Former President Biden iced out key members of his Cabinet during the second half of his term in the White House, according to a preview of a new book from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson.
In Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Tapper revealed new details of his book, including from conversations with three unnamed Cabinet secretaries, who “told us that Biden’s inner circle shielded the president from them in 2023 and 2024,” Tapper said on CNN.
“The Cabinet secretaries were no longer even directly briefing the president in any regular way,” Tapper said on CNN, citing reporting from the book. “Instead, they briefed senior White House aides, who would then speak to Biden.”
The book cites one Cabinet secretary who said when they did meet with the full Cabinet, the president seemed “disoriented” and “out of it.”
“Access dropped off considerably in 2024, and I didn’t interact with him as much,” one Cabinet secretary told the authors in the book.
Another Cabinet secretary suspected this was a “deliberate strategy” to keep the president at a distance.
“For months we didn’t have access to him. There was clearly a deliberate strategy by the White House to have him meet with as few people as necessary,” the secretary told the authors in the book.
From October 2023 on, according to the same secretary, “The Cabinet was kept at bay with few exceptions,” pointing to former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as two of those exceptions, since their roles concerned matters of national security.
The book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” will be released May 20 and is based on more than 200 interviews, mostly with Democratic insiders, following the 2024 election.
A spokesperson for Biden criticized the book in a statement to CNN.
“We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite – he was a very effective president,” the statement said, according to CNN.
