Jake Tapper Hits Back At Criticism Of Biden 'Cover-Up' Book: 'Lies From Bad Faith Actors'
CNN host Jake Tapper on Thursday slammed journalist Glenn Greenwald for attacking him for co-authoring anupcomingbook detailing a White House 'cover-up' of former President Joe Biden's reported health decline.
Greenwald — on Tuesday's episode of his Rumble show 'System Update' — claimed Tapper was a key member of the media who helped conceal Biden's deteriorating condition from the public, adding that he was 'demanding and insisting ... that nobody talk about Biden's cognitive decline.'
A representative for Tapper, in a statement to The Daily Beast on Thursday, scorched Greenwald for doing an 'entire segment based on false attacks that could've been fact-checked in seconds.'
'Lies from bad faith actors will keep coming for whatever reason but the truths of the book remain,' said the representative.
Tapper — who co-wrote 'Original Sin' with Axios' Alex Thompson, known for covering the circumstances that led to and followed Biden's train wreck debate performance — has facedfurther criticism from Fox News over the book. The two authors hired a crisis PR expert to navigate its release, per The Daily Beast.
Greenwald argued that pollsreflected how Americans 'overwhelmingly' believed Biden was in cognitive decline, was 'too old' to run again and wasn't fit for the Oval Office — claiming that the media were the only ones who pretended this wasn't the case.
Greenwald, elsewhere on his show, analyzed a supercut of Tapper weighing in on a Wall Street Journal article published weeks prior to Biden's June 2024 debate against Donald Trump. The newspaper reported at the time that Biden showed 'signs of slipping' behind 'closed doors.'
Greenwald — whose supercut shows Tapper noting that the WSJ is 'owned by News Corp. which is run by the Murdochs' — accused the CNN host of trying to 'disparage' the reporting and acting as if it was a 'partisan hit-job.'
But, as The Daily Beast noted, Tapper was referring to a then-White House spokesperson's possibly insinuating that the WSJ was 'taking orders' from the Murdochs.
Tapper, in separate remarks during a CNN appearance on Wednesday, noted that he believed 'some of the criticism' toward him is 'fair to be honest.'
'Knowing then what I know now, I look back at my coverage during the Biden years — and I did cover some of these issues, but not enough — I look back on it with humility,' he said.
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New York Post
7 minutes ago
- New York Post
Washington Post media critic admits failure in scrutinizing Biden coverage after ‘Where's Jackie' gaffe
Advertisement Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple reflected on his own 'failure' Monday in scrutinizing press coverage of Joe Biden and his cognitive decline, particularly after the infamous 'Where's Jackie?' gaffe. As the legacy media continues to face a reckoning over how it handled covering the former president's mental acuity before his disastrous 2024 debate performance, Wemple wrote a scathing piece calling out news organizations for not admitting any errors with the headline, 'Did legacy media fail in its Biden coverage? Not if you ask them!' In his lengthy critique, Wemple revisited an episode from a September 2022 event where Biden called for Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., who had died just weeks earlier in a car accident. Biden previously released a statement acknowledging her death after it happened and the event he attended similarly honored her memory. Advertisement 4 Erik Wemple wrote a scathing piece calling out the media's lack of self-reflection. Fox News 'Jackie, are you here? Where's Jackie?' Biden said in the viral moment. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended the president at the time, insisting Walorski was simply 'top of mind.' 'It's time to turn this exercise on my own byline,' Wemple wrote Monday. 'The 'Where's Jackie' episode was my cue to start hammering mainstream outlets for not pushing on this story. Never happened — that was a failure.' Wemple noted, as Fox News Digital did at the time, that neither CNN nor MSNBC offered any coverage of the 'Where's Jackie' comment. Advertisement 4 Former President Joe Biden speaks during the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, at the Ronald Reagan Building, Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022, in Washington. AP 4 Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., is seen before a House Ways and Means Committee markup in Longworth Building on July 12, 2018. CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag While acknowledging some in the press, like Axios' Alex Thompson and The Wall Street Journal's Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes for their pre-debate reporting that shed light on Biden's cognitive decline, Wemple knocked the media for broadly lacking the vigor to get to the bottom of it sooner. 'White House coverage must involve more than observing the president in action and writing up analysis pieces about his comings and goings,' Wemple wrote. Advertisement 'It needs to include a muckraking component detailing behind-the-scenes strategies, conflicts and debates over all manner of issues, particularly those relating to the president's mental acuity. An adjacent question relates to whether Biden himself was fully abreast of and in charge of day-to-day decisions.' 4 The Washington Post office in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, June 27, 2024. Bloomberg via Getty Images 'And it's on these fronts that major media organizations fell short: Though Biden's declining faculties were clear to all, they never ignited one of those glorious mainstream-media investigative frenzies that colonizes television and radio broadcasts,' he added. Thompson's 'Original Sin' co-author, CNN anchor Jake Tapper, said there should be 'soul-searching' in the legacy media for how Biden's clearly apparent issues were covered. 'Few souls are undergoing a pat-down,' Wemple wrote.
