As Townhall has been covering, there's been plenty of books released on President Joe Biden's decline and the 2024 election, with one of them, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again" by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson coming out next Tuesday. The books findings were a major discussion point for Tuesday's episode of "CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip."
Phillip began the show by talking about Tapper and Thompson's new books, and how it supposedly "shed light on the events that eventually led to Biden dropping out of this race," though it's worth reminding that Tapper was one of those covering up for Biden. Those who pointed to the then president's decline as it was happening were gaslit by the Biden-Harris White House. Then White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre, as Scott Jennings would later remind during the panel discussion, even claimed that video evidence of what was going on with the president in real time amounted to "cheap fakes."
At one point during the segment, Phillip would reference a "Plan B" that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed to have, alongside other figures such as former President Barack Obama, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries "if things [went] south at the debate" between Biden and now President Donald Trump, which they indeed did. A piece from Tapper and Thompson in the New Yorker references Schumer's concerns not so much with "Biden's acuity," but "the optics."
Jennings was quick to chime in about that debate and how Schumer framed his concerns. "Did he mean goes south at the debate in that Joe Biden totally, you know, had a malfunction the way we saw, or did he mean just go south at the debate like he doesn't perform well?" he wondered. "The fact that he was only concerned about the optics and not about the fact that the president of the United States might be in cognitive decline, might be mentally impaired, to me, speaks volumes about the lack of character of Chuck Schumer," Jennings also added.
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Jennings didn't just go after Schumer, who has had a pitiful response about Biden's decline, but also how that decline was addressed in general, and not just when it comes to that June 27 debate on CNN last year.
"But the idea that we did not know about this for the years leading up to the presidential campaign, we all saw it with our own eyes, video after video, speech after speech statement after statement, the Hurr report, the fact that we had people saying today, 'oh, I didn't know, we had no idea, is outrageous.' That's number one. Number two, the cover-up is outrageous. And number three, people were arguing with a straight face that this man could serve four more years until, of course, it became untenable at the debate," Jennings continued.
As Jennings also praised the book as one with stories that "need to be told," he also brought up a frightening prospect to think on, about if Biden were still president today. "These stories need to be told because we've lived through the greatest scandal in modern American political history, the cover-up of the decline of the president, the argument that he can serve four more years, if he were in office today, if he had somehow won him were office day, you'd have the same people on TV today saying, 'he's fine, behind closed doors, he's fine, and you know it,'" he reminded.
Another co-panelist, Van Lathan, tried to make it about "extreme transparency" for candidates in general, but Jennings wasn't having the conversation go anywhere else but about the cover up of Biden.
"But it wasn't just deception about a campaign. The man was the sitting president of the United States," Jennings said about Biden. "There's more at stake here than just politics. There's in the moment decision-making. Was the country at risk? Who was making decisions on behalf of the country? Because obviously the president was impaired and there were people who knew it. There were people--those same people were lying about it publicly. And now the real question is who was making decisions behind the scenes? You can't just move past it," Jennings stressed, emphasizing that "it happened."
🚨 "The idea that we did not know about this for the years leading up to the presidential campaign — WE ALL SAW IT WITH OUR OWN EYES!"@ScottJenningsKY gets it. pic.twitter.com/0N8xkLdJo6
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) May 14, 2025
Later still in the segment, Phillip read a statement from a Biden spokesperson that laughably tried to claim that "evidence of aging is not evidence of mental incapacity" as part of a response to the book's allegations.
Jennings once more brought up the report from Robert Hurr, released in February of last year which revealed that when it comes to Biden's mishandling of classified materials, he would have been considered too old and sympathetic for a jury to convict.
"That's not true. The Hurr report, he had to testify. Robert Hurr wrote in a report, 'I can't even charge this man, because if I put him in front of a jury, they're going to say, oh, this is just a confused old man. We could never get a conviction.' We had official government evidence that he was in cognitive decline," Jennings reminded, going on to also emphasized how the Biden-Harris White House "smeared Robert Hurr." That same day that the report was released Biden also appeared for a rare news conference where he not only yelled at the press, but mixed up the presidents of Mexico and Egypt. Jennings has been drawing attention to the Hurr report since the day it was released.
While Phillip said she was "not disagreeing," Jennings still expected more from her. "Do you not feel lied to? Do you guys--the Democrats who ran your party, who ran the White House, the people who lied to you as a journalist, do you not feel any sense of outrage about Karine [Jean-Pierre] or anybody else in the White House?" Jennings demanded to know, sending the panel into explosive crosstalk.
Democrats are still asking, "How could we have possibly known about Biden's cognitive impairment?!"
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) May 14, 2025
I'm glad you asked.
I told you on-air in early 2024 the Hur Report was a "WARNING" about how bad it was & you chose to smear Hur instead of listen to him! Roll the tape 👇 pic.twitter.com/EDA8bB9Ah3
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