Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted that she never saw former President Joe Biden’s mental acuity falter leading up to his poor performance in the 2024 presidential debate, claiming that she did not see him on the way to the venue despite traveling on the same plane together.
Jean-Pierre was questioned by anchors Tony Dokoupil and Gayle King on this Monday’s episode of CBS Mornings about excerpts from her upcoming book, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.
Quotes from the book explained her resignation from the Democratic Party, with her blaming her decision to become an independent on other Democrats treating Biden “poorly” as they told him to drop out due to his age and potential cognitive issues, Breitbart News reported.
“Biden seemed to be totally at peace with his decision, but I was stunned, my feelings a blur. I was angry and sad. I was enraged and heartbroken that this man had given more than 50 years of his life to serving the American people, and in the end, he’d been treated poorly by members of his own party. It was horrible,” Jean-Pierre wrote.
“You know what? I’m going to become an independent. I don’t think I can stomach being in the Democratic Party anymore,” she added.
Dokoupil pressed the former press secretary on how she apparently could not see the signs of Biden’s mental decline that were obvious to millions of voters.
“So when this book landed on my desk and I saw ‘A broken White House,’ in the subtitle, I have to say, I thought you were going to say that, try as you might to convince Joe Biden to drop out of the race — because what we were seeing is what you were seeing, and he was struggling, and couldn’t do it — I thought you were going to say you were angry at that,” the anchor began. “What you said in this book is you’re angry at the people who tried to push him out.”
“Some Americans are going to say, ‘seriously?’” he said.
Jean-Pierre replied, claiming that strangers were coming up to her in public and asking why the Democratic Party was not “fighting” back, before King circled back to Dokoupil’s point.
“I want to pick up on what Tony was saying because I, too, thought that,” the co-host said. “You said, people said, why didn’t members of his inner circle speak up about what many believe was the apparent decline of Joe Biden, and you said you’re a member of the inner circle, and you never saw the decline. After that, I wrote, ‘how?’ You even write, Karine, that you were on the plane with him going to the debate, and you didn’t see anything.”
“So hard to understand,” King added.
Biden’s June debate performance was so bad that he even admitted that now-President Donald Trump “knocked him down” as donors began backing away from his campaign, Breitbart News reported.
The former president ended his campaign less than a month later.
“Well, when we were on Air Force One going to the debate, you got to remember his campaign people were on the team, his family was on the team,” Jean-Pierre told King. “[It] actually was one of those rare trips that I didn’t really see him until after the debate, even though I was on the plane.”
She continued, “So really, I want everybody to know that I take this question incredibly seriously. I do. I was his White House press secretary, which means I had a role that saw him practically every day and traveled with him—”
King interjected, asking, “And you saw nothing?”
Jean-Pierre replied, “We’ve always said we’re not going to say, ‘Oh, he didn’t age.’ He aged, and he poked fun at it. We always owned up. And with age comes what happens when you get older.”
“Which is?” Dokoupil asked, getting no response as Jean-Pierre continued.
“When we talk about the mental acuity — and again, I take this very, very seriously — I never saw anyone who wasn’t there. I saw someone who was always engaged,” she insisted. “I saw someone who understood policy, pushed us on the policy and also understood history.”
Even establishment media outlets eventually acknowledged that Biden’s team covered up his faltering capabilities, with the Washington Post‘s left-wing editorial board publishing in August 2024: “The 81-year-old had shown signs of slipping for a long time, but his inner circle worked to conceal his decline.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris also admitted in her own book that her former running mate’s age had “showed in physical and verbal stumbles,” and pondered if it was “recklessness” on her part to not have intervened to stop him from running for reelection.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
Read the full article here