Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

Tonight, we'll discuss a book that has enthralled Washington and much of the nation.

Original sin, President Biden's decline, it's cover up, and his disastrous choice to run again.

Joining me are its authors, Jake Tapper, CNN's lead anchor and chief Washington correspondent and Alex Thompson, a national political correspondent at Axios.

Gentlemen, thank you for being here and what is only your 3rd interview of the day.

I appreciate it, but the best, but the certainly no, save the best for the middle.

Um, uh, the, um, let's start with, uh, jump into the the the key moment.

A key moment in American history, one of the most dramatic moments in American political history, um, at the debate co-moderated by you, Jake, uh, June of last year in which Joe Biden essentially, Lost The election for the Democrats perhaps certainly lost the nomination.

I just want you to watch this key moment with me and we'll talk about it.

We'd be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person, eligible for what I've been able to do with the uh with, with, with the COVID, excuse me with um dealing with everything we have to do with uh Like If We finally beat Medicare.

Jake It's painful.

It's painful to watch.

You're sitting 15 ft away, something like that maybe next to Dana Bash, your co-moderator.

What are you thinking at that moment?

I'm thinking Well, what I wrote on the iPad to communicate with the control room is what I was thinking, a very clean version of what I was thinking, which is holy smokes.

That's what I wrote, holy smokes.

I I couldn't believe it.

We'd all watched Joe Biden through the years and we'd watched him becoming elderly.

But this was something else.

This was.

Addled, this was nonfunctioning.

This was not able to follow his own train of thought and, and, you know, this isn't just like catching him at the beach and asking him a question when he's not in the right spirit, not in the right state of mind.

This is the debate, the debate where he needs to prove his acuity and ability to be president because so many Americans were worried that he that he didn't have that ability, right, right.

You're watching it, I assume.

Yeah, in Atlanta and you're, um, you've already been reporting.

Obviously on Biden and some of the doubts and worries about Biden.

What was going through your mind?

Uh, that even though That honestly, I thought it was bad.

I did not think it was this bad.

And it was sort of shocking that they had let him go out on that stage, especially given that so many people around Joe Biden have been around him for so long, and, uh, say they love him, and the fact that they, and now we know from our reporting in this book that this was not the first time or even close to the first time that he had acted that way behind closed scenes, uh, behind closed doors and the fact that they let him go out there, um, with the potential that this could happen and let him, you know, in some ways, um, hurt his legacy and embarrass himself on the world stage.

I, I was, I just felt sad.

So is this when you realized that the White House was lying to the public, lying to the media about Joe Biden's condition, or was this I'm wondering how, how you move cognitively through the, the stages here.

Did you immediately think to yourself, oh my God, I've been lied to, or wow, he's having a really bad night.

I thought that they had been Misrepresenting his acuity for a little bit then at that point, like in our reporting suggests that he really started to deteriorate in uh the summer and fall of 2023.

Um, I didn't see him all that often, uh, and I didn't know how bad it was, but it seemed odd, uh, in retrospect, I, I, I mean, I asked people about it and I heard what I'm sure you heard what I'm sure Alex heard, which is he's fine, he's fine, he's fine, he's 81, of course.

He's elderly, but he's great, you know, his decision making solid.

He's great in meetings, blah blah blah, and um I didn't believe them, but I didn't have any evidence to report that they were lying.

When he came out and he could not.

Deliver what any politician should be able to do.

A 90 minute debate discussing why you should be elected, actually.

I mean, some of the questions were honestly like issues that he should have wanted to talk about and should have been able to talk about brilliantly and that's when I realized it wasn't even about, oh my God, I've been lied to, it was.

Uh, I had the same thought that, that some Democrats told us Democrats who worked for Biden told us they had that during that debate, which was, oh my God, who's running the country?

Well, who was running the country in I just wanted to first added, you know, beginning in April 2023, I really started honing in on this issue because of what some people in the White House were saying about their concerns, not necessarily in the moment, but certainly that he could not do a re-election campaign or serve 4 more years and in response to that reporting, the White House said false.

They did denied it.

They denied it, they denied it, and I was hearing otherwise.

So I had stopped believing their denials, uh, for a while.

But in terms of who was running the White House.

It's a small group of people that have been around, some people within the administration called them the pull-up bureau, that's the term we use in the book.

Give us the names of the 3 or 4.

Mike Donelon, Biden's longtime political liaison, Steve Richetti, who was sort of the legislative liaison plus like a friend, Bruce Reed, uh, at times, depending on his situation with the Biden people.

Ron Klain, and then there are some people outside the pull-up bureau that are closer to family, which would be obviously Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, but then Jill's main, uh, chief of staff, Anthony Bernal, and sort of his sort of like deputy in some ways, any Tomasini, who is often Biden's traveling chief of staff.

Joe Biden himself also is part of this.

Joe Biden is not like um It's not Weekend at Bernie's, right?

