JAKE TAPPER TALKS TO THE BBC ABOUT JOE-MENTIA

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AI-POWERED TRANSCRIPT We are well into the postmortem now of Joe Biden’s 2024
presidential campaign, that campaign of course that came apart last summer and led to
Kamala Harris being the candidate rather late in the day. A lot of books now, either been
published or about to be published, all of them bringing different insights, angles into what
was happening behind the scenes.
In this episode we’re going to hear from another of those authors, the journalist and CNN
anchor, Jake Tapper. He’s a very big name in American journalism. He moderated the first 2024 presidential debate, in other words, the one between Trump and Biden, where Biden fell apart.
So his new book, which he co-authors, argues that there was a cover-up of Joe Biden’s decline, not just during the campaign, but during his entire presidency. So, we’re going to ask why he says that, but also whether the American media have their own questions to answer about whether they covered things up as well. Welcome to AmeriCast.
AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people.
You’re gambling with World War III. President Trump’s message is very simple. We are done
being taken advantage of.
Mr. President, in the name of our God, have mercy upon the people. We’re scared now. Are you supportive of these onesies? I’m supportive of vaccines.
What is happening? Like, this is not America. This is a terrible nightmare. This is what victory feels like.
Hello, it’s Justin at home in South London, on my own, but not for long, because I’m going to
talk to Jake Tapper, who is CNN’s lead anchor and the co-author of a new book. It’s called
Original Sin, President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. It’s written alongside Alex Thompson of Axios, who did an awful lot of reporting of this during the course of the election.
But it’s a real honour now to talk to Jake, who is joining us. Jake, hi. We have talked to you
before, but you hadn’t that time written a book.
So, welcome and congratulations. It’s great to be here again. Thank you so much.
Let’s start with, I mean, it’s quite a nightmare, isn’t it? Where would you start? Where does the story begin in terms of what you are saying, which is that this was a president in decline, not just in the last few months, but from quite a long way back? Well, that’s a tough question
because all of us deteriorate and all of us age. But what started happening to President Biden, according to top aides, is, sadly, can be traced to the death of his son, Beau, in 2015, when he was vice president. And a top aide described to us, it was like watching water being poured on sand, in terms of what happened to the then vice president’s psyche.
And that said, nobody or very few people thought he couldn’t function as president. But it
became clear through our reporting, me and my co-author Alex Thompson of Axios, that
starting basically in 2019, there were two Bidens. There was the functional Joe Biden that did well enough at the debates in 2020, etc. And then there was a non-functioning Joe Biden. I mean, somebody who could not come up with the name of top aides or close friends. I mean, somebody who loses his train of thought to the degree that it’s alarming.
I mean, somebody who seems at times to have glitches or be frozen, not being up to the task of being president. And our reporting suggests that that Joe Biden, the non-functioning Joe Biden, started rearing his head in 2019, 2020. And then with disturbing frequency, the ratio of appearances of the non-functioning Joe Biden increased, especially starting in 2023 and 2024.
Give us an example of something that you now know happened that they hid.

