Former President Bill Clinton denied explosive new claims that President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline left him unable to run the country — and insisted he was “never” worried about the 82-year-old’s competence.
“I saw President Biden not very long ago, and I thought he was in good shape,” Clinton, 78, told CBS Sunday Morning when pressed about recent allegations in the book “Original Sin,” which claimed Biden’s mental faculties were so poor that a council of confidants had to run the White House by the end of his term.
“I had never seen him and walked away thinking, he can’t do this anymore,” Clinton said, insisting there was never a moment he doubted Biden’s mental state.
Clinton also said he didn’t read the Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson book, and dismissed its alarming claims from White House insiders, according to Mediaite.
“I didn’t want to because he’s not president anymore, and I think he did a good job,” Clinton said. “I think we are facing challenges today with our president in our history. Some people are trying to use this as a way to blame him for the fact that Trump was reelected.”
Clinton added that the only doubts he ever had about Biden were during his reelection campaign, when he wondered whether the 82-year-old would be able to keep up with the grueling demands of the job until his term ended at the age of 86.
“The only concern I thought he had to deal with was, could anybody do that job until they were 86?” Clinton said. “We’d had several long talks. He was always on top of his briefs.”
“Original Sin” was published in May with reports that a “politburo” of longtime Biden aides — and even family members like First Lady Jill Biden and the president’s son Hunter — were really running the country, while the president served as little more than a figurehead.
It also claimed Biden was largely incapable of maintaining his focus for extended periods of time, and that his administration actively worked to conceal his decline from the public even as he pursued a second term in the white house.
Biden ultimately dropped out of the presidential race in July after a disastrous and largely incoherent performance against Donald Trump during their presidential debate.
Allies of Biden have denied the allegations in “Original Sin,” insisting that its authors didn’t know what they were talking about.
“The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us, and they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day,” former first lady Jill Biden told “The View” earlier in May.
The book’s release coincided with the news that Biden had been diagnosed with an “aggressive” prostate cancer.
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