Now that the coast is (largely) clear, the liberal media and their Biden administration sources have increasingly come out of the woodwork to sound off on the President’s reportedly paper-thin mental fitness to have fully served the last four years.
With 50 sources, Thursday’s Wall Street Journal item was devastating, but of no concern to ABC, CBS, and NBC on their flagship newscasts Thursday night and Friday morning.
The four-byline story’s headline and subhead spoke volumes: “How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge; Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.”
Whether it was his early 2023 interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur, the 2021 collapse of Afghanistan, or even the 2020 presidential campaign, The Journal piece revealed entire cabinet agencies were run with little direct input from the President and major decisions were done when explained in elementary detail to him or done on one of his “good days.”
On Friday’s Fox & Friends, The Journal article came up 15 minutes into the show with co-host Brian Kilmeade calling it an “explosive report” with senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy summarizing the 3,600-word story.
Peter had to have felt at least some validation as he recalled early 2021 when President Biden “was walled off” for what Americans had been told was to avoid Covid exposure, “but then he stayed walled off.”
He then read one devastating passage:
[I]t comes with this quote: “If the President was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped all together. On one such occasion in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. ‘He has good days and bad days and today was a bad day, so we’re going to address this tomorrow,’ the former aide recalled the official saying.” The President showed natural signs of aging but key allies always stuck their necks out to say no big deal.
Doocy reminded viewers he “had a front row seat to a lot of this and at various times was basically told not to believe what I was seeing or hearing” and instead buy the excuses of Biden misspeaking or having “a cold.”
Kilmeade replied by pointing out this wasn’t the first bombshell Journal article about Biden’s health with one having come months earlier (on June 4) to serve as a “dip[ping] their toe in the water on this very topic and they got blasted.”
He then added:
You’ve gotten blasted when you’ve questioned the President’s acuity...[T]hey talk about “interaction between Biden and many of his cabinet members were infrequent, often tightly scripted. One cabinet member stopped requesting calls with the President because it was clear that such a request wouldn’t be welcome”...Adam Smith, who is chairman of Armed services, tried to tell the President how bad Afghanistan could turn out, he couldn’t get to him. This is cataclysmic.
Doocy stated the obvious that the stories in the article have “raise[d] a lot of questions about who was making key decisions — you mentioned the Afghanistan withdrawal” and, if the claims are true, that’s “a huge problem and it could explain why certain decisions were made that turned out to be catastrophic and why no apologies ever paid.”
The Fox correspondent passed along a stunning finding from the article about cabinet meetings and also explained how things he had heard about Biden’s mental incapacitation were only second-hand (and thus not something able to be reported with certainty) (click “expand”):
PETER DOOCY: [W]hen the cabinet met all nine times, which is the least in the last several decades that a president has had their whole cabinet together in an entire term, there was a different item a few months ago where cabinet secretaries were being asked to submit their questions for the President behind closed doors in advance and they were being told to keep it quick because the way it worked they would ask a question pre-screened and the President would have a card with the answer even in a closed setting. And I hear a lot of the complaints and there was a bite in the open — why wasn’t there more coverage of the president’s age and acuity earlier? Well, a lot of the stories that you hear —
STEVE DOOCY: You kept asking.
PETER DOOCY: — I — I kept asking the whole time. And a lot of the stories that we would hear that we would try to report out are second hand. But it’s a lot of stuff like “oh,” — you would hear from somebody on the staff or somebody that works at the White House — “it looked like the President was falling asleep somewhere.” Okay. Hard to confirm that but we have tape of him falling asleep —
KILMEADE: Yes, yes, right.
PETER DOOCY: — at events as recently as his most recent foreign trip.
Before shifting topics, co-host Lawrence Jones blasted the irony of the D.C. “talking about the Republican Party right now and who’s debating this bill and Elon Musk,” but the real question should be “who is running the country right now?”
For her part, co-host Ainsley Earhardt wondered how the Abbey Gate families must feel hearing that, even in those moments of crisis, Biden was distant.
Kilmeade wrapped it up:
I think that this disqualifies Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, KJP — they all lied to us. They told us he was fine. Campaigned to get him another four years until he fell apart in June. And they hid this from the country...And Jill! And she was the most complicit.
Instead, the networks had other priorities such as NBC Nightly News advocating for a requirement to have guns include a magazine disconnect mechanism, nearly seven minutes (6:56) on Friday’s CBS Mornings celebrating co-host Gayle King’s birthday, and two minutes on ABC’s Good Morning America reminding those traveling this holiday season that airport parking is a disaster.
To see the relevant Fox News Channel transcript from December 20, click here.
