Pelosi's office pushes back against report she tried to sabotage AOC's Green New Deal launch

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried to sabotage the rollout of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal in 2019 because she was "anxious about the new congresswoman's notoriety becoming actual power," according to a new book about insider Democrat politics obtained by Fox News, although Pelosi's office is pushing back against the claim.

"In February 2019, Pelosi called [Massachusetts Sen.] Ed Markey the night before he was scheduled to help roll out the Green New Deal. She asked him to hold off. She wanted more substantive policy. The politics weren't good right then. Don’t give the platform to Ocasio-Cortez, she urged, anxious about the new congresswoman's notoriety becoming actual power," Edward-Isaac Dovere writes in "Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump."

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Markey was among the progressives who unveiled Green New Deal legislation in February 2019. 

Pelosi's office pushed back against Dovere's book.

"This is false. No such call was made," Pelosi's spokesman Drew Hammill told Fox News. He added that Pelosi's team plans to ask Dovere for a correction.

Pelosi made headlines in February 2019 for downplaying the far-reaching proposal.

"It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive," Pelosi told Politico at the time. "The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they're for it right?"

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., during a press conference to announce Green New Deal legislation to promote clean energy programs outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Feb. 7, 2019. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

The Green New Deal rollout formally outlined the proposal in Congress for the first time and would mark a start on the path toward what Ocasio-Cortez called "a wartime-level, just economic mobilization plan to get to 100% renewable energy." Cost estimates for the sprawling proposal range into the trillions.

The resolution said the U.S. "has historically been responsible for a disproportionate amount of greenhouse gas emissions" and calls for the U.S. to take a "leading role in reducing emissions through economic transformation."

The resolution painted a grim view of present-day America, saying it is "experiencing several related crises," including declining life expectancy, economic stagnation, erosion of worker bargaining power, increasing income inequality and the exacerbation of "systemic racial, regional, social, environmental and economic injustices."

The resolution said that "a new national social, industrial and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal" is an opportunity to tackle systemic injustices of minority groups, create millions of high-wage jobs and "provide unprecedented levels of prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States."

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Dovere's book will be published on Tuesday. 

Fox News' inquiries to Pelosi's, Ocasio-Cortez's and Markey's offices were not returned at the time of publication.

Fox News' Andrew Murray and Adam Shaw contributed to this report.