It’s Publication Day for the much-ballyhooed Original Sin, authored by Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, and with it, the requisite media tour. And what sounded like an honest admission byTapper on CBS Evening News Plus is really a searing indictment of the media’s conduct throughout the Biden years.
Watch as Tapper concedes to host John Dickerson that “conservative media was all over” the Biden decline story:
JAKE TAPPS OUT, ACKNOWLEDGES CONSERVATIVE MEDIA GOT BIDEN DECLINE RIGHT: "So, there were people reporting on what they saw. The conservative media was, to their credit, all over this. Now, they didn't have insider information, but they were just making sense of all the clips,… pic.twitter.com/furqYdRtBq
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) May 21, 2025
JOHN DICKERSON: Why wasn't this something that was reported about Joe Biden and this cognitive decline? Why wasn't this reported in real time? And obviously, people have criticized you in the book, have said, why didn't you report it in real time?
JAKE TAPPER: So, there were people reporting on what they saw. The conservative media was, to their credit, all over this. Now, they didn't have insider information, but they were just making sense of all the clips and all of the weird moments and off putting moments.
Tapper’s admission, while correct, is also years too late. Reasonable individuals may determine that this belated admission is either a face-saving move ahead of public release, or disingenuous appeasement ahead of public release. Either way what it really demonstrates is the rationale for why the American public lost trust in the media.
Conservatives, per Tapper’s admission, were right about Biden from the beginning because we relied on our eyes, ears, and common sense and reported what we saw. For that, we got called conspiracy theorists, disseminators of disinformation and spreaders of cheapfakes.
The legacy media, however, with all the contacts and all the resources, refused to do actual investigative journalism on what is arguably the worst political fraud perpetrated upon the American people.
If we’re being honest here, the “Original Sin” isn’t Team Biden’s prevarications in 2024, but the media’s willful omissions going as far back as the aftermath of the 2020 South Carolina primary.
Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned interview as aired on CBS Evening News Plus on Tuesday, March 21st, 2025:
JOHN DICKERSON: A new book by journalist Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson is shedding new light on the cognitive decline of President Biden. The book, original sin, depicts a years-long attempt by the president's family and close aides to shield the president's mental lapses from the public. And for tonight's interview, we are joined by CNN anchor and coauthor of the book, Jake Tapper. Jake, thanks for being here.
JAKE TAPPER: Thanks, John. Good to be here.
DICKERSON: The debate was the turning point. That's the hinge moment for you.
TAPPER: Well, it's the hinge moment for him and for the country. But what we all saw on stage that night was something else. It was somebody who was incoherent, who couldn't follow a train of thought. How did that person come to that stage that night? Because it wasn't an anomaly. It wasn't a cold. How did that happen? And that's what we tried to find out and figure out. And for people who are supportive of President Biden, I think it's important to understand that in some ways, A: you were lied to. And B: if you don't like President Trump, this is how we all got President Trump. This lie.
DICKERSON: “Lie” is a word that’s had- has had some complexity in our business over the last several years. When did you come to know it was a lie? And by “lie”, what do you mean?
TAPPER: I mean that they were saying things about his acuity that were not true, and that they were denying facts about the attempt to hide the degradation, the deterioration of his acuity that were just patently false. Alex Thompson, my coauthor, for example, when he when he was covering the fact that Biden's schedule was largely limited to 10 A.M. to 4 P.M., which he broke in the spring of 2023, the Biden team attacked it. They said it was false. They said it was fake news. It was not. It was true. It was 100% true. And throughout the election, and I'm sure you went through this, you call people Democrats, like, “what's going on? It doesn't look great”- before the debate. “I mean, he's fine, he's fine, he's fine. He's old, but he's fine.” He wasn't fine.
DICKERSON: Here's a statement from the Biden spokesperson about the book. “here 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. Nor do they show that our national security was threatened, or where the president wasn't otherwise engaged in important matters of the presidency. In fact, Joe Biden was an effective president who led our country with empathy and skill.”
TAPPER: Whether or not he's an effective president, that's for historians to decide. And obviously they think that and obviously some people disagree. And that's not really for me to weigh in on. That statement, by the way, was written before they got a copy of the book. I should note we do go into quite a lot of detail about the cover up in terms of the national security implications. We have two U.S. Senators in the book. As you know. One is senator Mark Warner, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has a very serious conversation with President Biden about 11 terrorists that the administration is about to release from Guantanamo Bay into Oman. And Warner thinks that President Biden doesn't understand the conversation. He doesn't- he's not up to speed, and it alarms him. It's not just he's not informed, it's something else. So I would disagree with their assessment that there were no actual implications about this addlement at all, which, by the way, they don't dispute that there was an addlement.
DICKERSON: Why wasn't this something that was reported about Joe Biden and this cognitive decline? Why wasn't this reported in real time? And obviously, people have criticized you in the book- have said, “why didn't you report it in real time?”
TAPPER: So, there were people reporting on what they saw. The conservative media was, to their credit, all over this. Now, they didn't have insider information, but they were just making sense of all the clips and all of the weird moments and off putting moments. But that said, Alex Thompson, who covered this heroically at Axios as White House correspondent, and I, when we got to work on this, we only were able to get this information after the election, after the Sword of Damocles had fallen and Donald Trump had won, and Democrats were like, “okay”- and were suddenly returning our emails, returning our texts, returning our calls, meeting us for drinks, because the threats, this existential threat that the Democrats perceived that was no longer a thing. And a lot of people regretted that they hadn't told the press sooner, and really were mad. Mad at the Bidens and mad at the Politburo. That inner circle.
DICKERSON: Jake Tapper, the book is “Original Sin”, coauthored with Alex Thompson. Thanks a lot, Jake.
TAPPER: So great to be here, John. Thank you.
