Eyes Wide Shut

The mendacity of the Biden coverup was matched if not exceeded by its stupidity

Better late than never: For behind the Resolute Desk, President Joe Biden delivers his farewell address to the nation on January 15, 2025

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The announcement that Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive and advanced form of prostate cancer was almost certainly timed to step all over today’s big political story: the publication of Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.

If the excerpts published so far are anything to go by, Original Sin will be a bombshell account of the greatest scandal in American history: the clandestine usurpation of presidential power by a cabal of White House staffers. That’s a story that the Biden family, the Democratic Party, progressives in general, and much of the media would prefer to shove down the memory hole.

Team Biden’s calculation seems to be that a wave of sympathy for the former president can claw back some high ground and shame critics into silence. How dare anyone mention the four-year coverup of Biden’s unfitness to serve as president? How dare anybody ask who was actually running the country? How dare anybody demand accountability for the lies and gaslighting that came out of the White House, to be echoed by the media? The man is dying! Have you no compassion?

Well, I have two words for anybody who’s shooting that line: Screw you.

The mendacity of Team Biden is matched if not exceeded by its stupidity. Was it not obvious that a suspiciously timed announcement about Biden’s terminal illness would add fuel to the flames of scandal? For consider: Prostate cancer is a malady that’s slow to develop and, in the case of a serving American president, must have been diagnosed long ago. Surely President Biden’s health was being closely monitored. Is it plausible, is it thinkable, that the medical professionals responsible for his care missed the diagnosis? No, it is not. The people around the President knew about it and chose to cover it up—just as they tried, none too successfully, to cover up his cognitive and general physical decline.

The list of people involved to a greater or lesser extent in this scandal is a long one and includes the names of a number of people here on Substack. Here, for example is an excerpt from Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” of February 9, 2024, which dealt with the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s final report on President Joe Biden’s mishandling handling of classified documents. After noting that Hur had decided against prosecuting the President, she turned up the gaslight:

But in Biden’s case, what followed the announcement that he had not broken a law was more than 300 pages of commentary, including assertions that Biden was old, infirm, and losing his marbles and even that “[h]e did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died” (p. 208).

As television host and former Republican representative from Florida Joe Scarborough put it: “He couldn’t indict Biden legally so he tried to indict Biden politically.”

Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their teams came out swinging against what amounted to a partisan hit job by a Republican special counsel. The president’s lawyers noted that it is not Department of Justice practice and protocol to criticize someone who is not going to be charged, and tore apart Hur’s nine references to Biden’s memory in contrast to his willingness to “accept…other witnesses’ memory loss as completely understandable given the passage of time.”

Professor Richardson was all on board with the campaign to discredit Robert Hur as a partisan hack, and to explain away the President’s troubling incoherence and lapses of memory as documented in the transcript. But actually, the hackery was all on the side of Professor Richardson and her ilk—as the newly released audio transcript of the Hur/Biden interview makes painfully clear. So where does Robert Hur go to collect the apology due to him? Not, I suppose, to the comments section of “Letters from an American.”

Then there was this, from Substack’s leading Nazi shouter, the inimitable Steve Schmidt, who had this to say about President Biden’s March 7, 2024, State of the Union Address:

President Biden’s State of the Union address focused on democracy, the economy, and the border. While he never mentioned former President Donald Trump by name, he repeatedly attacked his predecessor as a threat to American institutions. Biden even joked about his age, acknowledging concerns from those both within and outside of his party. I believe this fiery speech proves otherwise. The “incapable old man” narrative was obliterated in the speech tonight.

This can only be characterized as seeing what one wants to see—for on June 27, 2023, the “incapable old man narrative” was resoundingly confirmed.

There are degrees of culpability, however. Though Professor Richardson and Mr. Schmidt deserves criticism for their unseemly eagerness to toe the party line, they could not have known what was going on inside the White House. One might argue that they should have accepted the evidence of their eyes and ears, as a robust majority of their fellow Americans did, acknowledging that Joe Biden was indeed losing his marbles. Well, political passions do tend to trump common sense—pun premeditated.

But when it comes, for instance, to former White House press secretaries Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre, no such mitigating circumstances apply. When KJP informed the American people that her boss was just fine, that she could hardly keep up with President Energizer Bunny, she was lying—period. As for Psaki, she left the White House in 2022 and her line now is that while she was there, she really didn’t notice anything untoward. But the tale told in Original Sin compels the conclusion that Psaki too is probably lying.

All this is bad enough—and the revelation of Biden’s cancer diagnosis only makes things worse. It now seems likely that that the White House cabal responsible for covering up Biden’s cognitive and general physical decline also knew that he is terminally ill. Yet they covered that up as well—and did nothing to prevent him from running for reelection. A remedy, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, was available. But instead, his handlers propped Biden up in the front window, while behind the scenes they played games with the autopen.

Only with the disastrous Trump/Biden debate of June 27, 2024, did the bottom fall out of the tub. Only when Biden’s incapacity became undeniable was the coverup abandoned.

The media—much of it anyway—was all too willing to go along with what many journalists suspected to be a coverup. But no matter: White House assurances that the President was “fine, just fine” were uncritically accepted and repeated. The “cheap fake” charge—that audio and video evidence of the President’s incapacity was being manipulated to create a false impression—was seized upon by reporters and pundits who broadcast it far and wide. The grim, increasingly obvious, reality of Biden’s condition was scornfully dismissed as a conservative/GOP hit job. If the comically inept propagandists of MSNBC were the worst of the lot in that regard, there’s plenty of blame to go around in media circles, whose motto could well have been Eyes Wide Shut.

And by ignoring the biggest political scandal since Watergate if not ever, American journalism beclowned itself. It’s all very well for Jake Tapper set forth the facts now, but not so long ago he was part of the problem. (His co-author Alex Thompson did, however, report on the story—and was roundly denounced by many of his fellow journalists for that.)

On yesterday’s Commentary magazine podcast, John Podhoretz and the gang opined that the 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, whoever that is, will have to cut ties with anyone in the party who had anything to do with this scandal. Because really, after what happened, how can the American people be expected to believe a single thing that any of those people say? And how can any Democrat who tries to ignore or make excuses for what happened expect to enjoy the trust of the American people?