Former aide: Obama played cards during Bin Laden raid

A video interview with a former aide to President Barack Obama which reveals that the leader was playing cards during the raid that killed al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is being circulated by U.S. media after the original clip was deleted from YouTube.

Former aide Reggie Love said that during the May 1, 2011 raid on Bin Laden’s residence he, President Obama, Marvin Nicholson - another Obama aide - and White House photographer Pete Souza spent some time in the private dining room playing cards to ease the tension.

“Most people were like down in the Situation Room and [Mr. Obama] was like, ‘I am not going to be down there, I can’t watch this entire thing,’” Love stated in a July 18 2013 interview at a lunch event hosted by UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs.

The former aide, who left the White House later in 2011 to complete his MBA, talked about life with the president during the interview, including the night when U.S. Navy SEALS carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

“We must have played 15 hands, 15 games of spades,” Love said, describing it as a “very long day.”

The video was initially available on the Artists and Athletes Alliance YouTube account however it was deleted after being picked up by the Drudge report, a U.S. based news aggregation website, earlier this month.

“The clip has since been removed from the YouTube channel that carried it after the comments were picked up by the Drudge Report,” according to the New York Daily News.

Days after the raid, Obama described the mood in the Situation Room as “tense,” adding “there were big chunks of time in which all we were doing was just waiting,” during a CBS’s “60 Minutes” interview with the president.

“It was the longest 40 minutes of my life... It was a very tense situation,” he added.