CNN anchor Jake Tapper beat back questions about what he knew about former President Biden’s mental acuity before the 2024 election ahead of the release of his new book about the former president’s decline.
“The criticism has been that you’re complaining about a cover up about Joe Biden’s mental acuity,” pundit Megyn Kelly said as she hosted Tapper on her popular podcast and SiriusXM radio show this week.
Kelly noted “the right wing saw” Biden’s condition and called it “no mystery that even left wing and mainstream media reporters who were not fooled but chose willful blindness … and that you were part of it.”
“It’s a tough and fair question,” Tapper responded, adding that after Election Day he and fellow journalist Alex Thompson interviewed dozens of Democratic insiders and others, many of whom “justified what they had done” to beat Trump.
Tapper said aides to the president and others in his orbit were “misrepresenting” to him and themselves how bad Biden’s condition had gotten before the election but after President Trump won, became “remarkably willing to talk to us about what they saw.”
The anchor acknowledged an interview he conducted with former Trump campaign official turned Fox News host Lara Trump in which she pressed him on Biden’s mental state, saying of that conversation “she saw something I did not see at the time. I own that.”
Tapper has faced criticism for what skeptics say is withholding information about Biden’s mental state for his book. Trump and his allies have argued the timing and revelations in Tapper’s book prove a “cover up” by mainstream media outlets covering the former administration.