There was a concerted effort to hide Biden not just from the public, not just from reporters, but from his own administration, from Cabinet secretaries, from senior aides in the White House, from Democratic members of Congress. I wonder if that's really the theme. The Democrats, and especially the Bidens, were so focused, so obsessed by the phenomenon of Trump that this guy could even try to get back into the White House that it kind of abrogated them of all other responsibilities.
The focus on what they call the existential threat of Donald Trump allowed them to justify almost everything. Hello and welcome to the forecast. It was one of the most jaw-dropping moments in American presidential history. In just a few minutes of faltering, incoherent, incomprehensible, President Biden destroyed his own presidency and chances of re election. It was the first presidential debate against his opponent Donald Trump in late June last year. To many watching at home, it
came as a shock. To others as confirmation of what they had long suspected. To a small inner circle around Biden, the truth had come out, A truth they had been trying to hide from the world and perhaps even from themselves. 3 long weeks later, Biden bowed out and handed the baton to his Vice President, Kamala Harris. She breathed new life into a badly wounded campaign, but not enough.
The question hanging over her campaign, over her defeat to Trump, and still over the Democratic Party is why Biden was allowed to seek re election in 2023, let alone continue to soldier on until it was too late. Who allowed this to happen? Who's to blame? The Biden family, the staffers of the inner circle? The media? The medics?
All of the above. Well, an explosive new book called Original Sin by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson has given us the inside account. What it reveals are depths of deceit and self deceit. On the whole, it makes painful reading for Democrats and yes, gleeful reading for Republicans. I'm very pleased to have CNNS Jake Tapper join us now from DC Jake, it's good to see you again. It is an absolutely cracking
read. And they, as I said, a very painful read, perhaps even for some Republicans. You extraordinarily also hosted the debate in which Biden
faulted. So just to kick off this interview, talk us through those moments and when you started to realize that things were going horribly wrong for President Joe Biden. Well, he walked out that night, June 27th, in the debate that I Co moderated with Dana Bash, and he seemed, you know, very old and we had gotten used to his gait at that point from his degenerating spine. He had a cold, so his voice was even readier and higher than
usual. But I didn't realize that things were going truly off the rails until maybe his second answer, when he really was having difficulty finding the words to articulate his thoughts, his arguments to the American people about why he should be re elected. And shockingly, that got worse and worse to the point that at the very end of it, he said we finally beat Medicare, which makes no sense. And I think he was maybe trying to say we finally beat COVID, but I'm not really sure.
And then it actually kept getting worse and worse and worse. And it I was sitting. So Dan and I were there at that desk, and as you know, in a situation like that, you can't speak to the control room because people will hear you. They can say anything they want to you, but you can't say anything back. So they had given us an iPad so that we could write notes to them and they could read them back in the control room. I didn't know who was back there, so I kept it clean.
But I wrote back. I wrote to them, holy smokes, because I just was shocked like everybody else. That's quite tame, isn't it? Holy smokes. Well, it's not what I was thinking, but again, I didn't know. I didn't know who was back. There, there. There are lots of extraordinary
details in your book. And one of them occurred on the day of the debate, which is that there was, you know, both candidates were allowed to do a walkthrough, you know, looking at the arena while they were joust against each other later in the day. And, you know, they often candidates often turn up late. Maybe it's the cool thing to do. And, and I think Trump turned up at, you know, 6:00 or so. The debate was going to be recorded at 9:00. Astonishingly, Biden said, I don't need to turn up.
And then he finally showed up, You know, I think at 8:20, I mean, just before the broadcast. I mean, that attitude of I don't really need to do this the way that other people are doing it and then to falter in this way. What does that tell you? What did that tell you? It tells me that there was a a degree of hubris and delusion that the president was experiencing that is remarkable even to this moment. You're quite right in how you describe it.
And as you know from doing these things, walkthroughs are very normal. Candidates just like to see which is their camera, what happens, what happens when the other guy is speaking, etcetera, etcetera. And Biden by 8, by 820, he still hadn't been there. Actually, he didn't show up till 8:30 and it was truly shocking. And the Biden campaign explained it as like, he doesn't, you know, he's done a lot of these debates. He's 82. He's been in public life since 1970. He's done a lot of these
debates. He doesn't need to do it, which is just just, it's, it's stunning. And then when you consider obviously what happened after that, even even more stunning because it, it gets into the arrogance of his decision. He thought ultimately, and This is why they wanted to do an early debate in June as opposed to 1 after Labor Day in September or October.
