On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” CNN Senior Justice Correspondent Evan Pérez reacted to audio of then-President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur by saying that the interview took place right after the October 7 attack when Biden “had spent that entire time, obviously, on the phone and working long hours.” And so you could wonder if Biden’s struggles in the interview are “because of fatigue” or due to his decline.
After agreeing with host Jake Tapper that Biden’s decline got particularly bad in 2023, Pérez stated, “They did not want this to come out before the election. That — let’s be honest, that’s really — that’s the reason why this happened.”
He continued, “And look, one of the other things that I think is key to understanding this, during this interview, the context, right, is that, you remember, he sat down for these interviews in October of, when, right after the attack by Hamas in Israel. And so, he had spent that entire time, obviously, on the phone and working long hours. And so, the big question, of course, became, a president of his age, and given the stresses of what he was going through, should he have sat down, should that have been the time for him to sit down for several hours of interviews — and they do go over two days of interviews with prosecutors — with everything that they had on the line? Clearly, Joe Biden thought that it was fine to do that. But, clearly, you can see from some of his answers that he does not have a handle on some of this. And so you could say, was it because of fatigue, or is it because of the things that you write about in your book, Jake? And so, that’s the big — I think, the big takeaway or big question that people will take away from listening to this audio.”
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