‘The White House Was Lying’: CNN’s Jake Tapper Goes There in Scathing on Air Takedown of Joe Biden

CNN’s Jake Tapper minced no words in Tuesday morning interview with his colleague Sara Sidner during which he accused former President Joe Biden’s team of “lying” about his condition.

Tapper joined Sidner on Tuesday to discuss Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, his forthcoming book with Axios’s Alex Thompson.

Sidner kicked off the conversation by asking Tapper about details from Original Sin reported on by Axios, and specifically the allegation that aides thought Biden might need a wheelchair.

“So the White House physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, was telling White House aides that President Biden’s deterioration of his spine, the degeneration, was so significant that if he fell one more time, that he might have to be in a wheelchair and serve in a wheelchair for his second term. But everybody pushed off the notion that he use a wheelchair until after the election,” replied Tapper. “This is all part of a larger whole where the Biden White House tried to hide the extent of his deterioration, both physical and cognitive, as much as possible. In fact, as you-, we all know, we all saw, as his shuffling gait got worse and worse from 2003 to 2004 [sic], they started putting aides around him as he walked to Marine One, the helicopter, that was to kind of hide from public view how bad his gait was, how bad his walking was, his shuffling. And also in case he stumbled again to make sure somebody was there. And this is just of a piece of an overall campaign to try to conceal from the American people the extent to which the president was really struggling to do his job.”

“You have an entire White House press corps, though, following him around. And I’m just curious as to whether or not this kind of trying to hide what was happening with the president at the time had an impact on the press corps. Like why didn’t we hear some of these details from what they actually saw and were dealing with trying to get information?” followed up Sidner.

“Well, Alex Thompson and I were on the case, as were lots of other reporters trying to figure out what was going on behind the scenes. But the bottom line is the White House was lying, not only to the press, not only to the public, but they were lying to members of their own Cabinet, they were lying to White House staffers, they were lying to Democratic members of Congress, to donors about how bad things had gotten,” answered Tapper, who continued:

And in fact, Alex and I started writing this book after the election of 2024. And we spoke with more than 200 people, most of whom, almost all of whom were Democrats, and almost all of whom wouldn’t be honest with us or wouldn’t candid with us until after the election. And then after the election, we found out all of these things that when you looked at what was going on with President Biden at the time, it probably doesn’t surprise you the extent to which he was deteriorating, but now we have anecdotes and facts about what was really going on behind the scenes, with details that Democrats wouldn’t share with us until after Election Day.

Watch above via CNN.