27 minutes ago
President Donald Trump pushes ahead with his maximalist immigration campaign in face of LA protests
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Trump said in September of that year that he 'can't call in the National Guard unless we're requested by a governor' and that 'we have to go by the laws.' But now, the past and current president is moving swiftly, with little internal restraint to test the bounds of his executive authority in order to deliver on his promise of mass deportations. What remains to be seen is whether Americans will stand by him once it's operationalized nationwide, as Trump looks to secure billions from Congress to dramatically expand the country's detention and deportation operations. For now, Trump is betting that they will. 'If we didn't do the job, that place would be burning down," Trump told reporters Monday, speaking about California. 'I feel we had no choice. ... I don't want to see what happened so many times in this country.' The protests began to unfold Friday as federal authorities arrested immigrants in several locations throughout the sprawling city, including in the fashion district of Los Angeles and at a Home Depot. The anger over the administration's actions quickly spread, with protests in Chicago and Boston as demonstrations in the southern California city also continued Monday. But Trump and other administration officials remained unbowed, capitalizing on the images of burning cars, graffiti and Mexican flags — which, while not dominant, started to become the defining images of the unrest — to bolster their law-and-order cause. Leaders in the country's most populous state were similarly defiant. California officials sued the Trump administration Monday, with the state's attorney general, Rob Bonta, arguing that the deployment of troops 'trampled' on the state's sovereignty and pushing for a restraining order. The initial deployment of 300 National Guard troops was expected to quickly expand to the full 4,000 that has been authorized by Trump. The state's senior Democratic senator, Alex Padilla, said in an interview that 'this is absolutely a crisis of Trump's own making.' 'There are a lot of people who are passionate about speaking up for fundamental rights and respecting due process, but the deployment of National Guard only serves to escalate tensions and the situation,' Padilla told The Associated Press. 'It's exactly what Donald Trump wanted to do.' Padilla slammed the deployment as 'counterproductive' and said the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department was not advised ahead of the federalization of the National Guard. His office has also pushed the Pentagon for a justification on the deployment, and 'as far as we're told, the Department of Defense isn't sure what the mission is here," Padilla added. Much of this was predictable. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump pledged to conduct the largest domestic deportation operation in American history to expel millions of immigrants in the country without legal status. He often praised President Dwight D. Eisenhower's military-style immigration raids, and the candidate and his advisers suggested they would have broad power to deploy troops domestically to enact Trump's far-reaching immigration and public safety goals. Trump's speedy deployment in California of troops against those whom the president has alluded to as 'insurrectionists' on social media is a sharp contrast to his decision to issue no order or formal request for National Guard troops during the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, despite his repeated and false assertions that he had made such an offer. Trump is now surrounded by officials who have no interest in constraining his power. In 2020, Trump's then-Pentagon chief publicly rebuked Trump's threat to send in troops using the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that empowers the president to use the military within the U.S. and against American citizens. Current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signaled support on his personal X account for deploying troops to California, writing, 'The National Guard, and Marines if need be, stand with ICE,' referring to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The Defense Department said Monday it is deploying about 700 active-duty Marines to Los Angeles to support National Guard troops already on the ground to respond to the protests. Protesters over the weekend blocked off a major freeway and burned self-driving cars as police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades in clashes that encompassed several downtown blocks in Los Angeles and led to several dozen arrests. Much of the city saw no violence. But the protests prompted Trump to issue the directive Saturday mobilizing the California National Guard over Newsom's objections. The president and his top immigration aides accused the governor of mismanaging the protests, with border czar Tom Homan asserting in a Fox News interview Monday that Newsom stoked anti-ICE sentiments and waited two days to declare unlawful assembly in the city. Trump told Newsom in a phone call Friday evening to get the situation in Los Angeles under control, a White House official said. It was only when the administration felt Newsom was not restoring order in the city — and after Trump watched the situation escalate for 24 hours and White House officials saw imagery of federal law enforcement officers with lacerations and other injuries — that the president moved to deploy the Guard, according to the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations. 'He's an incompetent governor,' Trump said Monday. 'Look at the job he's doing in California. He's destroying one of our great states.' Local law enforcement officials said Los Angeles police responded as quickly as they could once the protests erupted, and Newsom repeatedly asserted that state and city authorities had the situation under control. 'Los Angeles is no stranger to demonstrations and protests and rallies and marches,' Padilla said. 'Local law enforcement knows how to handle this and has a rapport with the community and community leaders to be able to allow for that.' The aggressive moves prompted blowback from some of Trump's erstwhile allies. Ileana Garcia, a Florida state senator who in 2016 founded the group Latinas for Trump and was hired to direct Latino outreach, called the recent escalation 'unacceptable and inhumane.' 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Yahoo
42 minutes ago
- Yahoo
US business group says Washington should treat Taiwan like partner not adversary
TAIPEI (Reuters) -The United States should treat Taiwan like a partner and not an adversary, remove new and proposed tariffs, restore high-level cabinet visits and agree a double taxation deal, the American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan said on Tuesday. Taiwan, which China views as its own territory, enjoyed strong support from U.S. President Donald Trump's first administration, which regularized arms sales that President Joe Biden continued. But Trump, as part of his sweeping tariffs on countries around the world, in April said he would put a 32% tariff on Taiwan, before pausing them for 90 days. Taiwan and the United States are still in talks to resolve the issue. AmCham Taiwan President Carl Wegner, releasing the group's 2025 White Paper, said he would be leading a delegation to Washington later this month to have "door knock" talks with officials on concerns about the tariffs and how to boost Taiwan-U.S. business ties. "Taiwan is a reliable friend of the United States, an essential democratic partner in the Indo Pacific, a major investor in American industry and a critical contributor to supply chain resilience," he told reporters in Taipei. Trade measures that were initially designed to address unfair practices by strategic competitors like China are now being targeted at friends like Taiwan, Wegner said. "It is in America's interests to ensure Taiwan is treated like a partner, not like an adversary." The White Paper said an agreement to avoid double taxation, currently stalled in the U.S. Senate, should urgently be resolved to remove investment barriers, while high-level visits by U.S. cabinet members should resume. Neither Taiwan nor the United States have provided substantive public updates on the tariff talks. The U.S. Department of Commerce did not respond to requests for comment sent outside of Washington office hours. Sign in to access your portfolio
