The White House shielded former President Joe Biden’s “deteriorating” health from the press, Cabinet members, donors, Congress, and staffers, according to CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Tapper’s statement came as he teased a book written alongside Axios’s Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which will report on their conversations with over 200 Democrats about Biden’s health.
“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,” Tapper said in an interview. “They were lying to White House staffers. They were lying to Democratic members of Congress, to donors about how bad things had gotten.”
The book, set to be released May 20, accuses Biden’s closest advisers of hiding his physical and cognitive decline from the public and even his own White House staffers during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Tapper said Democrats, by and large, would not speak candidly about Biden’s condition until after the 2024 election was over.
“After the election, we found out all of these things that when you look at what was going on with President Biden at the time, it probably doesn’t surprise you the extent to which he was deteriorating,” Tapper said. “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 the election.”
According to Tapper and Thompson’s book, Biden’s doctor, Kevin O’Connor, suggested that Biden start using a wheelchair as he struggled with an awkward gait due to his “significant spinal arthritis.”
The White House blamed Biden’s struggling gait on a foot fracture from November 2020. Biden allegedly refused to wear his boot to help the injury heal properly, but the book’s claim contradicts his doctor’s assessment in 2021 that his “injury has healed as expected.”
The book alleges that Biden’s severe cognitive decline was first noticed by staffers in 2022.
ADVISERS PRIVATELY DEBATED BIDEN USING WHEELCHAIR IF HE WON REELECTION: BOOK
Following a disastrous debate performance against President Donald Trump last summer, Biden’s cognitive abilities were called into question by the public and members of his party. After facing weeks of pressure to end his campaign, Biden dropped out of the presidential race on July 21, 2024, passing the torch to former Vice President Kamala Harris.
“It was an abomination. He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people,” a prominent Democratic strategist was quoted in the book, speaking of the former president’s drive to seek reelection.