GLENN GREENWALD: Like, we had no idea. None of us knew. I mean, there was that debate and we were all shocked, but we were told he had a cold. So it was like, okay, he's on some cold medication—who hasn't been there before? Makes you a little groggy, a little just, like, dragged.

But no, now Jake Tapper has uncovered the truth. Turns out Joe Biden was in cognitive decline. Did you know that?

TUCKER CARLSON: What! How did he find out?

GLENN GREENWALD: Just hardcore shoe-leather investigating. Just working his sources. Calling all the people in Washington, digging up FOIA documents.

It's one of those things where you kind of can't believe what you're witnessing, because Jake Tapper is pretending to have uncovered a scandal that he himself led the way in the media—or was one of the leaders in the media—in covering up. To the point where, if somebody went on his show and said, "Joe Biden's obviously in cognitive decline, he can't get a sentence out," he would say, "How dare you bully kids who stutter."

Like, are you at all ashamed of what you're doing? That's what he told Lara Trump when she was like, "Yeah, I just—I feel bad for Joe Biden. I wish he could get a sentence out." And he's like, "Do you ever think about what you're doing to kids who stutter and the kind of world you're creating for them?" And she's like, "What? I've been watching him for decades. I never even knew Joe Biden had a stutter."

He told Lara Trump that. She was at an event, and she—it was a very, like, benign remark. She was just saying, "Yeah, you watch Joe Biden..." 'Cause we've talked about this before. When I was on your show—it wasn't even when he was president. It was in the run-up to the 2020 campaign, and we were talking about this. Everybody I know did. No one takes joy in it. We've all had that experience of watching an older person in our family go through cognitive decline. It's actually quite sad.

So the way she was saying it was like, "Yeah, you know, honestly, as a human being, I watch Joe Biden and he's in the middle of a sentence that he can't finish. I'm like, 'Come on Joe, get that out.'" And then when she went on Jake Tapper's show, he played that tape and he said, "Do you understand the world of bullying that you're creating for kids who stutter?"

And she was like, "What? I'm bullying stuttering kids?" Yeah. And she's like, "I didn't even know he had a stutter." And he said, "We all know he has a stutter. And I know that you are mocking his stutter."

This was not just a person who didn’t speak about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, who’s now uncovering this shocking truth that 85% of the public has known for years, according to polls.

I heard him this week saying he was one of the very few people—because he was asked, "Why didn’t people in the Democratic Party speak up and say this, since they all knew it?"

And he said, "Well, Dean Phillips tried, and he got mauled and maligned, and his character was attacked by the Democratic Party." I was like, by the Democratic Party? Go watch what happened when Dean Phillips went on Jake Tapper’s show and said that one of the reasons he was running for president was he was concerned about Joe Biden’s age and infirmities and how he couldn’t win and couldn’t govern.

And Jake Tapper said to him, "Do you know that your Democratic colleagues despise you? And they’ve been telling me the worst possible things." That’s what he did to everybody who went on his show and said, “Hey, I think Joe Biden’s in cognitive decline.” He wanted Biden to win desperately and would not tolerate anyone going on the show and saying otherwise.

And now he’s making millions of dollars off a book. The only good thing is that his credibility is so in tatters from it that he had to hire a PR crisis firm—the kind Anthony Weiner had to hire, that Puffy Combs hired. Like, imagine being a journalist and being exposed as such a fraud that you have to hire a PR crisis team of the kind that public figures hire when they’re involved in some big sex scandal or bribery scandal. That’s who’s managing Jake Tapper’s behavior and his compartment.

They’ve tried to place hit pieces on me and succeeded in, like, you know, shitty places like The Daily Beast. And everything he says now is scripted. Every interview he does now—at first it was like, "What are you talking about? This is outrageous!" And now every time he’s in an interview he says, "I look back on my coverage with humility." You know, that phrase they feed you to make it seem like you're accepting accountability. No, you're really not.