He thought all he would need to do was stand on stage next to President Trump and whatever concerns the American people had about his age, his acuity, inflation, the border, that would all melt away because they would see how how crazy Donald Trump was. And that's obviously not what happened. I wonder if that's really the
theme. The Democrats and especially the Bidens were so focused, so obsessed, so deranged, if you like, by the phenomenon of Trump that this guy, you know, who tried to overturn democracy, who by that stage of the debate had been convicted of a crime, you know, could even try to get back into the White House. That it kind of abrogated them of all other responsibilities. He was bad enough.
And that Vadnais of Trump was was in was big enough to get them back into the White House. The focus on what they call the existential threat of Donald Trump allowed them to justify. And by them, I mean the Biden family and his top aides and the Democratic Party to a large extent allowed them to justify
almost everything. It allowed them to justify putting somebody as nominee who his own cabinet secretaries told us in this book that he could not be relied upon for that proverbial 2:00 AM phone call for a national security crisis. He he wouldn't be up to it, some cabinet secretaries told us. It allowed them to justify not having a competitive primary. It allowed them to justify not doing interviews, not having
press conferences. If if you think that you are the only answer to a question that poses an existential threat to the free world, you really can get away with anything in your own mind. Your book is called Original Sin. What is the original sin? The original sin, as these more than 200 Democratic insiders explained to us, in their view most of them was the decision to run for re election. When Joe Biden ran for president, there was an implicit promise that he would run as a
one term. 4 aides did a strategic leak to Politico in December 2019 saying he would only serve one term when he was getting a big, you know, a three person endorsement from Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer in I think March of 2020, he, he talked about being a bridge to the next generation and yet he decided, no, you know what, I'm I'm going
to go for two. And that decision, even when polls were already showing that vast numbers of Americans, 10s of millions of Americans, had concerns about his age and acuity, was the original sin. And from that flowed everything else, every other bad decision. And Jake, do you think that when they said, because I remember that that implication of serving for one term as a bridge, I remember that really well. I don't remember him actually enunciating it, spelling it out,
but that was the implication. And no one ever abused us of this being wrong at the time, right? But do you think that they thought they believed that or were they lying at the time when they said when they implied that it would be a one term president? I think that it is the decision of politicians in an election, which is like the decision of a of a car salesman in a showroom. What do I have to do to get you to leave the showroom in this
car today? And I think they just figured that they had to make the implied promise it would OK, he's old, but it's just going to be one term. But what they didn't count on is, and our reporting suggests that as far back as 2015, after the death of his son Beau, there was a psychic toll being taken on him. In 2017, 2018, he was losing his train of thought.
He was forgetting things. 2019-2020 during that campaign aids would describe for us a good functioning Biden and also a non functioning Biden. And then throughout his presidency, that non functioning Biden would rear his head increasingly. And by non functioning, I mean forgetting the names of close friends, not able to identify George Clooney who he'd known for decades, not being able to come up with the names of top aides, losing his train of
thought in an alarming way. We all lose our train of thought. We all forget names. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about to a degree that it was unsettling and suggested something cognitively was going on and this was going on behind the scenes, was going on in front of cameras to a lesser degree, but behind the scenes with increasing frequency. I have to say, not recognizing George Clooney did come as a bit
of a shock. I mean, I think there's probably no one on the planet who doesn't recognize George Clooney. But but to be serious for a second, you said that from that original sin flowed all these bad decisions. But these bad decisions also ended up in deceit, in actual planned deceit. Tell us about that. Well, I mean, some of the examples of the intentionally planned to see are told to us by members of the Biden
administration. One person, high-ranking official in the White House leaving because they didn't want to be part of it. And because this person told us there was a concerted effort to hide Biden not just from the public, not just from reporters, but from his own administration, from Cabinet secretaries, from senior aides in the White House, from Democratic members of Congress. There's a, there's a, a Cabinet meeting in October 2023. That's the last one for almost a year.
Cabinet secretaries told us that he they, that they were kept at Bay When one of them had a meeting with him somewhere in between that Cabinet meeting and the June debate, that person was shocked. He seemed disoriented. He seemed out of it. They couldn't believe what was going on. When those people who felt somehow excluded from the presence of the president that something was wrong in the system, when they raised the alarm bells, what happened to them?
