CNN host Jake Tapper has been under fire since announcing he was writing a book about President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the extensive “cover-up” to convince American voters they were too dumb to see what was happening with their own two eyes. Many have pointed out that Tapper, his network, and the mainstream media in general were active participants in the scandal. They neglected to report on Biden’s decline, allowed themselves to be cowed into submission by White House aides, and attacked anyone who suggested the president wasn’t fit to serve, which he was not. Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again finally came out on Tuesday, further inflaming critics who are disgusted by what they see as Tapper’s attempt to profit by “exposing” an obvious reality—after the fact—despite helping to conceal that reality when it mattered most.
Tapper, renowned in political circles for his aggressively defensive response to criticism, hired Risa Heller, a crisis communications expert, to assist with the book rollout and teach the CNN host how to be “nicer” to critics. She has advised a slew of shady characters including Zoom masturbator Jeffrey Toobin, dick-pic peddler Anthony Weiner, and former CNN boss Jeff Zucker, the office romance maestro who gave Jake his seven-figure contract and turned him into an anti-Trump avenger. Early indications suggest Tapper might be heeding some of Heller’s advice. Last week he described “some of the criticism” of his Biden coverage as “fair,” acknowledging he didn’t do “enough” to cover Biden’s cognitive impairment. “I look back on it with humility,” he said, unconvincingly.
A comprehensive review of Tapper’s past coverage of Biden’s decline suggests that far more humility is required than the CNN host is prepared to convey, especially when viewed in light of the details recounted in Original Sin. CNN has claimed that Tapper “fairly and accurately covered” Biden’s entire career “through years of dogged Washington reporting.” The evidence laid out below in what some have described as the official “Tapper Dossier” shows otherwise.
Defending Biden’s fitness in the 2020 election
During the Democratic primary in August 2019, Tapper swatted down criticism from Democratic officials (backing rival candidates) who argued Biden didn’t have “the wherewithal, shall we say, to run this campaign, to beat President Trump and then even to be president.” He echoed Biden’s talking points at the time, describing the former VP as a “gaffe machine” whose bumbling remarks were still better than “what Donald Trump says, which is horrific and in some cases racist, or at least racially tinged.” Several weeks later, Tapper went on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and defended Biden from primary opponents who had suggested he “wasn’t all there” or was “not as sharp as he used to be.” He chuckled in agreement when the liberal “comedian” suggested the attacks on Biden’s mental acuity were “kind of mean.”
In August 2020, Tapper dismissed Republican allegations about Biden’s mental decline as unfair and “frankly hypocritical,” asking a colleague what Biden needed to do in an upcoming speech to prove “he’s sharp.” In October, Tapper attacked Trump campaign adviser Lara Trump for suggesting Biden was suffering from “cognitive decline.” He accused her of “mocking his stutter” and insisted she had “absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline” before cutting the interview short. “Thank you, Lara. I’m sure it’s from a place of concern. We all believe that,” Tapper huffed sarcastically.
Tapper’s critics have frequently highlighted his Lara Trump interview, but a review of the record clearly shows the CNN host repeatedly promoted Democratic talking points on the air, and aggressively bullied those who questioned the official narrative. One month prior to his confrontation with Lara Trump, Tapper interviewed H.R. McMastter, the national security adviser Trump fired, and implied that Republicans questioning Biden’s mental acuity were promoting Russian disinformation. “What do you make of the fact that so many of the criticisms that you’re talking about, the Russians are trying to do to make us and the public not trust in our election integrity, the election is rigged, Joe Biden has dementia, and all this stuff, is stuff that we’re hearing repeated by leaders, by American political leaders?” the CNN host asked, channeling the Democratic Party’s bizarre conspiracies about Vladimir Putin as an all-powerful puppet master.
Context from Original Sin: Tapper now reports, in his book that people can buy with money, that Democratic officials were shocked by Biden’s condition while attempting to film a series of inspirational videos for the Democratic National Convention in August 2020. They shot hours of footage of Biden interacting with ordinary voters over Zoom, but the videos were “horrible” because Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all.” One Democrat who hadn’t seen Biden in several years was stunned. “It was incredible. This was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.”