TUCKER CARLSON: False humility, it's called. What’s interesting though is that it wasn’t just, “I disagree with you. Biden seems fine to me.” What’s interesting is that he used the most vulgar moral blackmail you can: "You're attacking children who stutter. You’re attacking disabled kids when you criticize the president of the United States." That is so low, it’s hard to believe that happened. I haven’t seen that clip.

GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, he claims he called Lara Trump to apologize. Maybe he should do that on his show, since that’s where he told his audience she was attacking kids who stutter. That’s one of the worst things you could do—bully kids with disabilities. Right? Like, if my kids ever did that, I would punish them for three months. So accusing her of having done that probably doesn’t warrant a private apology. Or maybe it does too. But also, you go on air and say, “Hey, I did something really despicable.”

What’s so amazing, too, is they’re trying to rewrite history. One of the ways they're trying to do that is to say, “We were the victims of the fraud. We in the media were the victims of the fraud,” and are so angry at this inner team of Joe Biden’s White House advisors who kept this from them, who hid this, even though the entire public knew forever.

I know, I’ve written about this so many times—it drives me crazy how easily history is rewritten. The first time I ever heard concerns about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline was back in 2018, when the Democratic field was coalescing. People who were gonna run against Donald Trump were really worried Joe Biden was going to get the nomination solely by virtue of name recognition—because he was vice president to Barack Obama for eight years, was viewed as loyal, has been around forever.

And they all knew there was no way he could sustain the rigors of an election because he was in cognitive decline. So it was these Democratic operatives—Andrea Mitchell talked about it. Cory Booker and Julian Castro in that 2019 debate all made fun of Biden for not being able to remember what he had said three seconds ago.

It was the Democrats who were raising it, trying to alert everybody that you shouldn’t vote for Joe Biden because he’s not the same Joe Biden he was. I’m not talking about 2023, I’m talking about 2018 and 2019. Remember, the minute it was down to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary, that’s when the media narrative shifted. It became: “The only people talking about Biden’s supposed cognitive decline are Bernie bros and MAGA people. And it’s absolutely immoral and disgusting.”

And that’s when I wrote an article saying, “What do you mean? You were the ones who first raised it.” I heard it from you—those DC insiders. The only reason Joe Biden was saved from that was that COVID happened and he got to run the campaign from his basement, where he only talked to people like Nicolle Wallace, who spoke to him like some ailing grandpa.

You know that voice you use for your ailing grandpa—“Mr. President… oh, Mr. Biden, hello…”—and then the fake laugh if he got even close to a joke. Those were the kinds of interviews he was doing, in that basement in Delaware. That’s the only reason he could sustain that campaign.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it was so widely known. His sister Valerie told a good friend of mine that she didn’t want him to run in 2020 because he had dementia. My former makeup artist was there in the room when he was injected with amphetamines before an event—more than once during that campaign.

And like I said all that on TV. Everyone I knew in DC who knew Biden said, “Yeah, no, he’s got dementia.” Everybody knew. It wasn’t just some right-wing Twitter thing where people were being cruel. The people who knew Biden knew that. So how could you not know that?

GLENN GREENWALD: I think the reason this media fraud—of all the other media frauds that have been perpetrated—is probably the most damaging is because in 2016, they pushed this whole deranged, demented conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin had sex tapes on Donald Trump—yes, where he was being urinated on by a prostitute.

And of course, if you know Donald Trump, that’s pretty much the last thing… of all the people on the planet... but, you know, it was that sort of thing. They always accused people—independent media or whoever—of being conspiracy theorists. Think about that conspiracy: Donald Trump was being blackmailed by the Russian government into sacrificing the interests of the United States to serve the interests of the Kremlin. That really was the predominant media narrative from 2016 to 2018.

So that’s what they did to try and stop Trump the first time. In 2020, you know, weeks before the election, the New York Post had very serious reporting about the Biden family unethically exploiting Joe Biden’s influence in Ukraine and China to profit—not just for themselves, but also for Joe Biden. And we were told by the media over and over the lie that this is Russian disinformation. That this laptop, the contents of it, should be ignored because it’s inauthentic.