Well, they were cut off. This was, you know, Joe Biden is not alone among politicians in being spiteful and demanding loyalty. He's certainly not the first one like that, and he won't be the last. But when people raised issues like that, they were shown the door. There's a pollster named John Anzalone who had been with Biden as far back as when Biden ran for president the first time in the 1980s.
And Anzalone was kind of shunted to the side because he was raising questions about the administration's policies on inflation and on the border. And then when Biden, before Biden announced that he was running for re election, he had a talk with a couple members of the White House team, including Anita Dunn, who was a senior advisor. And he was he was expecting that he would be asked to do some polling on whether or not Biden should run for re election.
Just, you know, we are a data-driven political world these days. I don't have to tell people in the government of Keir Starmer how data-driven politicians can be. And Anzalone was shocked because Anita done said, we're not, we're not polling for this. The decisions already been made. And he he couldn't believe it. And he was further and further excommunicated from the group. Congressman Dean Phillips, he runs against Biden. He says just to get this out in the open that there is a real
problem behind the scenes. He's basically defenestrated and excommunicated from the Democratic Party. Person after person that with they raise their head. Then Anvil falls down on the special counsel Robert. Her is the first person from outside the Democratic Party to have a long sit down with Joe Biden. He's investigating him for his handling classified information and he can't believe this rambling old man.
And he says in his report in February 2024 that he's not going to prosecute him because a jury would find President Biden a well meaning elderly man with a poor memory. He gets shellacked, as does the attorney general. The The administration goes to war against its own Justice Department. So what does some of the devices that the administration or the inner circle around Biden came up with to try and limit the kind of visible damage of his frailty? Well, some of them started out
innocent enough. Any politician wants to be portrayed as in in as positive a light as possible. And certainly running for president during COVID, as much of as COVID was a disaster and tragedy for the world, was a benefit to Joe Biden because he he didn't have to travel all that much. He could do a lot of zooms.
But by 2021-2022, the teleprompters that he was relying on, the note cards he was relying on became something of a crutch and and people would point it out, Conservatives especially would point it out how much he was relying on these things and how odd it was. But it was even worse behind the scenes because he would go to a fundraiser of 40 or 50 people, and the campaign would demand that he'd be allowed to have a teleprompter just to make impromptu remarks for 10
minutes. People thought it was weird. People thought it was disconcerting. Bill. Bill Daley, former Obama White House chief of staff, went to one of these events and couldn't believe it. He was trying to get a Democratic governor to run against Biden because he didn't think Biden was going to make it. And he had loved Joe Biden. He was Biden's political director during his 1988 presidential campaign.
What really amazes me is that you know when when some people were clearly raising the alarm bells. I mean, George Clooney after not being recognized by the president, who we've known for years, wrote a very searing op-ed piece in one of the papers. Ari Emmanuel, the the famous Hollywood agent, you know, was screaming at the back of a Democrat fundraiser meeting, I think, or some, some party meeting, you know, saying the president's not up to it, he should bow down, etcetera.
You know, when when there was clearly clamour for all this, you know, why didn't they go to the next level? You know, why did people in Congress, in the media not stand up and say this can't go on, especially when the opponent is someone who was styled by the White House as being a danger to democracy? Well, I mean, the question kind of answers itself because why were a bunch of politicians not behaving bravely and independently? I mean, that's the answer to the question.
They're because they're politicians. They're in fear of voters. And Democratic voters to this day are angry about any discussion of this. How come you're not covering Donald Trump? I mean, that is what the Democratic Party is going to have to reckon with as they also have to deal with the fact that this is a calamity and a tragedy that most people with functioning eyes and ears now recognize was a major cover up and a major problem for the country.
And that's I don't, I don't envy them having to negotiate those waters. As a journalist, I don't have to worry about pleasing a base. But I hear from the angry Democrats. They have to appeal to them. We talk a lot about the difference around Donald Trump, you know, when he's got his cabinet meeting and people have to put up their hand and tell him how wonderful he is. You know, did did the Democrats around Biden fear Biden or Jill Biden as much as the Republicans around Trump fear Trump?
I think it was there. Obviously there was a degree of that. There was also a degree of loyalty. There was also a degree of if I do anything, I will be helping Donald Trump. Joe Biden's running for re election. He is the president. There is no viable alternative candidate. The Biden people would would use Kamala Harris, the vice president who at the time was even less popular than Biden, as an excuse. How can you get rid of Joe Biden? Look at Kamala, you want Kamala to be the nominee.
