Latest news with #RonKlain
Daily Mail
5 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
How Hollywood hotshot was real whistleblower in Biden coverup...as his 'Rahm-bo' brother teases White House run
Rahm Emanuel is positioning himself as the future of the Democratic Party. President Barack Obama 's former chief of staff, who was also Joe Biden 's ambassador to Japan, and the mayor of Chicago, has been teasing a presidential bid as of late, while blasting his party as 'woke and weak.' The 65-year-old plans to head to Iowa - traditionally the first state that votes - in September for a fish fry and sat down for an interview this week with The Wall Street Journal. But it was a different Emanuel brother who shouted warnings to party elders during the last election cycle. In Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's blockbuster new book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, it is revealed that Rahm's hotshot Hollywood super-agent brother Ari Emanuel screamed at former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain over Biden's condition. It was late September 2023, five months after Biden announced he would run for reelection, and Ari Emanuel had invited members of the president's team to his annual 'Power Players' retreat. 'For months now, Ari Emanuel - CEO of Endeavor, a talent and entertainment company, and a major Democratic donor - hadn't been able to believe what he was watching,' the authors wrote. 'President Joe Biden was quite obviously deteriorating before the nation's eyes, and Democrats seemed to be in complete denial about it,' they continued. 'Emanuel would call governors and encourage them to run. He would talk to his brother, Rahm, a former Obama chief of staff and then an ambassador to Japan. He would with anyone who would listen,' Tapper and Thompson added. Ari Emanuel turned up the volume at the Power Players retreat - yelling his concerns at Klain from the back of the room. 'Joe Biden cannot run for reelection! He needs to drop out! He can't win! What's the plan B?' Tapper and Thompson described. 'Emanuel was flat-out yelling at Klain.' Klain pushed back telling Ari Emanuel that there 'was no plan B' and that Biden, as the sitting president of the United States, got to decide. He added that Biden had already beaten former President Donald Trump, the far-and-away-frontrunner on the GOP side, once. Ari Emanuel was 'incensed,' the authors wrote. 'What the f*** are we doing?' the Hollywood super-agent was described as saying. 'The first party to put a younger candidate before the voters, if we give him enough time, we can win.' He also knew Trump well, having served as the now-president's agent for almost a decade. 'It was wild,' attendee Michael Kives told Tapper and Thompson. 'A public yelling match between them.' Kives recalled that the event was typically a 'civilized affair,' in the years before. 'Eventually, Emanuel came to believe they were all lying about Biden's health. "We're seeing it!" he would shout. "It's called age! It happens!"' the book continued. 'Everyone around the president - worst of all, Jill - was lying, Emanuel would say.' 'Jill and Hunter and Jeffrey Katzenberg and Ron f***ing Klain. And the president had lied, too, when he said he would be a bridge,' Emanuel's gripes continued. In an interview with Red Letter's Tara Palmeri last month, Rahm Emanuel said he warned Democrats about Biden's chances of success in a reelection fight but was cagey on details. 'I can't give you the hour and the day that I said it, but I expressed myself,' he said. 'A year in, two years in, was not the timeframe. I don't have the exact date and I'm not going to sit here and guess it but I expressed myself to individuals that were important.' 'I let people know that could have an an influence on that decision,' he continued, refusing to divulge much more. 'I don't try to expose private conversations.' In his Wall Street Journal this week, Rahm Emanuel positioned himself as a Democrat who could take the wheel of the party next. 'I'm tired of sitting in the back seat when somebody's gunning it at 90 miles an hour for a cliff,' he said. He criticized his longtime party as being 'toxic' as well as ' woke and weak.' 'If you want the country to give you the keys to the car, somebody's got to be articulating an agenda that's fighting for America, not just fighting Trump,' he continued. 'The American dream has become unaffordable. It's inaccessible. And that has to be unacceptable to us.'
Fox News
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
'Original Sin' co-author exposes 'frantic efforts' to hide Biden's cognitive decline
Members of former President Joe Biden's inner circle "weren't telling the truth" when describing him as "sharp," "focused" and "detail-oriented," Axios national political correspondent Alex Thompson said Sunday — adding that the media fell short in challenging the narrative. The co-author of the new book "Original Sin," which details what many view as a calculated, years-long effort to conceal the former president's decline in the run-up to the 2024 election, joined "Fox News Sunday" to shed light on the inner workings of the Biden White House. "They weren't telling the truth, and I think the book really conclusively shows what was going on behind the scenes," he said, weighing in on a series of statements from top Biden officials — including then-Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas, former press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and former Chief of Staff Ron Klain — who, at various times, portrayed Biden as intellectually sharp and fully in control. Jean-Pierre even dismissed "right-wing critics" by blaming "cheap fake" videos and selectively edited media. But, according to Thompson, the reality behind closed doors told a different story. "Throughout 2023 and 2024, there were steps taken to increasingly shield Joe Biden — not just from the public, but from members of his own cabinet, members of his own senior staff," he said. "One White House official who left in 2024 told us that they left in part because they were not comfortable with how they were trying to shield the extent of the decline." Thompson said Biden's condition became harder to conceal as time went on, and the now infamous debate performance against then-candidate Donald Trump in June 2024 shattered any remaining illusions. "The Joe Biden that people saw on that debate stage… I think the book really shows it was not the first time that Joe Biden had acted like that. You can also listen to the tapes from the Robert Hur investigation. I think you can sort of hear 'debate Biden,' and there were increasingly frantic efforts to make sure that the public did not see 'debate Biden' while the public did see that he was aging," he continued. Thompson said Biden's debate performance was likely a "shock" to millions of Americans who finally saw the "extent" of the News Digital has written extensively dating back to the 2020 presidential campaign about former President Joe Biden's cognitive decline and his inner circle's role in covering it up.
