Tuesday on her podcast, host Megyn Kelly interviewed CNN host and author Jake Tapper over his network’s coverage of the Biden presidency on the heels of the release of his book “Original Sin.”
Partial transcript as follows:
KELLY: Jake, the criticism has been that you’re complaining about a cover-up about Joe Biden’s mental acuity that failed that right wing pundits saw,
TAPPER: Knowing what I know now, obviously, I feel tremendous humility about my coverage. That Lara Trump interview, for example
KELLY: We’ll get to that.
TAPPER: She saw some — she saw something that I did not see at the time. 100 percent. And I own that. I did ask Joe Biden to be transparent about his health records in an interview in 2020. I did ask him about the fact that voters thought that he —
KELLY: But then he wasn’t.
TAPPER: He was not transparent at all. No.
KELLY: He promised you that he would be transparent about his health records, and then he wasn’t and when you sat with him again —
TAPPER: At all.
KELLY: — including one month — including one month after the Jackie Walorski thing, you didn’t ask him about it. You didn’t follow up on the fact that he was falling up the stairs, that he was losing his train of thought regularly, that he was slurring, that he was incomprehensible, that he was getting lost in the White House lawn. You sat right across from him and you asked none of that, notwithstanding the fact that he had promised you he would be fully transparent about his health issues.
TAPPER: That’s true, but I did ask him about his age and the fact that the American people had concluded that even though he said whenever anybody brought up the subject of his age, watch me, and I said —
KELLY: Yes.
TAPPER: — they’re watching you and they are concerned —
KELLY: You did.
TAPPER: — that you are too old for this job.
KELLY: But you know as well as I do that there’s a way of, you can say, hey, there’s this poll on your age, or you could say, you just forgot that Jacki Walorski was dead. You asked where she was moments after watching a videotape tribute to her. You lowered the flags at the White House after she died. This happened 13 days before you sat with him. There is a way of pressing a man like that on the actual infirmities to bring it home to him and to the audience, and you didn’t do it.
TAPPER: That’s correct, I didn’t. And like I said, I feel humility about my coverage. I mean, it’s not like I was asking him his favorite movie or his favorite color. We were talking about Putin. We were talking about other issues of national importance. But yeah, I mean, of course, I’ve said I look back at my coverage with humility and, and, I wish I did cover the issues of age and acuity, but I wish I had covered them much more.
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