That, of course, was when I left The Intercept—because they wouldn’t let me write about it, claiming that there were doubts about its authenticity, when I knew there weren’t. And then Twitter and Facebook censored it.

But on those kinds of questions—like Russiagate, the authenticity of these emails—for most Americans, they don’t have the competence to judge that because they do other things. But when it comes to seeing older people in cognitive decline, most of them have had that experience with a grandparent, or a parent, or a sibling, or a neighbor, or whatever, and don’t need to be told by quote-unquote experts that it’s happening—because they can see it with their own eyes.

And for the media to have sat there for a year and a half and told everybody—as Joe Scarborough said—"This version of Joe Biden is the best Biden we’ve ever seen." I mean, imagine being such a state propagandist that you do that—and then keep your job!

I think that’s why this scandal is so devastating to them. And why, when Jake Tapper stands up to write a book saying, “I’ve uncovered the truth with investigative reporting,” everybody is reacting with justifiable nausea.

TUCKER CARLSON: You gotta admit, it takes some balls to do that though. I mean, I famously advocated for the Iraq War, realized in 2003 that it was a bad idea, and said I was wrong. What I didn’t do was write a book saying I always thought it was wrong.

GLENN GREENWALD: Or like, “Hey, I’m here to write a book saying why the Iraq War was based on falsehoods.” It’s like—we already know, Tucker, thank you. You didn’t go and write that book because you were the one helping to perpetuate it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, exactly. I totally agree. So I guess without repentance—without the acknowledgment of wrongdoing, of dishonesty—without saying, “I screwed up” and making that the headline, nothing that follows is credible at all. It’s all fake unless you admit your role in the lie.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. And if that happened—if you said, “Look, I was really swept up in the media bubble I was in, and I want to tell the story of why I did this, or how I convinced myself of this lie”—then there would be some nobility to it. There would be some value in the work.

But this is what I mean. I was one of several people—including myself—who was bashing the table every day. We were compiling tapes of Jake Tapper doing all the things I just referenced. And I remember at the time, Jake Tapper was always serving the Democratic Party in these ways.

And his initial response was to send out publicists to try and plant stories that I was lying, that I was manipulating media. There was one in The Daily Beast, one in The Huffington Post. They were pitching stories. And they were in these, like, shitty liberal sites that no one reads—Huffington Post and The Daily Beast. There were a couple others. But they had pitched them to The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal too, I think. The New York Post got in contact with me. They didn’t run it because it was so easy to prove.

TUCKER CARLSON: What was the allegation?

GLENN GREENWALD: That all of these incidents I just described—and others of things he did on his show—were taken out of context, or the video was manipulated.

Just like they did when people saw Joe Biden wandering around on D-Day and had to be redirected by Giorgia Meloni, or being taken off the stage by—this is the other thing. They didn’t just deny it. They attacked anyone who said it.

People in 2024 who were saying, “Oh look, Biden clearly doesn’t know where he is”—including at that event with Obama, that big George Clooney fundraiser—the Washington Post ran an article saying they were using a new phrase: "cheap fakes."

Like, they weren’t exactly fake, but the narrative was fake. And anyone who said, “Joe Biden clearly is in cognitive decline. Look at him at these events,” they were called right-wing disinformation agents.

And as it turns out, George Clooney ended up saying the reason why he wanted Biden not to run was because the Joe Biden he saw at that event was completely unrecognizable. He has dementia.

And at the time, when people were saying, “Clearly he doesn’t know where he is, being led off the stage by Barack Obama,” none of this was new. This is what we had been seeing for so long.

The media affirmatively used that “disinformation” term—that has become their weapon of deception and propaganda—to smear people who told the truth. They labeled all of that “disinformation.”

So they were the ones who perpetrated the fraud, and now they’re pretending like they’re the ones uncovering it.

It is... I think the reason they don’t get it is because of that insulated bubble they exist in. They all do believe that they’re truthful, they’re good, they’re benevolent, they’re nonpartisan.

And that, unfortunately, there was no way for them to have told the story because Mike Donilon was lying about it or Jill Biden was lying about it—or keeping the truth from them. And so—what can they do?