Well, I mean, there are so many. I’ll just give you one example, which is there was a very high profile fundraiser in Los Angeles in June 2024, co-hosted by Julia Roberts and George Clooney, names that your listeners will know.
And President Biden had known George Clooney. He’d met him after 9-11 and had had
meetings with him, knew him personally. Clooney obviously is somebody who’s been very
active on when it comes to human rights in Darfur and Sudan.
And Biden walks into this event and he doesn’t recognise George Clooney. It’s very obvious to
people in this small group that George Clooney is not a face he recognises. And his aide has to say, you know, George. And the president says, oh, yeah, George Clooney. And it’s obvious to people there that he doesn’t recognise him. That’s that’s a shocking lack of of memory and cognitive ability. And it’s not just Clooney. He doesn’t… he’s not able to come up with the names of two of his top aides in December 2022. A witness told us that, you know, outside the Oval Office, he forgets the name of Jake Sullivan, his National Security Advisor.
He forgets the name of Cade Benningfield, his Communications Director. The Clooney
fundraiser is really interesting, isn’t it, as well, because as people, particularly the right wing
press, looked at the video and put things out which appear to show him wandering about on
the stage. There was a real pushback, wasn’t there, to say, no, it’s fake video.
It’s been edited wrongly, et cetera, et cetera. In other words, they knew there was a problem at that fundraiser, you’re saying, but they covered it up. They did.
The real problem was behind the scenes in the fundraiser, backstage when he met with
Clooney and others. And there were other people backstage who had similar encounters to the one that Clooney and his team had, including President Obama, who had to jump in during a couple times that Biden was speaking to groups. But even what was on stage in front of the audience of hundreds of people, while not as bad as what was going on backstage, was bad and shocking and alarming people.
Obviously, the people in that audience are not Trump supporters. They’re big Biden supporters who have spent lots of money to be there. And they, on the record, tell us how shocked they were.
And then you’re right. First of all, there’s a big tell here in the fact that there is no official video of this event. You have Jimmy Kimmel doing an event with Joe Biden and Barack Obama, like a 20 to 30 minute conversation on stage that is only meant to boost Biden.
And yet there is no official campaign video released to the public of that. It’s shocking that that would happen, but only if you were trying to hide something from the public. So that’s one.
Two, in some of the video that is able to escape the event, because in this day and age, you
can’t really, unless you confiscate everybody’s phones, something’s going to get out there. The White House says, oh, they call it cheap fakes instead of deep fakes. Deep fakes are the, you know, using technology to have somebody say something they never said to suggest that it didn’t cost that much. And it was just like maliciously edited or deceptively edited video. But it wasn’t. It was Biden wandering on stage and looking out into the audience blankly and Obama kind of going over and pulling him back and taking him off stage with him. Now, Obama explained it like he just he just wanted to get the hell out of there. But it looked bad and it looked bad to attendees. But yeah, the White House, as you know, suggests that it’s fake.
It wasn’t fake. It was real. Well, turning to 2023, you talk of the moments when he said, OK, I’m going to run and they try and hold campaign events or sort of mock campaign events, video events. And he can’t string together enough words for the video. There’s a fundraiser that takes place in Chicago in 2023 where he’s using a teleprompter for an event in front of just a handful, you know, a few dozen people. These are the kind of extemporaneous thing, tasks that anybody in public life should be able to do.
You would be able to do it. I would be able to do it. Most of the people listening would be able to do it.
Maybe they don’t like speaking in public, but but most people would be able to do it. President Biden at the beginning of his presidency, and this is not strange, his aides would try to make sure that he looked his best. And so they would give him his ability to do that with teleprompters and note cards and such. But those became such crutches and he became so reliant on that teleprompter and a small fundraiser type thing that some Democrats started being alarmed and very privately and quietly expressing concern. Bill Daley, whose dad was a famously Mayor of Chicago, Bill Daley himself was a commerce secretary and a chief of staff during the Obama presidency. Bill Daley was so alarmed he started calling around and trying to get other Democrats, Governors to challenge Biden in the primaries.
And when the White House heard about that kind of thing, and this goes to the guts of what
you are revealing in this book that I think we all kind of guessed at, but maybe didn’t know the virulence of the response, the gathering of the waggons around the fire or whatever the phrase is, was was quite something. People say now, with the benefit of hindsight, why didn’t people say why didn’t cabinet secretaries come forward? Why didn’t members of Congress come forward, et cetera? Because obviously all of us and throughout the world saw evidence of his deterioration on camera, but we just didn’t know how bad it was until maybe the debate when it was just laid bare before the whole world. But the question of why didn’t people come forward, you look at the people who did try to sound the alarm, Congressman Dean Phillips, Democrat of Minnesota, ran against Biden in the primaries, and he said he did it just to expose this. And he was basically defenestrated. His career is over. People called it an exercise in narcissism. He was destroyed.

Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating Biden’s mishandling of classified information, he gets hours in October 2023 interviewing the president and is shocked and alarmed by what he sees in terms of the rambling, the inability to maintain a train of thought or answer a question cogently. He says in his report that he’s not going to prosecute Biden because Biden will come across to a jury as a well-meaning elderly man with a bad memory.
I remember that. And they really hit back. They threw an anvil at him.
And it was months before he could even find work. The word got out, don’t hire Robert Hur. So
I think that while we as a Country and we as a world would have been much better off if the
alarm had been sound and truth tellers had come forward. It really requires a lot of courage and a lot of financial independence, to be quite frank, because the risk that you’d never work again was was quite real. And also like. And it wasn’t just that.
Sorry, Jake, I was just going to say it wasn’t just the Politicians, was it? And lawyers and those who came across it was journalists as well. Yeah. But to me, the chief individuals responsible for this are the Biden family and the top aides, because starting in about fall of 2023, there is an effort, a concerted effort, we’re told by our sources, including top sources at the in the in the Biden administration, Cabinet Officials and the like, to hide him, to sequester him, to keep people from him so they can’t see this.
At one point, one of the cabinet secretaries, there’s a cabinet meeting in October 2023, and
then there isn’t another one until for almost another year. And at one point, one of the cabinet secretaries does have a meeting with the President. And this individual is shocked at how disoriented and out of it he seems.
But the question is, so why didn’t somebody come forward? I would have reported that if that cabinet secretary had come to me and told me at the time, but they didn’t. There were those of us who were pushing and probing and trying to find out more. But, you know, looking back on it now, I’ll only speak for myself. Not enough. I wasn’t doing it enough. And it is really shocking the degree to which this was hidden as much as it could have been until the debate.
Did you guess at it? So on our podcast, on this podcast, AmeriCast, towards the end of 2023, we were all kind of wondering what was going to go on in the next year. And I actually said, I don’t think he’s going to be the candidate. And the reason I said it was I had a friend who’s a
fundraiser, a big fundraiser on the West Coast. And he had rung me and said, we’ve done one of these fundraising things and he used an autocue. And I don’t think he’s going to make it. I can’t remember exactly what his words were.
But it seems extraordinary that with some exceptions and your co-author is one of the
exceptions. And in a way, it’s yes, there was a failure of and you say there’s a failure of kind of investigative ability. But I wonder if it’s fair to ask whether it’s a bit more than that.
Sure. I mean, look, it’s a very complicated story and one can get into all sorts of ways in which this was not reported on sufficiently. Let me just take two.
In May of 2024, there are a couple of Wall Street Journal reporters named Siobhan Hughes and Annie Linskey, who after the, her report started trying to find out if anybody else had seen more of this. At the same time, there is a different reporter. Let’s call this reporter Smith.
Smith gets called by Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden’s top aides, who basically says everything
you’re hearing is false. I’m in those meetings. And Smith leaves this encounter thinking, if I go forward with this, the White House is going to call me a liar and just utterly destroy my
reputation.
And Smith stands down. Linskey and Hughes, to their great credit, write a story. They’re still not able to get Democrats to even go on background, meaning just name, say, one House
Democrat said. But Siobhan and Annie get raked over the coals, not just by Democrats, not just by the White
House, but by Democratic senators, Democratic members of the House, social media, regular media. They get lambasted. Yeah, I mean, I know people at The Journal who were involved at that time and they had calls not just from the White House, but from other journalists.
That’s the extraordinary thing. And that it is in those terms, the story you are telling is not just a sort of run of the mill. And this is a scandal, isn’t it? It’s absolutely a scandal.
Now, is it criminal? I don’t think it is, but I’m no law enforcement expert. I can’t find evidence of any criminality. But it’s without question a cover up in a scandal and one of the biggest scandals of the modern presidency.
There was somebody running the Country who, according to his own Cabinet Officials, could not be relied upon to do that 24-7. And that is shocking. And what we all saw on June 27th at the debate was not an anomaly. It was how he sometimes was. Now, was he like that all the time? Of course not. It is a deterioration.
So they held the debate and then it all goes appallingly wrong.
Debate image

And then they try and keep in it. It’s shocking.
The gaslighting is shocking. You know, it’s funny. So I did the debate.
I co-moderated the debate with Dana Bash of CNN. That was on a Thursday night. I had Friday off.
I had the weekend off. And I watched this. And I just, you know, like somebody who had seen
what we all saw, except honestly, I think it was worse in person.
But it was pretty bad on TV. Having now gone back and watched it for this book. But on that
Monday, and I said, I really feel like I have to say something on the show today about the
gaslighting.
I just have to acknowledge, like, I don’t want our viewers to feel like they’re alone in seeing
what they see. And I was cautioned not to. You know, it’s too, and I was just like, I rejected the advice and I did it.
But it’s just like there was still an institutional reflection or reflective refusal to acknowledge
what we all saw. And it was just crazy. Yeah.
What’s the impact going to be on the Democratic Party? Because, I mean, you mentioned
cabinet secretaries. I mean, Pete Buttigieg, who was one of the cabinet secretaries, transport secretary, and people around the world kind of know him because he’s run for President before and is young and dynamic and all the rest of it. One of their best media performance performers. If he was in the cabinet and he knew this stuff, he’s not going to be able to run in 28, is he?
Well, what he is saying out there is that he, anytime he needed anything from the White House as transportation secretary, he got it. But he also said maybe Biden should not have run for re-election. I think this is not unlike what the Iraq war was for Republicans more than a decade ago.
This was a mistake and a disaster, and people need to acknowledge and own what happened
and speak straight to voters. I think there’s a lot of simmering resentment that voters can’t
even articulate as to why they’re mad. And, God, there is a lot of anger, isn’t there?

