CNN anchor Jake Tapper hit back at journalist Glenn Greenwald for claiming Tapper helped cover up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.
Greenwald—the journalist who exposed government spying during the George W. Bush administration—assailed Tapper on his Tuesday podcast as hypocritical over the promotion of his new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.
Greenwald said Tapper was “one of the primary people in the media, not just covering it up and denying it, but aggressively attacking and maligning the character of anyone who was raising this.”
A representative for Tapper rebuked Greenwald’s claims in a statement to The Daily Beast on Thursday.
“Glenn Greenwald did an entire segment based on false attacks that could’ve been fact-checked in seconds,” the representative said.
Greenwald further called the promotion of the book a “brazenly fraudulent scam“ on X after Tapper heralded on Wednesday two Wall Street Journal reporters for a June 2024 report titled “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.”
Greenwald compiled a supercut of Tapper commenting on the Journal report from June last year and interviews he did with Democratic lawmakers about Biden’s health.
“I didn’t know human beings were capable of the level of audacity and fraud that drives Jake Tapper’s book tour: pretending he’s the angry victim of the WH which prevented him from knowing about Biden’s cognitive decline,” Greenwald wrote on X.
A representative for Tapper said the clip was deceptively edited.
“He spliced up a video that took what Jake said about Biden White House attacks on WSJ reporting completely out of context, then misled about the timeline of the reporting of the book,” the representative said. “Lies from bad faith actors will keep coming for whatever reason but the truths of the book remain.”
Greenwald did not respond to an immediate request for comment. CNN also did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
The clip Greenwald shared featured Tapper derisively referring to the Journal as “owned by News Corp., which is run by the Murdochs,” claiming Tapper was “trying to act as if The Wall Street Journal‘s reporting was the partisan hit-job.“
However, Tapper had referenced a statement made by then-White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt, who speculated whether the Journal reporters were “taking orders from” a boss.
“Maybe that’s an insinuation because The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp., which is run by the Murdochs,” Tapper said in the full CNN segment in June last year.
News Corp. is run by Lachlan Murdoch, the son of conservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, though the news side of the Journal operates independently.
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