WASHINGTON: A group of Democratic governors say they are standing behind President Joe Biden amid increasing calls from some in their party for him to leave the presidential race.
Biden met for more than an hour at the White House in person and virtually with more than 20 governors from his party. The governors told reporters afterward that the conversation was “candid” and said they expressed concerns about Biden’s debate performance last week.
But they did not join other Democrats in urging him to leave the race.
“The president is our nominee. The president is our party leader,” said Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland. He added that, in the meeting, Biden “was very clear that he’s in this to win it.”
A defiant Biden vowed Wednesday to keep running for reelection, rejecting growing pressure from Democrats to withdraw after a disastrous debate performance raised questions about his readiness to keep campaigning, much less win in November.
But increasingly ominous signs were mounting for the president. Two Democratic lawmakers have called on Biden to exit the race while a leading ally publicly suggested how the party might choose someone else. And senior aides said they believed he might only have a matter of days to show he was up to the challenge before anxiety in the party boils over.
“Let me say this as clearly as I possibly can as simply and straightforward as I can: I am running … no one’s pushing me out,” Biden said on a call with staffers from his reelection campaign. “I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end and we’re going to win.”
Still, despite his efforts to pull multiple levers — whether it was his impromptu appearance with campaign aides, private conversations with senior lawmakers, a weekend blitz of travel and a network television interview — to salvage his faltering reelection, Biden was confronting serious and mounting indications that support for him was rapidly eroding on Capitol Hill and among other allies.
Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Arizona, told The New York Times that though he backs Biden as long as he is a candidate, this “is an opportunity to look elsewhere” and what Biden “needs to do is shoulder the responsibility for keeping that seat — and part of that responsibility is to get out of this race.”
Senior aides said they believe the 81-year-old Biden has just a matter of days to mount a convincing display of his fitness for office before his party’s panic over his debate performance and anger about his response boils over, according to two people with knowledge who insisted on anonymity to more freely discuss The president accepts the urgency of the task — having reviewed the polling and mountains of media coverage — but he is convinced he can do that in the coming days and insistent that he will not step out of the race, the aides said.
Meanwhile, a major Democratic donor, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, also called on the president to exit the race, saying, “Biden needs to step aside to allow a vigorous Democratic leader to beat Trump and keep us safe and prosperous.” The statement was first reported by The New York Times.
And all that followed Rep. Jim Clyburn, a longtime Biden friend and confidant, saying he’d back a “mini-primary” in the run-up to the Democratic National Convention next month if Biden were to leave the race. The South Carolina Democrat floated an idea that appeared to be laying the groundwork for alternative choices by delegates during the Democrats’ planned virtual roll call that is scheduled before the more formal party convention set to begin Aug. 19 in Chicago.
On CNN, Clyburn said Vice President Kamala Harris, governors and others could join the competition: “It would be fair to everybody.”
Clyburn, a senior lawmaker who is a former member of his party’s House leadership team, said he has not personally seen the president act as he did on the debate stage last week and called it “concerning.”
And even as other Democratic allies have remained quiet since Thursday’s debate, there is a growing private frustration about the Biden campaign’s response to his disastrous debate performance at a crucial moment in the campaign — particularly in Biden waiting several days to do direct damage control with senior members of his own party.
One Democratic aide said the lacking response has been worse than the debate performance itself, saying lawmakers who support Biden want to see him directly combatting the concerns about his stamina in front of reporters and voters. The aide was granted anonymity to candidly discuss interparty dynamics.
Most Democratic lawmakers are taking a wait-and-see approach with Biden, though, holding out for a better idea of how the situation plays out through new polling and Biden’s scheduled ABC News interview, according to Democratic lawmakers who requested anonymity to speak bluntly about the president.
When Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who called on Biden to leave the race this week, shopped around his move for support from other Democratic lawmakers, he had no takers and eventually issued a statement on his own, according to a person familiar with the effort granted anonymity to discuss it.
Democratic governors say they are standing behind Biden amid questions about his shaky debate
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Democratic governors say they are standing behind Biden amid questions about his shaky debate
Suspect in Brown University shooting and MIT professor’s killing was once a physics student
PROVIDENCE, R.I.: Thirty years ago, Claudio Neves Valente and Nuno F.G. Loureiro were classmates with bright futures. Both excelled in physics and made their way from their home country of Portugal to the US, settling on the campuses of prestigious East Coast universities.
