Chris Cuomo says Jake Tapper’s ‘Original Sin’ book is itself a cover-up for something ‘much more serious’

NewsNation host Chris Cuomo said Tuesday that CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson’s new book “Original Sin” is a cover-up of the media’s political bias in favor of President Joe Biden over former President Donald Trump.

The book claims that Biden’s inner circle concealed the former president’s decline, hindering the media’s ability to cover it. But Cuomo argued on “CUOMO” that Biden’s decline was evident, and the media’s reluctance to report on it was not due to ignorance, but its desire for Biden to defeat Trump.

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“When it comes to Biden, you know how I feel. You didn’t see and hear his obvious diminished capacity? What we mentioned here at NewsNation all the time. This is a shocker? And now the narrative gets a nudge from a book that is about deception and a cover-up. They want you to believe the media was deceived into thinking Biden had no issues,” Cuomo said. “Don’t count me in on that. I knew, okay? And it was no secret, because you knew too. The book is titled ‘Original Sin,’ claiming to detail how Biden staffers made efforts to hide his decline from the public and the media. The cover has Biden with his hands over his eyes, and it could just as easily be a picture of the writers of this book, who are pretending they didn’t see and hear what everybody else did. ”

“And look, I do believe the book is a cover for something. It’s a cover for something that’s much more serious to me than Biden’s age and stage ever were: the reality that many in the media knew damn well that Biden was losing it, but they played it down because they wanted Trump to lose more,” he continued. “The original sin is not hiding Biden’s age and stage, but hiding this preference.”

Corporate media spent years attempting to dismiss Biden’s decline ahead of his catastrophic June debate against Trump, despite voters and Republicans raising doubts about it as far back as his 2020 campaign.

Moreover, special counsel Robert Hur released a February 2024 report concluding Biden had mismanaged classified documents, but declined to bring charges against the then-president. Hur cited the difficulty of convincing a jury, given that Biden might be seen as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

In response, corporate media outlets defended Biden’s lucidity and attacked the special counsel as deceptive and partisan, despite the published transcript of their interview revealing memory lapses, including forgetting when he served as vice president and the date of his son Beau’s death.

When several clips of Biden in June amassed attention for highlighting the former president’s diminished fitness ahead of the debate, the White House characterized the videos as “cheap fakes,” with the media picking up on the narrative.

The coverage of Biden’s competence should have been more intense, some reporters who covered the White House told CNN anonymously in a July piece.

Tapper himself has acknowledged that he did not report on Biden’s decline sufficiently and that he reflected on his reporting “with humility” in interviews promoting the book.

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