That comes out in your book, both off the record, and there’s too much swearing for this podcast because we’re a family podcast, Jake, but you think of David Plath, the guy who was brought back in to help Kamala Harris and had, of course, done so much for Obama behind the scenes two times round.
Really angry and openly angry to you. Yeah. I mean, there is swearing in the book.
A lot. It’s all quotes. It’s not me swearing.
It’s not Alex swearing. It’s politicians swearing, and they are mad. I confess I have a weakness for quoting curses when people of importance are using them.
But beyond that, I think it does get at some of the deep frustration, the deep anger. David Plath saying he F’d us, or just saying that the reason that Donald Trump is President is because of Joe Biden choosing to run for re-election and choosing to hide his deterioration. I mean, that’s the premise of the book, and it’s based on more than 200 interviews with Democratic insiders.
So when the Biden people say now, as they are in response to the book, that actually you have not come up with a single case of when he was President and he screwed something up because he wasn’t capable. And unless you do that, they sort of try and push it all to one side. Is that going to work, do you think? Sure, he was addled and deteriorating and had moments of lack of acuity, but you can’t point to one bad decision he made.
I mean, I don’t know that that’s the marker for a good presidency or even for whether or not
somebody should have been President. But beyond that, I actually reject that notion. First of all, you can say his decision to run for re-election was a horrible decision. But beyond that, we have in the book examples of Democratic senators expressing concern about his grasp on National Security issues or why the immigration policy in this country was, in
their view, such a mess because of his inability to have the same grasp on these issues that he might have had 10 years before. So I just disagree. Yeah, a final thought.
They’re putting him out now, aren’t they? He’s been on the BBC actually, did his first interview with the BBC with my colleague Nick Robinson on the BBC. Nick should have called me, I would have given him some questions.

Well, yeah.
Well, the thing is, it was about VE Day, so it wasn’t very easy to ask him questions. I think they did that deliberately and fine. But he’s done The View as well, hasn’t he? Morning TV in the States.
There’s a sort of desire to get him out there. I mean, what happens to him now? Well, they did try to get him out there on BBC and then on The View. Some people thought it was like a prebuttal to our book, which they obviously are very worried about. And I don’t know that it went particularly well. The Nick Robertson interview was fine. But those are topics that Biden is, you know, he can kind of answer in his sleep about Europe and the
importance of NATO and Ukraine and the like.
And he can rely on tropes that kind of are just like buried in his brain. This is not meant as an impugning of Nick Robertson in any way. I just mean like that’s a real comfort area for him, the importance of the United States in the post-World War II world order.
The View did not go as well. It was longer and it was live. Jill Biden was there for some of it.
She seemed to answer some of his questions for him. He seemed a little spacier, a little more out of it. It was mocked and derided.
And he has not been out there since. And it’s kind of like the problem that he faced after the
June 27, 2024 debate, which is he could have put aside all of the questions about his acuity after the debate if he went out there and did 15 interviews and 20 town halls and three more
debates and took some tough questions. But he wasn’t capable of it.
He couldn’t have done it, as even his top aides acknowledged to us in the book. So there is only so much that Joe Biden can do to rebut or refute or attempt to do so what we’re saying in this book, because we all see it. And it’s sad.
It is sad. It’s a sad story. But it’s great to have you to talk to us about it, Jake.
And I really do recommend the book. It’s called Original Sin. I couldn’t put it down.
Jake Tapper, thanks a lot. Such an honour.

Thank you so much.
And if you’re interested in Joe Biden’s final months in the White House, it’s difficult not to be,
isn’t it, really? I talked to Chris Whipple for AmeriCast, who has a bit of a different take, actually, on how the Biden team managed their last days in the White House. You can find that on BBC
Sounds or, of course, wherever you get your podcasts, along with all our other episodes. Bye.

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