CNN anchor Jake Tapper is currently out hawking his new book, “Original Sin,” which digs into the cover-up of the Joe Biden mental decline.
I say he should have been reporting on this in real time. I believe he had this information long before this book, and there are plenty of receipts to prove it.
Every time I hear Tapper call this a cover-up that he exposed, I cannot help but laugh because he was complicit in the cover-up itself.
To support the premise, Tapper and his co-author discuss how administration officials were deceiving the media.
For instance, his co-author, Alex Thompson, stated, "They weren't telling the truth, and I think the book really conclusively shows what was going on behind the scenes.”
He later stated that members of the administration even left due to this, explaining, "Throughout 2023 and 2024, there were steps taken to increasingly shield Joe Biden — not just from the public, but from members of his own cabinet, members of his own senior staff. One White House official who left in 2024 told us that they left in part because they were not comfortable with how they were trying to shield the extent of the decline."
In reality, CNN, including Tapper, were just as responsible for this cover-up as administration officials. And it was not even really a cover-up, but instead a denial, as right-wing outlets were writing about all of this for years, which is why the mainstream media pushed back so hard.
For instance, when videos started to pop up of a confused or just flat-out frozen Joe Biden, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called them “cheap fakes,” and CNN was among the outlets that pushed that narrative. CNN commentator and former Kamala Harris adviser Jamal Simmons stated, "These are cheap fakes, [as] the White House and Biden people are calling them.”
Tapper has now changed his tune, stating, "The Biden White House falsely- when people showed that clip and asked what was going on- said it was a ‘cheap fake.’ They did this all the time when there was video that seemed to show Biden acting in an odd or unusual, seemingly out-of-it way, they would call it a ‘cheap fake.’ It was not fake. It was actual video.”
Correct me if I am wrong, but is it not the duty of the press to push back on that in real time and not just take the administration’s word for it?
The reason people like myself were reporting on this at the time is because we were watching live press conferences, and we knew this was the real Biden and not fake videos, as the White House proclaimed.
Tapper, defending his original position, stated, "So, there were people reporting on what they saw. The conservative media was, to their credit, all over this. Now, they didn't have insider information, but they were just making sense of all the clips, and all of the weird moments, and off-putting moments."
George Orwell once stated, “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations." Now, even as an independent journalist, I pride myself in telling you guys the truth, even when it is not what you want to hear or when I know it will result in hundreds of emails calling me a RINO and nasty threats.
My job is to tell the truth as best I can, as is Tapper’s, only Tapper chose to ignore what his eyes were telling him, and he has far more access to information than I have. I simply don’t buy his excuses that he did not see this decline. He saw it, but he chose to ignore it and mock the right for its reporting (check out his interview with Lara Trump) solely because of his dislike for Trump. We cannot let this man off the hook.
