Nancy Pelosi allegedly threatened Biden with public criticism if he did not abandon the presidential race

Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race on Sunday, July 21, when he announced he would not seek re-election and endorsed Kamala Harris. Much was speculated about the role that some leading Democrats would have played in the president's decision, for example Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi or Hakeem Jeffries. Particularly Pelosi, however, would have gone a step beyond simple advice.

As reported from the Daily Mail after speaking with sources close to the former speaker of the House of Representatives, she would have threatened Biden to come out publicly to criticize him, even assuring that the Democrat would lose in an eventual confrontation with Donald Trump.

According to these sources, the threat was so forceful that the president experienced a click that led him to accept that he should withdraw from the presidential race, thus becoming the first to do so since Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

Without giving much detail, Biden remarked on that sense of pressure in his first television interview after dropping out of the race. "A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought I was going to hurt them in the election," he told CBS News Sunday Morning, later mentioning the Californian by name.

"I was worried that if I stayed in the race, that would be the issue: I would be interviewed about why Nancy Pelosi said [something] ... and I thought it would be a real distraction," he added.

"Incessant negative and horrible attacks on Joe Biden."

Anita Dunn, who was one of Biden's top political advisers during his nearly four years in office, took aim recently at Democrats for virtually pushing him out of the presidential race after the debate.

While she made it clear that the president's performance in the debate was not the best, she assured that it did not have such a negative impact indoors. "And I think other people who did independent research saw roughly the same thing. If you go back and you look at the polls, what you will see is you didn’t see much movement whatsoever coming out of the debate because the structure of this campaign had been fairly static for a long time, and the debate didn’t change that," he continued.

At the same time, he took aim at the rest of the Democrats for running a sort of pressure campaign to get Biden to drop out of the race.

"What did change it was 24 days of unremitting negative, horrible attacks on Joe Biden," she said, later adding that those attacks came "from his own party and from the press."