“He put it in his pocket and did not share it with his advisers,” Bob Woodward and Robert Costa write inPeril, which was released Tuesday. “His attention turned to the virus.”
Biden, 78, laterconfirmed the existenceof the presidential epistle but gave away very little about its contents. “The president wrote a very generous letter,” he told reporters in the Oval Office later on Jan. 20. “Because it was private, I will not talk about it until I talk to him. But, uh, it was generous.”
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump.
The letter, which has been a tradition from one president to the next since Ronald Reagan, was notable given how Trump refused to concede his loss in the 2020 election, one of countless political norms he ignored since he announced his candidacy for president in 2015.
President Joe Biden.MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty
At the time, a Trump White House spokesman also confirmed the note but said nothing more about what it said. Incoming White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said only that the letter was “gracious.”
Later, in March, Trump spoke about the letter on the podcastThe Truth with Lisa Boothe.
“Basically, I wish him luck and, you know, it was a couple of pages long and it was from the heart because I want to see him do well. Look, he’s there,” Trump said of leaving the note,according toTheNew York Post.
Then he repeated his baseless yet frequent claims of fraud in “an election that, you know, I would never concede.”
source: people.com