Defending Biden’s fitness in the 2024 election
By 2023, Zucker had been fired from his job running CNN, and the failing network’s hosts had been told by its new owners to be more objective in their reporting. Nevertheless, Tapper doubled down on his vigorous defense of Biden’s cognitive abilities after the president announced he was running for a second term. Tapper ramped up his defense of Biden’s cognitive abilities in 2023, after Biden announced he was running for reelection. By the end of the summer, Biden had turned in a number of awful performances at fundraisers that had shocked Democratic donors. Some feared he “might not make it to Election Day.” Tapper told his viewers all was well. In September of that yeah, he concurred with the Atlantic‘s Franklin Foer—author of a fawning and now largely discredited Biden biography—who claimed (without evidence) that Biden “would pass” a mental acuity test.
“Right. He’s sharp physically. I mean mentally,” Tapper said, before pointing out that Trump “was only three or four years younger than [Biden] anyway.” When Special Counsel Robert Hur released his damning report describing Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” who was unlikely to be convicted by a jury for mishandling classified information, Tapper rushed the president’s defense, insisting (without evidence) that while Biden “shows his age in some instances,” he was “not the way he is caricatured” on Fox News. He interviewed a historian about how former president Ronald Reagan overcame “concerns about [his] faculties.”
Tapper echoed the Biden campaign’s talking points again in March 2024 during an interview with congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota, the only elected Democrat to challenge Biden in the Democratic primary while raising questions about his capacity to serve another term. “I’ve heard a lot of really nasty stuff about you from your Democratic colleagues because, I mean, just like, what is he thinking? Exercise in narcissism,” Tapper said. He asked Phillips, who was ending his campaign after Biden ordered the Democratic National Committee to rig the primary process in his favor (just to be sure), if he “worried” that his (accurate) attacks had “damaged” the president, and wondered “how seriously” anyone could take him as a candidate.
The same day, after Biden delivered a fiery State of the Union address. Democrats widely celebrated his ability to read the teleprompter prompter without mumbling. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein frantically recanted his call for Biden to step aside. Tapper joined the chorus, mocking Fox News host Sean Hannity for describing the president as a “hyper-caffeinated, angry old man,” and urged Republicans to “pick a lane” in terms of their criticism of Biden’s cognitive state. “He certainly seemed like an 81-year-old, but he did not seem incapable of doing the job,” Tapper said of Biden, arguing that the speech should put to rest GOP comparisons of Biden to Weekend at Bernie’s. Days later, Tapper interviewed Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) to discuss Hur’s testimony before Congress. Tapper said he didn’t understand why Democrats were so angry. “[Biden] is 81 and his memory, you know, it doesn’t seem great,” he said. “It’s not horrible, but I don’t understand the outrage.”
Context from Original Sin: Tapper now writes that following the State of the Union address, White House aides “noted the immediate return of the Old Biden—the one Biden aides had been trying to obscure.” Biden gave a rambling and barely audible speech to a group of high school students at the White House. One of Biden’s granddaughters attempted to coax him out of the room, as did Anthony Bernal, an aide to Dr. Jill Biden. They failed. “[A] White House aide couldn’t help asking themselves what on earth they had just seen,” Tapper writes in the book. “This isn’t going to work, they thought. He can’t do it. This is crazy. Crazy. Crazy.”
June 2024 (pre-debate disaster)
When a Wall Street Journal report on Biden’s cognitive impairment came out in early June 2024, just weeks before the debate on CNN, the publication came under sustained attack from the media establishment, including from Tapper’s then-CNN colleague, Oliver Darcy, who wrote that the Journal piece “suffers from glaring problems” and practically demanded the paper apologize to the American people. Tapper piled on, beginning his coverage of the article by noting that the White House was “vehemently pushing back” on the allegations. After noting that the Journal was owned by conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch, Tapper invited one of Biden’s most avid supporters, Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), to discuss the article. Coons slammed the “misrepresentative” piece for obsessing over “minor slips” that were “typical of anyone who’s keeping a demanding 14 hours a day schedule.” Biden was “absolutely” fit to serve as president, Coons told Tapper, who didn’t challenge the assertion and changed the subject to relations with Taiwan.
