“Don’t news people have to tell you what they know when they find it out? Isn’t that the difference between news and a secret?” joked an incredulous Jon Stewart in a monologue about Original Sin, the book CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson are working really hard to sell. Further making clear that he thinks Tapper and Thompson knew this all along, Stewart added, “The news is selling you a book about news they should’ve told you was news a year ago for free.”
Well, five years ago — like we did — but why quibble? Stewart was on a roll. (It’s Stewart, so language warning):
.@jonstewart is getting whiplash watching CNN pivot from promoting Jake Tapper’s “bombshell” book to lamenting Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis pic.twitter.com/pShybi5F6e
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 20, 2025
In this age where no one can trust anything we see or hear from the media, you can be forgiven for wondering some things about this whole kerfuffle surrounding Joe Biden’s health.
Allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for a moment: Did Tapper help with the cover-up while he already had a book deal to expose it? Did Team Biden reveal his cancer diagnosis just in time to gin up sympathy as Tapper and Thompson were “exposing” the truth? Or to help them sell books? Did Biden really avoid testing for prostate cancer since 2014, as his team now insists, or did they know and cover it up along with his cognitive decline? Who ran the White House between January 20, 2021, and January 20, 2025? Because it sure doesn’t seem to have been Joe Biden.
To that last question, Tapper and Thompson wrote in their book, “Five people were running the country, and Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”
Among the gems from a couple of Tapper/Thompson interviews yesterday, Tapper added to that answer. Hunter Biden “was driving the decision-making for the family,” Tapper told Katie Couric. “He was almost like a chief of staff.”
Isn’t that “bizarre”? Couric wondered. Tapper unloaded: “It’s bizarre because I think he is provably, demonstrably unethical, sleazy, and prone to horrible decisions. Well, I mean, I just look at the record. I mean, after his brother died, he cheated on his wife with his brother’s widow and then got her addicted to crack. That’s just one thing I could say. I mean, I don’t have a lot of personal regard for him.”
Welcome to the club.
WATCH: CNN’s Jake Tapper says Hunter Biden “was driving the decision-making for the family.”
“He was almost like a chief of staff.” 👀 pic.twitter.com/hZVP9ACt73
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) May 20, 2025
Set aside Tapper’s animosity and consider what he just said: An unelected, drug-addled, wife-cheating liar and influence-peddler was effectively running the White House behind the scenes.
The Washington Post, which took down President Richard Nixon over Watergate and has been trying to replicate that feat with every Republican president since then, is incredulous. With hands on hips, its editorial board lectures, “If Biden was too frail for his job, voters should have been informed.”
If only the nation’s capital had some intrepid reporters who could find out information like that.
I’m not a journalist, but I’ll clue the Post in on a tactic I’ve picked up along the way: I used my eyes and ears to determine that Biden was unfit even before the 2020 election. Follow me for more journalism tips.
Now, back to Professional Journalist Jake Tapper, who is just as shocked as anyone to learn that Biden has been unwell this whole time.
Tapper and Thompson also ventured onto Megyn Kelly’s podcast to talk about their book, and particularly Tapper made some astounding statements.
When Kelly pointedly lumped them in with the media cabal who “chose willful blindness instead of honest reporting,” Tapper responded, “I feel tremendous humility” about that coverage. He pointed to the infamous Lara Trump interview in which he accused her of effectively mocking Biden because he stutters. “She saw something that I did not see at the time,” Tapper admitted to Kelly. He said he “already apologized to her” and told her “you were right.”
Kelly nailed him to the wall on his failure to ask tough questions, saying, “There was no effort, none, to get to the bottom of this. And now you write this book like, ‘There was a cover-up.’ It could only ever work if you allowed it.”
Eventually, Tapper said, “Alex and I are here to say that conservative media was right and conservative media was correct, and that there should be a lot of soul-searching — not just among me, but among the legacy media to begin with, all of us — for how this was covered or not covered sufficiently.”
But he still didn’t really own it. “We were just lied to over and over again,” Tapper insisted. Gee, I wonder what that’s like. He claimed that nearly everything reported in the book was discovered after the 2024 election. I don’t buy that for a minute. Aside from conservative media, a pair of Wall Street Journal reporters wrote on Biden’s troubles in June 2024 — before his infamous debate implosion.
Kelly brought that up, too: “How did The Wall Street Journal get it in June of 2024, and Jake Tapper and CNN couldn’t find sources for this story then before he dropped out?” He tried to rewrite history to make himself look better, saying, “I had them on my show right after the debate to talk about their great reporting.”
Kelly wasn’t having it. “After the debate,” she retorted. “But you did not put them on when they published that story, which was before the debate.” More than three weeks before the debate, I might add.
After further interchange, Tapper whined about sticking to facts, leading Kelly to say, “One of us didn’t miss the biggest story of the century when it comes to presidential politics, and one of us did.”
One of them also has a huge book deal.
There should be a reckoning for Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, and any other administration officials who covered up the worst presidential health failure since Woodrow Wilson. There should also be serious accountability for the journalists who willfully put on the blinders because they play for Team Democrat. Journalists like Jake Tapper aided in the cover-up and now pretend they were just lied to.
Instead, Tapper will take his deceitful propaganda to the bank and probably add an award or two to his shelf. It’s disgusting, and it illustrates why the legacy media no longer has a shred of credibility.
Here’s the whole Megyn Kelly interview if you have two hours to spare…
