A former colleague of Jake Tapper turned on him in an angry segment Tuesday night, accusing the CNN anchor of trying to rewrite history after spending years defending former President Joe Biden’s health on the air.
“Original Sin,” released on Tuesday, is a groundbreaking book co-authored by Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson that reveals for the first time some of the most shocking admissions about how delicately Biden’s staffers were managing him behind the scenes. It has been heavily promoted by CNN in the run-up to its release.
Tapper is continuing a media tour that’s also a mea culpa filled with profuse apologies, including for labeling Lara Trump a conspiracy theorist when she accused the White House of covering up Biden’s mental and physical decline for most of 2024. Some of the reporter’s peers have been more understanding than others.
On the latter side is Chris Cuomo, the former CNN anchor now with NewsNation, who on Tuesday lambasted Tapper and Thompson for acting dumb about a painfully obvious charade played on them by the Biden administration.
“They want you to believe that the media was deceived into thinking that Biden had no issues,” said Cuomo with a chuckle. “Don’t count me in on that. I knew, okay? And it was no secret because you knew, too.”
He then mocked the cover of the book, which shows Biden with both hands covering his eyes.
“It could just as easily be a picture of the writers of this book who are pretending they didn’t see and hear what everybody else did!”
He speculated that Tapper has released the book as a “cover for something.”
“It’s a cover for something that’s much more serious to me than Biden’s age and stage ever were: The reality that many in the media knew damn well that Biden was losing it, but they played it down because they wanted Trump to lose more. The original sin is not hiding Biden’s age and stage, but hiding this preference,” he concluded.
Cuomo is just the latest in a series of peers who have called out Tapper for attempting to portray himself as a deceived but well-meaning journalist.
Megyn Kelly on Monday torched Tapper after he appeared on her show, challenging him to explain why he didn’t ask Biden about his request to shake the hand of a congresswoman who died a month earlier. The incident, which occurred in a speech just 13 days before he sat down with Tapper, was one of the more embarrassing senior moments by Biden that officials attempted to explain away as a simple misstatement.
But as Tapper writes in his book, concern about their boss grew drastically over his final year in office. Aides contemplated the possibility that Biden would be confined to a wheelchair for the entirety of a second term. He was forgetting the names of key staffers in meetings.
Biden’s longtime doctor, who also happens to be a family friend, is the latest member of his inner circle under fire following his cancer diagnosis, with President Donald Trump and others openly questioning how the former Army physician could not have noticed a slow-growing prostate cancer until just this month.
