CNN's Jake Tapper pressed on 'withering criticism' by his own network

CNN's Jake Tapper was confronted by fellow network anchor Erin Burnett during a joint interview with Axios' Alex Thompson on their new book detailing explosive allegations about Joe Biden's administration's attempt to conceal his cognitive decline — and specifically, the uproar it has caused.

"So it's an incredibly reported book you have, and I don't know if you expected this. Maybe you did a little bit, but maybe not to the extreme that it has occurred," said Burnett. "You have come under withering criticism ... so President Biden's granddaughter, Naomi, she kind of — I think this summarizes a bit. She says the book 'relies on unnamed anonymous sources pushing a self-serving, false narrative that absolves them of any responsibility for our current national nightmare ... there are real stories to be told. One day they will be, I suspect history will reward the truth.'"

"You know, there are some saying you're doing this to make money, others saying history respects the truth," said Burnett. "I hope so, but I want to give you a chance because you're both Washington insiders in the sense you live there, you know it. And there are people who say, come on, Jake Tapper, you had to have known. What do you say to them?"

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"I say that I knew what we all knew, which was I saw him deteriorating in front of the cameras, like in the stuff that was public. But I didn't know anything more than that," said Tapper. "I knew that he was okay in the interview I did in 2020, and old, but still with it in the interview I did in 2022."

However, he continued, "I didn't know about all these horrible moments. The reason why the debate was so shocking is because that was a president who is nonfunctioning, not a president who had a gaffe, not a president who tripped on the stairs, a president who is nonfunctioning and was basically nonfunctioning for 90 minutes, to different degrees. So I think that is why it's so shocking. And I think the reason why there's such interest in this book is because people want to know what really happened."

"As for Naomi, we know, and we report in the book that the Biden family is very close and they stick together. And I don't — I don't begrudge her standing up for her dad and her grandfather," Tapper added. "But I will say we stand by our book, and we do hope that history does reward the truth."

Tapper is not only catching fury from Biden's supporters and family, but also from Trump supporters who insist he was in on some sort of cover-up and had this information embargoed for years. The backlash has been so white-hot that Amazon was forced to restrict reviews of the book to verified purchasers to prevent a flood of personal attacks.

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