So I think there there were a lot of factors. We after all contain multitudes. But I do think the existential fear of Donald Trump and being seen as in any way helping Donald Trump really guided the decisions of a lot of these people. But also keep in mind a lot of them have their, you know, very few of the people who work for Joe Biden were near retirement age themselves.
Most of them were young enough to either want to run for president themselves or want to keep working and making some money for their families, and this is not a popular thing to do. There's a whole chapter in your book called Jill Biden, then the first lady, of course, How guilty was she and how guilty were the people around both her and Joe Biden? First and foremost, I think you have to lay this at the feet of the president. Joe Biden was the one who made the decision to run for re
election. Joe Biden is the one who, at least to some degree, was aware of his deterioration. I'm 56, I know what I'm capable of doing now and what I'm not capable of doing now as opposed to 1015 years ago. I know when I forget a word. I know when I forget a name. I'm well aware of this and I I think Joe Biden has to be acknowledged was the one driving this train. That said, doctor Jill Biden, the the first lady, former first
lady was part of the deal. She was part of the team that tried to make sure that by the her husband was portrayed in as positive and misleading away as possible. One of her top aides, Anthony Bernal, was perhaps the most powerful first lady chief of staff in the history of the United States. Anthony Bernal was basically a Co chief of staff to the White House when it came to how Joe Biden was portrayed. So I think those two obviously
bear most of the responsibility. Hunter Biden, the president's son who has had struggles with addiction and the law. He was basically a functioning family, chief of staff making. The president or encouraging the president, encouraging his father to fight back, to go after his critics. He was very responsible as well. And then there's a group that people in the White House, people in the administration
would call the politburo. These are the very top Biden aides, most loyal Biden aides, Mike Donnellan and Steve Roschetti. There were others who were part of this group of top aides that were part of the cover up, but nobody outside the family more so than Donnellan and Roschetti.
Jake Sullivan, the former national security adviser, gave an interview to the Financial Times earlier this year, and he said that when he saw the debate performance that you and Dana Bash chaired in June of last year, he was deeply shocked. It came as a complete surprise to him out of the blue that the president could be this fortunate. That begs belief, doesn't it, from someone who is always with the president in the Oval Office for all these years on matters
of national security? I think it is fair to say that Biden was most animated and most engaged on issues of national security and less so on issues like the immigration or inflation. That said, I personally find it hard to believe that it was a complete and utter shock to Jake Sullivan. Now that that might be, and you alluded to this in your introduction, that might be because of a degree of self delusion and self deception.
I don't think Jake Sullivan is one of the conspirators trying to portray the president in in a way that was misleading, but I also think it's quite possible that he was willing to discount or immediately ignore what he was saying. He claims, for example, there's a scene in the book where President Biden in December 2022 is not able to come up with Jake Sullivan's name, even though he's his national security
advisor. He calls him Steve, and then he's not able to come up with the name of his communications director, Kate Beningfield. He calls her press. Jake Sullivan claims he doesn't remember that. Does that mean he really doesn't remember it? I can't speak for him. I think the human capacity for self denial is quite strong. The Republicans and people around Trump have for long referred to the Biden family as
the Biden crime family. Now that of course was deemed to be, you know, far fetched, typical Trump talk, etcetera. But when it comes to deceit and cover up, we can argue whether that's a crime or not. But when it comes to deceit and cover up of the president's cognitive abilities, they sort of have a point, don't they? I don't know how much of the cover up can be called criminal. I'm not an expert on the law. I'm we, we do not allege a criminal cover up.
It was, it's certainly a scandal and it's certainly appalling. When the Republicans talk about a Biden crime family, they they mainly talk about ways that Biden's brother and his son Hunter cashed in on the on the Biden family name. And there's certainly a lot of smoke there. I don't know if there's any fire. There's certainly a lot of sleaze there. I don't know if there's any criminality, but but this might be. And if this is what you're
driving at, I agree with you. Truly the most appalling thing that the Biden family ever did. And of course, when you talk about self enrichment, you know, the the Trump family can't really start that conversation without some red faces. OK, but but just to get back to the, you know, to the cover up.