But Neves Valente’s path took a darker turn than his former peer. Investigators say the 48-year-old fatally shot two students last week at Brown University in Providence, where he was a graduate student in the early 2000s, and later killed Loureiro, who led one of the largest laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Authorities have offered no motive for the shootings or elaborated on what, if any, history was between the two men.
Neves Valente was found dead Thursday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a New Hampshire storage facility, ending a search that started with last Saturday’s shooting in a Brown lecture hall, where nine other people were also wounded. Authorities believe that on Monday, two days after the Brown shooting, Neves Valente shot Loureiro at the professor’s home in the Boston suburbs, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Providence. An autopsy found Neves Valente died Tuesday.
In high school, Neves Valente had been a promising physics student, but he was let go from Portugal’s premier engineering school, Instituto Superior Técnico, in 2000 and withdrew from a Brown University graduate program three years later without a degree.
Before his death, he was renting a room in a home in a working class Miami neighborhood, the past two decades of his life a mystery. What he was doing for a job was unclear. One witness to the Brown shooting noted he was wearing the kinds of pants and shoes that are typical of restaurant workers.
Neves Valente and Loureiro were in the same academic program in Portugal
Neves Valente was born in Torres Novas, Portugal, about 75 miles (121 kilometers) north of Lisbon. As a high school student, he competed in a national physics competition in 1994, coming in third place, according to a Portuguese physics magazine. Five of the top finishers got to compete in an international competition the following year in Australia.
From 1995 to 2000, he was in the same physics program in Lisbon with Loureiro, federal prosecutor Leah B. Foley said. Loureiro graduated from Instituto Superior Técnico in 2000, according to his MIT faculty page. A termination notice from the Lisbon university’s then president shows that Neves Valente was let go from a position at Instituto Superior Técnico that same year.
Neves Valente was a graduate student at Brown
Neves Valente came to Brown that fall as a graduate student on a student visa. Brown University President Christina Paxson said he took a leave in 2001 and formally withdrew effective July 31, 2003.
Around that time, he posted on the Brown physics website that he was back home in Portugal and had dropped out of the program permanently, according to a webpage saved by the Internet Archive. Then in Portuguese, he added: “And the moral of the story is: The best liar is the one who manages to deceive himself. These exist everywhere, but at times they proliferate in more unexpected places.”
During his time at Brown, he enrolled only in physics classes. Paxson said it is likely that he would have taken courses and spent time at the building where the shooting occurred because that’s where the vast majority of physics courses take place.
Paxson said Brown found no indication of any public safety interactions or other concerns while Neves Valente was a student.
“As of yet, we have not identified any employee who recalls Neves Valente nor is there any Brown record of recent contact between this individual and Brown,” Paxson said.
Brown classmate says Neves Valente was ‘genuinely impressive’
A former classmate of Neves Valente at Brown, Syracuse University professor Scott Watson, recalled being “essentially his only friend” in the graduate program in physics. Over dinners at a Portuguese restaurant near campus, Neves Valente shared his frustrations.
“He would say the classes were too easy — honestly, for him they were. He already knew most of the material and was genuinely impressive,” Watson said.
When Neves Valente decided to leave, Watson encouraged him to stay but to no avail. He said he never saw or heard from Neves Valente again.
Renting a room outside Miami
In September 2017, Neves Valente obtained legal permanent residence status in the US, Foley said. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
His last known address was about 10 miles (16 kilometers) north of Miami. The yellow house with a red roof is in a working-class neighborhood that features large houses.
Some neighbors who talked with The Associated Press on Friday said they had never seen Neves Valente. No police were in sight.
Edward Pol, a race car mechanic who lives across the street from the home, said the owner rents some rooms to people. He said he never talked to Neves Valente but had seen him several times, most recently two or three months ago. He realized the man was the suspect when he saw his pictures on the news Friday morning.
A man who answered the door through an intercom at the home said he was the homeowner but declined to identify himself or make any comment.
Loureiro was excelling
While Neves Valente’s life remained a mystery, his former classmate Loureiro was excelling. Loureiro joined MIT in 2016 and was named last year to lead the school’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, one of its largest laboratories. The 47-year-old scientist from Viseu, Portugal, had been working to explain the physics behind astronomical phenomena such as solar flares.
Portugal’s top diplomat said Friday that the government was taken aback by revelations that a Portuguese man is the main suspect.
There are still “a lot of unknowns” in regard to motive, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said. “We don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students and why this classroom.”