He has some purchase here.

He has some agency, and he, uh, he's aware of some of what's going on.

He might be in denial about it, but he's aware of the fact that they're keeping the cabinet away from him.

They are keeping some White House staffers away from him.

They're keeping members of Congress away from him.

He knows what's keeping the press.

Oh sure, absolutely.

It's, it's interesting, you know, and we talked about this on your show, um, a couple of weeks ago when, when I saw President Trump a few weeks ago.

He started by saying, I bet Joe Biden would never do this, and, and, and I took that as, and this is the conversation we had.

I took it as, oh man, he never stops talking about Joe Biden, and you took it as, well, I, I, I, that is actually true.

And it's true.

I, I interviewed Donald, I've interviewed Donald Trump more than I've interviewed Joe Biden.

I remember during the Biden years, good people don't know that you and I are friends, uh, that you would, you were frustrated.

You would constantly, you were, you had interviewed Obama several times about his presidency.

You wanted to, you're a very serious journalist and you know a lot about foreign policy and you wanted to talk about this, which was like a a section of his job that he really enjoyed and and like talking about and they wouldn't let you do it.

Well it wasn't, it wasn't just about you or the Atlantic either.

This is the first president in decades, perhaps actually ever.

It's hard to know with going back decades, who never sat for an interview with reporters with The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, or Reuters, did not do it.

4 years.

So he only did 1 interview with a national newspaper and that was on his way out the door with USA Today.

That was it.

Yeah, no, no, no, no.

And so this brings and we're getting granular, but this is Washington Week.

We're supposed to be granular, uh, Anita Dunn, who is kind of the, she was the czar of communications in in the Biden White House.

And I asked Anita periodically for 4 years, and, and Anita Dunn strung me along for 4 years.

strung a lot of other people along for you.

You didn't name her as Part of the Politburo, but she was right outside it though incredibly powerful.

So, so the question that, that comes to mind, I think for a lot of people is was this group.

Around by who are obviously trying to keep People from understanding how Diminished he was.

Were they, were they lying to themselves, or were they just lying?

I think both, yes, but I think, I think, I think there were honest people that realized that, uh, you know, we have one person quote in the book that the interview that Jake did in 2022, that by the next year, he was no longer capable of handling that 15 minute interview.

It was a nothing interview that, you know, it was a 15-minute interview straightforward question, just like you have like 6 questions or whatever.

One's on Putin, one's on people think you're too old, I forget what they all were, but I mean it was, it wasn't like a really, this is, this is gonna be more in depth than that, but even that, uh, a top aide told us he could not have done that in 2023, 1 year later.

let me hone in on this.

This, this group of people who were essentially running the country, or at least, I think you use in the, in the book, you talk about Biden is kind of the chairman of the board member of the senior member that's not us.

That's a, that's a cabinet secretary.

No, I understand.

I understand.

And by the way, by the way, the only people who were kept further away from Biden than the press were the members of the cabinet, but that's a separate subject, um, to these people, um, really believe that he was OK.

I think they believed this.

Did they convince themselves of that?

One, Joe Biden is the only person who has ever beaten Donald Trump.

2, Donald Trump is an existential threat to the country.

3, Joe Biden is the incumbent president, and he has decided he's going to run for re-election for All we have to do is get through election day and then we can figure it out after that.

Then it could be Weekend at Bernie's or, or then, yeah, who knows after that.

It was also in their self-interest to believe that, rightly demands before he goes over to the Biden campaign in 2024.

He demands that they pay him $4 million for that.

The, the campaign chair, the, the campaign manager, essentially, Jen O'Malley Dillon was paid 300,000 for, for, for running the campaign.

$4 million.

Biden says, Pam.

And they pay him $4 million so I don't know if people out there who donated to the Biden campaign knew that that's where some of their money was going, $4 million to McDonald's.

So you use the term, let's, let's go on to this.

The cover up.

Define cover up.

I think that the So the way that we define cover up is the Biden that was on that debate stage.

It was not the first time that that Joe Biden appeared, and over the course of the 9 months preceding it, you had an increasingly You know, hectic efforts to try to hide that, the extent of the decline from the American people, from reporters, from members of the Democratic Party from members of their own cabinet, literal hiding in a kind of way like he's not going to go do this, he's not gonna go do that.

And we're gonna, and, and we're not going to let him meet with these cabinet officials, and we're not going to let him meet with these White House staffers or we're not going to, or when he does uh uh a, an event with donors when he does a fundraiser, just 40 people, we're going to put a teleprompter in the back.

of the room so he can speak, uh, even though that's something that any politician should be able to do without a teleprompter that, that, uh, cover up is defined as hiding something bad.

That's what's happened.

We're not alleging criminality.

You're allowed to lie to the American people.

That's not a crime.

Politicians have been doing that since this country was founded.

Yeah