Jake Tapper Defends Biden Coverage When Relentlessly Grilled By Megyn Kelly in Heated Interview

CNN’s Jake Tapper, co-author of a blockbuster new book on former President Joe Biden’s decline, defended much — but not all — of his coverage of the former president in a heated interview with Megyn Kelly.

In a lengthy faceoff during Tuesday’s show on SiriusXM’s Triumph channel, Kelly called out an interview Tapper conducted with Biden shortly after an incident in which the former president, during a speech, called out for a congresswoman — Jackie Walorski — who had died a month earlier in a car accident. Kelly slammed Tapper for not asking Biden about the gaffe during his interview with him in the fall of 2022.

“One month after the Jackie Walorski thing, you didn’t ask him about it,” Kelly said. “You didn’t follow up on the fact that he was falling up the stairs. That he was losing his train of thought regularly. That he was slurring. That he was incomprehensible. That he was getting lost on the White House lawn. You sat right across from him, and you asked none of that. Notwithstanding the fact that he had promised you he would be fully transparent about his health issue.”

“That’s true,” Tapper acknowledged. “But I did ask him about his age and the fact that the American people had concluded that even though he said whenever anybody brought up the subject of his age, ‘Watch me.’ And I said, they’re watching you and they are concerned that you were too old for this job.”

But Kelly insisted the gaffe about Walorski demanded further scrutiny.

“You know as well as I do that there’s a way you can say, ‘Hey, there’s this poll on your age,’ or you could say, ‘You just forgot that Jackie Walorski was dead. You asked where she was moments after watching a videotape tribute to her. You lowered the flags at the White House after she died.’ This happened 13 days before you sat with him. There is a way of pressing a man like that on the actual infirmities to bring it home to him and to the audience, and you didn’t do it.”

Tapper conceded the point, but defended the overall substance of his interview.

“Like I said, I feel humility about my coverage,” Tapper said. “[But], I mean, it’s not like I was asking him his favorite movie, or his favorite color. We were talking about Putin. We were talking about other issues of national importance.”

“It wasn’t just that, though, Jake,” Kelly said of the 2022 interview. “It wasn’t just that. I mean you sat with him a couple of times in the course of his presidency.”

“No, I didn’t,” Tapper replied.

“And these issues were not pressed,” Kelly said.

Tapper set the record straight that he only interviewed Biden once while he was in office. Kelly conceded that point, but widened the scope of her argument to call out Tapper’s broader coverage.

“You covered the Biden presidency aggressively throughout the four years, and you didn’t cover mental acuity, hardly at all,” Kelly said. “I mean, time and time again, when issues came up, you seem to be running cover for the president.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Tapper shot back.

Watch above, via SiriusXM.