Context from Original Sin: Tapper reports in Original Sin that by the fall of 2023, Biden’s schedule typically ran from 9 a.m. to dinnertime at 4:30 p.m. “When Biden was in Washington, many of his days would end with his going to the residence by around 5:15 p.m.,” he writes.
July 2024 (post-debate disaster)
Two weeks after the catastrophic June 27 debate, moderated by Tapper, when Biden’s cognitive woes were undeniable, the CNN host politely acknowledged that Biden had demonstrated a “deterioration, at the very least, in his communications abilities in the last, really in the last six to nine months.” On the morning of July 21, the day Biden would announce his withdrawal from the race, Tapper interview House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), who accused Democrats of being “involved in a big cover-up” by trying to “prevent people from seeing what all of us in close proximity [to Biden] have seen.” Tapper remarked that “calling it a cover-up” was “pretty strong words” and asked if Johnson thought the matter should be “investigated in a serious way.”
Context from Original Sin: Tapper’s new book, available for purchase, is teeming with examples of how Biden’s “deterioration” was well underway years before the debate. Indeed, he writes that audio tapes uncovered during Hur’s investigation revealed that Biden was “really struggling” and “his cognitive capacity seemed to be failing him” as early as 2017. This weekend, with Original Sin about to hit bookstores, Biden’s office announced that he was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. On Monday, Dr. Zeke Emanuel, who worked on Biden’s transition team and whose brother, Rahm, was President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, argued that based on the details provided in the medical report, it’s highly likely that Biden had cancer when he was in office, if not earlier. “He probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021,” he told the fanatical pro-Biden propagandist Joe Scarborough on MSNBC. “Yes, I don’t think there’s any disagreement about that.” If that’s the case, then “cover-up,” a word that appears in the title of Tapper’s book, is not nearly strong enough to convey the extent of the scandal.
What’s missing from Original Sin: In one of the book’s most damning passages, Tapper reveals that in the spring of 2024, a reporter from a “national news outlet” was working on a story, based on interviews with concerned White House aides, about how Biden was “having serious and disturbing moments, forgetting names and facts, sometimes seeming seriously confused at meetings.” After seeking comment from the White House press office, which disputed her findings, longtime Biden adviser Steve Ricchetti called the reporter and threatened to “portray her as a liar” if she went ahead with the story. It worked; the reporter caved. Tapper doesn’t reveal the identity of the reporter. But the White House proved good to its word when separately, the Journal published the aforementioned article about Biden’s decline. As promised, the White House, Democratic officials, and other journalists denounced the Journal reporters—Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes—for writing a right-wing hit piece based on lies.
This anonymous account of Ricchetti bullying a reporter into submission is the closest we get to a concrete example of a journalist bowing to pressure from the White House, a crucial component of the Biden cover-up Tapper purports to expose, but largely ignores. This must have happened repeatedly over the course of Biden’s term. Tapper must have know. Perhaps he was such a reliable ally the White House didn’t even bother to bully him. Mark Halperin has criticized Tapper’s characterization of the scandal as primarily the result of the White House “lying” to journalists who couldn’t possibly have known any better. “It is not true that it’s only after the election that Jake Tapper could’ve gotten to the bottom of this, and the rest of the Washington press corps could’ve gotten to the bottom of this,” Halperin said. “No, they were part of the conspiracy and the cover-up. They allowed themselves to believe the ridiculous spin on TV and in public, and privately they allowed themselves to be browbeat.”
Readers familiar with Tapper’s coverage (or lack thereof) of Biden’s decline over the years are left to wonder how often he allowed the people orchestrating the cover-up to influence what he told CNN’s dwindling audience on a nightly basis.
What they’re saying: “We all have eyes. We all have had an aging grandparent or parent. We all knew, And yet Jake just said, ‘Nope nothing to see here. He has a stutter,'” said Michelle, a hardworking American nurse who appeared on Halperin’s podcast. “I’m sorry, that’s B.S., and for Jake Tapper to come out and say, ‘Oh, look at all the discoveries I have,’ it’s a joke, it is an absolute joke, and his career should go up in flames because he has lost all credibility.”
Original Sin is currently #4 on Amazon’s best sellers list, and is expected to make its authors a fortune. Who says you can’t have it both ways?
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