I mean, one of the things that I found really shocking from your book is the detail that, for instance, as of November 2021, the annual medical check UPS or medical reports into the health of the president did not include a cognitive section. He never took a cognitive test, even though they're pretty standard in the United States for anybody. After they turned 65 and President Trump took one, famously, he would recite man, woman, television.
Whatever it was, it became something of a comic staple, his reciting that list of of nouns. I can't get into the head of Doc O'Connor, the White House physician who was very, very close to the Biden's. And in fact, some people think too, too close to the Biden's. But I will say that Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who is an advisor to the White House physician's office, he has said that the only reason you would not give a test like that is because you don't want to know the answer.
Now, I know, having spoken to her, that Nancy Pelosi was one of the people who finally delivered the message to Joe Biden that he had to bow out. But what was the role of people like her over time in the run up, you know, before the disastrous debate, what was the role of Barack and Michelle Obama? You know, the Obamas are close to the Biden's apparently. What was their role in telling him or trying to tell him that the game was up?
Well it's interesting because they all had their different roles and they did not work in the cohesive unit that some people I think suspect it might even be great if politicians work that collaboratively. Collaboratively. Pelosi was early on calling for Biden to run for re election. And keep in mind that Nancy Pelosi is 2 years older than Joe Biden, so her take on his cognitive abilities may have
been shaped by that perspective. And beyond that, she stepped down as Democratic leader of the House of Representatives after the midterms of 2022, so she didn't really interact with him much in 2023 or 2024. She, after the debate, was something of a vocal passive aggressive nudger of the president to leave. Although she never directly said it, she would say things publicly and then also, when she had this secret private meeting with him, tell him he needed to
look at the polling. He needed to look at the what the American people were saying in the polling. And this isn't one of the most fascinating parts of this whole debacle. There were three pollsters that were really, really good, Jeffrey Pollock, Molly Murphy and Jeff Garin, names that don't mean anything to anybody outside politics in the United States, but they were really good pollsters. They did not work on the
campaign. They were hired by the campaign and they never talked to Joe Biden. They never directly presented their their findings to Joe Biden. They always gave it to Donnellan and Roschetti. And then Donnellan especially would interpret and massage the polling. And so Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader who replaced Pelosi, Obama, their campaign from the debate to Biden dropping out on July 21st, 2024. Their campaign was, have you
looked at the data? Have you looked at the polling? Because the polling, as Chuck Schumer told Biden in a very intense conversation, the polling suggested he only had a 5% chance of winning. The big thought that occurs to me in all this is that there's an enormous amount of deference in your Republic about the the office of the president who kind of sometimes behaves like an elected monarch. And you could argue that the current one wants to be, you know, treated a bit like a monarch.
But the deference towards the president is that what was going on here with Biden? I'm glad you brought it up because while I do prefer my country to yours, and I do prefer many of our institutions, especially the 1st Amendment, which I bet you envy to to to yours. I do think that your system, because of Question Time, because of the parliamentary process, because of the fact that if you are the leader of the party and you're not measuring up, you know who's coming for you, right behind
you. I think this could not have happened in Great Britain. I I just don't think that your system would allow it. And I think our system is flawed in such a way that our political parties are very weak and and our presidents are very powerful and our Congress are, are, are, you know, our legislature is emasculated to the degree that that that is, that is shocking. So I don't think, I don't think it would have happened in the UKI.
Just covered the conclave in Rome and they they prevent Cardinals who are older from 79 from voting for the next Pope. You know, there is no such age limit in America. And you mentioned in your book endless examples of legislators and indeed, presidents, you know, who are unbelievably old and passed it, frankly, whose ailments get covered up. You know, in Reagan's case, it was Alzheimer's.
You know, in FD Rs case, it was the polio at first in in Woodrow Wilson's case, it was something else. This is a theme of which Biden is just the latest iteration. Latest and perhaps the worst since Woodrow Wilson had a stroke while in office. President Wilson and his wife, Edith Wilson basically just propped him up and served as president for some time. It is a problem in this country. And I too am very keen on that data point from the conclave.
And I was just remarking, when did the Vatican become more forward leaning and progressive than the United States government? And that rule has been around since I think 1970. But they have something there. Look, my dad is 85, my mom is 82. Love him dearly, love to be with them, but we just have to acknowledge that while not everybody at age 80 is unable to be president, most of us are. Jake Tapper, thank you very much indeed. The book is called Original Sin.
We just spoke to one of the authors and that's it for the forecast. I hope you enjoyed it. See you next time.