The new book on President Joe Biden by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson reveals that some Cabinet secretaries in the final two years of the administration lost access to the president, only being able to brief Biden's senior aides, who would then brief him.
The book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” is set to detail how certain people in the White House kept the former president on a tight leash.
“Access dropped off considerably in 2024, and I didn’t interact with him as much,” one secretary said, speculating that it was a ploy by Biden's inner circle to influence his decisionmaking as his health and capabilities deteriorated. “Yes, the president is ‘making the decisions,’ but if the inner circle is shaping them in such a way, is it really a decision? Are they leading him to something?”
Another secretary said, “I don’t think he has dementia. But the thing is, he’s an old man. The president can give you four to six good hours a day. When he got tired, sloppy isn’t the right word, but his guard was down.”
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According to the book, aides who previously had constant access to the president suddenly found themselves not seeing him for months, and some people commented that Biden “would occasionally be mumbling and not making much sense” in meetings.
A spokesman for Biden disputed the book's claims, telling CNN, “We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite — he was a very effective president.”
The book also goes into detail about the fateful fundraiser meeting that prompted Hollywood actor George Clooney, a lifelong friend of Biden, to pen the op-ed calling for his exit from the race; Clooney had apparently been deeply shaken as Biden kept forgetting who he was.