Fox News
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Biden's chief of staff scolded Obama campaign architect for calling Biden's age an issue, book reveals
Former President Joe Biden's decision to run for re-election divided longtime Democratic advisors, a new book about Biden's cognitive decline and his administration's alleged cover-up revealed. Biden's former Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, shut down former President Barack Obama advisor David Axelrod for repeatedly calling Biden's age an issue. "The presidency is a monstrously taxing job and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue," Axelrod told The New York Times. Soon after the Times' story was published in June 2022, Klain called Axelrod fuming, CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios political correspondent Alex Thompson revealed in their book, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again." "Who's going to beat Trump? President Biden is the only one who has done it. You better have a lot of certainty about a different candidate before you say the president should step aside. The future of the country depends on it!" Klain told Axelrod on the phone, according to Thompson and Tapper. Klain believed it was "sloppy thinking" that anyone other than Biden could beat Trump, the journalists said in the book. But Axelrod, like most Americans, worried about the first octogenarian president's age and his ability to serve four more years. The chief strategist for Obama's back-to-back winning campaigns, Axelrod was one of the last advisers to meet with Biden before Obama chose him as his running mate in 2008. Axelrod told Tapper and Thompson that they didn't expect Biden to run for president at 73 and eventually discouraged Biden from running for president in 2015. They certainly didn't expect Biden to run for president at 77. After Axelrod made some friendly comments about Biden to a reporter in 2018, Biden invited him to his rental home in Virginia, according to the book. "He was stunned by how much Biden had aged," Tapper and Thompson wrote. Axelrod told Biden that age would be an issue for his campaign but encouraged him to lean on his experience and wisdom, the journalists said. Axelrod's apprehension about Biden's age only grew, and when it came time for Biden to make a decision about his re-election, he knew Biden shouldn't run in 2024. The longtime political advisor told Tapper and Thompson he wished someone in the White House had "come to their senses and [convinced] Biden and his family that this just wasn't tenable." Pointing to unfavorable battleground polls from 2023, Axelrod encouraged Biden to drop out of the race in a series of social media posts. He said the "stakes of miscalculation here are too dramatic to ignore." "Only @JoeBiden can make this decision. If he continues to run, he will be the nominee of the Democratic Party. What he needs to decide is whether that is wise; whether it's in HIS best interest or the country's?" Axelrod questioned on social media. Klain fired back, this time for the public to see: "Man who called Biden 'Mr Magoo' in Aug 2019 is still at it," in reference to Axelrod's comments following the 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate. An excerpt from the book reads: "In response to Axelrod's 2023 post, Biden called Axelrod a 'prick' – a private insult until someone leaked it to Jonathan Martin of Politico. Axelrod received confidential messages of agreement from prominent Democrats who remained silent, they explained, because they were resigned to Biden's candidacy and did not want to weaken him as a looming rematch with Trump approached." Fox News Digital has written extensively, dating back to the 2020 presidential campaign, about Biden's cognitive decline and his inner circle's role in covering it up. "There is nothing in this book that shows Joe Biden failed to do his job, as the authors have alleged, nor did they prove their allegation that there was a cover-up or conspiracy," a Biden spokesperson told Fox News Digital. "Nowhere do they show that our national security was threatened or where the president wasn't otherwise engaged in the important matters of the presidency. In fact, Joe Biden was an effective president who led our country with empathy and skill."
The Independent
20-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Biden's White House chief of staff made all the ‘big decisions,' was nicknamed ‘Prime Minister': book
Former President Joe Biden 's White House chief of staff was referred to as 'the Prime Minister' in the administration because he was the one making the 'big decisions,' according to a bombshell book. Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios share damning revelations about the alleged cover up of Biden's mental and physical decline in the book Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, out today. Ron Klain, who served as Biden's chief of staff from the start of his term until February 2023, was thought of as having 'Prime Minister' status by people inside the administration because the president was so 'limited', according to Thompson. Speaking to TIME, Thompson was asked about insiders referring 'to Ron Klain as the Prime Minister.' 'When you have a President whose energy is limited, whose time is limited, whose bandwidth is limited, then a lot of decision making filters down,' Thompson responded. 'And there were big decisions being made that people who had served in previous administrations and were surprised that Joe Biden was not involved in.' Thompson added that one Cabinet member, who is not identified, told the authors: 'The President is making the decisions, but if you present the decisions in a certain way, often it's not really a decision.' Klain was 'disappointed' in Biden's lack of preparation for the disastrous debate against Donald Trump on June 27. 'He'd been assured that Biden had been reviewing his prep materials before he arrived at Camp David, but he hadn't,' the authors write. In another book on Biden's decline released last month by reporter Chris Whipple, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, Klain was said to be 'startled' by the president's demeanor during debate prep at Camp David. 'He'd never seen him so exhausted and out of it,' The Guardian reported. 'Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.' 'The president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged,' Whipple writes in the book. 'Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.' Klain later told Politico that the 'framing' of his comments in the report was 'wrong.' Despite his previous remarks about the former president, responding to Thompson and Tapper's latest book, Klain said that he still believed that Biden should not have dropped out of the race. 'We are all in decline. But the president was mentally sharp and capable of serving,' Klain told The Guardian. 'I think his press conference after the Nato meeting in July proved that.' The book's release comes just two days after Biden revealed he has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. In response to claims made in the book, Biden's spokesperson Chris Meagher said that his team was 'still waiting for someone, anyone, to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline.' 'In fact, the evidence points to the opposite — he was a very effective president,' Meagher added.
