CNN’s Jake Tapper Argues Biden White House Misled Public ‘All the Time’ With ‘Cheap Fake’ Spin

CNN anchor Jake Tapper slammed former President Joe Biden’s White House team for having deliberately misled the public by “falsely” claiming that any “odd” video clip of the then-president was a “cheap fake.”

The White House began deploying the term in 2024 to deflect on unflattering footage that emerged of Biden as concerns mounted over his mental acuity during his presidential campaign.

One video that went viral in June 2024, circulated by the Republican National Committee (RNC), showed the former president “freezing” on stage at a Los Angeles fundraiser alongside former President Barack Obama.

At the time White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates labeled the clip a “cheap fake” – meaning deceptively edited to misrepresent Biden’s actions. In reality, he claimed at the time, Biden was pausing to take in applause from the crowd before exiting with Obama. Similar dismissals came after Biden stood still during a Juneteenth event, which Bates also dismissed as a partisan “cheap fake.”

But Tapper, the co-author of a new book called Original Sin, an exposé of the Biden team’s attempts to cover-up Biden’s health issues, said that the “cheap fake” spin became a tactic used by the White House.

Speaking to CNN anchor John Berman on Wednesday about the book’s revelations, Tapper revisited the fundraiser episode:

Obama’s side of that story is he wasn’t sure what was going on, but he just wanted to get out of there and he wasn’t going to get out of there without Biden. So he grabbed him and it was more just his impatience than anything else.

And we should note that 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.

And people in the arena who did not see the horrifying scene behind the stage, but in the arena, congresswoman Annie Kuster, Jon Favreau, former Obama speech chief speechwriter, and others, just from that event and Biden walking towards the edge of the stage, thought: ‘Oh, my god, something is wrong here. He’s not going to make it.’

Watch above via CNN.

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