CNN anchor Jake Tapper has co-authored a book about the mental fitness of President Joe Biden during his presidency. He addressed questions from Megyn Kelly on Tuesday.
During an appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show, the SiriusXM host questioned Jake Tapper on how it’s possible for him to report on a cover-up of Biden’s mental acuity when so many others in the media were pointing out a cognitive decline well before now.
“The criticism has been that you’re complaining about a cover-up about Joe Biden’s mental acuity, that right wing pundits — the right wing, in general — saw, that independent media saw and reported on and that was no mystery, even to left wing and so called mainstream reporters who were not fooled, but chose willful blindness instead of honest reporting and that you were part of it,” said Kelly. “How do you respond?”
“It’s a tough and fair question,” Tapper replied. “After Election Day, I interviewed more than 200 people — 200 mostly Democratic insiders — and almost all these interviews were after the election. They justified to themselves what they had done in terms of misrepresenting how the President was — not just to me and Alex (Thompson) and other reporters, but also just to each other and to the world, and to Democrats, and to the cabinet et cetera — by saying that there was this existential threat of Donald Trump and only Joe Biden could beat Donald Trump, and that justified everything in their minds.
“After that existential threat was over, because the election was over and Donald Trump won, we found — Alex and myself — they were remarkably willing to talk to us, either off the record or on background, and in some cases on the record, about what they saw.”
Later in their conversation, Kelly was critical of Tapper’s response, saying, “One of us didn’t miss the biggest story of the century when it comes to presidential politics, and one of us did.” Her comments came after telling Jake Tapper that she had been covering Biden’s cognitive decline for years before Jake Tapper became interested in the story.
“Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” the book co-authored by Tapper, hit newsstands Tuesday.
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