Did Harris Extort Biden To Get The Democrat Nomination?

Social media has been awash in rumors trying to make sense of Joe Biden’s abrupt decision to drop his bid for reelection. The rumors have ranged from the simple to the bizarre, but

there’s one that in light of subsequent events makes a lot of sense – Biden quit because Kamala Harris and a cabal of Democrat leaders backing her threatened to invoke the 25th Amendment to get an ailing Joe Biden out of the race.

In a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson requesting an investigation into the matter our friend Thomas Jones, President of the American Accountability Foundation laid out the case:

There have been multiple reports that leaders in the Democrat party, up to and including the Vice President, used the threat of invoking the provisions of the twentyfifth amendment to force President Biden to end his campaign. On July 22, 2024, the New York Post reported: 1

“That debate was a set-up to convince Democrats that he couldn’t run for president,” the source said Monday. As calls for him to bow out mounted, Biden insisted he would continue, but party bigwigs threatened to invoke the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution.

The Constitution makes clear the process for invoking the twenty-fifth amendment:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

As the plain language makes clear, the path to removing President Biden from office under the twenty-fifth amendment runs clearly through the Office of the Vice President and through the President’s cabinet. Put simply, if Vice President Harris were able to credibly muster the support of eight members of the President’s cabinet (a majority of the fifteen executive departments), she could present an ultimatum to the President forcing him to end his campaign and to endorse her candidacy, lest he be removed from office, forever cementing his legacy as a President who was mentally unfit to lead the country.

Such a demand by the Vice President, and any supporters in the cabinet, would have unquestionably been extortion. Federal criminal law 18 U.S. Code § 872 states,

Whoever, being an officer, or employee of the United States or any department or agency thereof, or representing himself to be or assuming to act as such, under color or pretense of office or employment commits or attempts an act of extortion, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both;

As Cornell University further clarifies, “Extortion refers to imposing an action or obtaining something by force or coercion.”2

The President’s frequent protestations that he was not leaving the race add increased credibility to the claim that external force was exerted upon the President to force him to relinquish his candidacy for President of the United States. On multiple occasions and in numerous interviews throughout the weeks following the President’s poor performance in his debate with Donald Trump, President Biden and his surrogates, had emphatically insisted that he was the nominee and would remain so.

The bizarre last-minute announcement of the suspension of President Biden’s campaign, hastily penned in the middle of the night by a staffer, posted on X in the middle of a Sunday afternoon only add further suspicion to this situation. President Biden’s subsequent disappearance for nearly two days further reinforces that this was a hastily conceived withdraw likely forced by external pressure.

President Biden has been in public life for nearly half a century – the idea that he would not have conducted a more graceful and dignified exit from public life, if he were making the decision on his own, strains credulity. The evidence makes it clear that President Biden didn’t walk out the door of the presidency, he was pushed. 

If the Vice President and members of the cabinet pressured President Biden to suspend his campaign under the threat of invoking the twenty-fifth amendment, it would represent one of the most consequential seizures of power in American government history. The House of Representatives must act quickly using its powers of investigation, subpoena, and contempt to determine what discussions members of the cabinet had regarding the application of the twenty-fifth amendment.

We look forward to the forthcoming investigation shedding light on the behavior of Vice President Harris and the President’s cabinet.

We thought something stunk to high heaven when President Joe Biden made his abrupt switch – literally overnight – from defiant statements that he would stay in the race, to passively mumbling that he was withdrawing to “save democracy.”

The Capitol Switchboard is (202-224-3121), we urge CHQ readers and friends to call Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to demand he open an investigation into the circumstances surrounding President Joe Biden’s abrupt decision to abandon is campaign for reelection. Click here to support the American Accountability Foundation and their work.

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