After a blitzkrieg of a book rollout that saw Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin” dominate the news cycle this week with its clinical autopsy of Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection, some in Biden world are hitting back, offering fresh complaints about the reporting process and their own fact checks.
When Biden’s reelection campaign needed video of him taking off-the-cuff questions from voters, they turned to a staged town hall in Delaware in April 2024 that they planned to use for a campaign commercial — an episode that went so poorly, people in the campaign determined the town hall yielded unusable material, according to Tapper and Thompson.
The pair write that at the closed-press event, even amid supporters and campaign staff that had the full list of questions, “Biden had trouble. The campaign ultimately decided that the footage wasn’t usable.”
But Biden team’s is pushing back. Three versions of test ads obtained exclusively by POLITICO tell a slightly more complicated story.
While all three are highly edited and feature jump cuts of Biden’s remarks, the footage also shows the candidate engaging with members of the audience. POLITICO viewed dated documents related to the town hall’s planning and a painting in the gym to confirm the date and location.
One is called “Greatest Nation” focusing on democracy; another is titled “They’ve Tried” on the Affordable Care Act; a third, directed at veterans, is called “Defend Us All.”
None ever aired.
Why was that? Though Tapper and Thompson report that it was because the footage “wasn’t usable,” Biden advisers argue that the footage didn’t make it on air simply because of timing.
A Biden spokesperson tells POLITICO that the campaign tested the ads with focus groups but did not deploy them before the president dropped out of the race following his disastrous June 2024 debate.
Asked about the Biden advisers’ claims, Tapper disputed the contention. In a quotation supplied to POLITICO by Tapper, an unnamed Biden adviser said: “While the campaign was able to selectively utilize portions of the footage to craft ads that were eventually tested on focus groups, the consensus from senior and mid level campaign staff present for the event and those privy to the editing process was that the footage was not up to par and would require crafty editorial support. The campaign’s leadership would not have needed to wait nearly four months to (not) release the ads created with the footage if it reflected the picture of confidence they suggest.”
POLITICO has been unable to independently verify the identity of the unnamed Biden adviser supplied by Tapper.
The dispute over the book’s reporting is the latest pushback from Biden aides and allies against what they are keen to depict as a slapdash fact-checking process by Tapper and Thompson.
Tapper and Thompson have made a point of publicly noting that they paid for their book to be fact-checked — a step that many nonfiction books skip — and that Fergus McIntosh, the head research editor at The New Yorker, led that process.
The New Yorker has a stringent and storied process for vetting materials before publication, and, indeed, McIntosh fact-checked both the book and the excerpt from the book that the magazine published last week. POLITICO has learned that McIntosh told at least one person that he was more limited in the facts he could check in the book versus the excerpt, which is common. McIntosh declined to speak on the record.
McIntosh’s role in fact-checking was raised as an issue in a statement Biden’s spokesperson gave The New Yorker, but which the magazine didn’t publish in its entirety. “[T]he New Yorker employee who reached out to fact-check this excerpt also apparently reviewed the book and offered suggestions to the authors as they wrote it,” the statement read. “It’s remarkable that neither this fact checker, nor the authors, reached out to fact check the actual book with us, and only the New Yorker is holding them to the high editorial standards that readers of the book should get in the first place.”
In other words, the unnamed Biden spokesperson claims that the first time a Biden aide heard from the independently hired fact-checker was for the magazine excerpt, not for the book. The New Yorker did not respond to a request for comment.
Rufus Gifford, a Biden campaign official, shared video of Biden talking with George Clooney at a moment that the president allegedly did not recognize him — though the video doesn’t seem to definitively prove Gifford’s argument.
Like some of the book’s buzziest anecdotes — including that Biden didn’t recognize Clooney — the town hall anecdote is a matter of perception.
Thompson reports that some people say ads from the town hall weren’t used because the lighting was bad; the lighting looks serviceable in the ads. Others told Thompson that Biden’s performance at the event was poor; Biden, indeed, sounds raspy and old.
In a statement to POLITICO, a spokesperson for Tapper and Thompson said: “Jake and Alex stand by their reporting in ‘Original Sin.’ The Biden team is repeating the same obfuscatory tactics used during their time in the White House, and news outlets continuing to rely on the very same unattributed and unverified voices raises serious credibility questions.”
The spokesperson didn’t want to be named. Tapper declined to identify his source who appraised the Biden town hall.
This story first appeared in POLITICO Playbook.
