Ex-White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre blames Hunter Biden gun trial for Joe’s debate debacle
By: Josh Christenson (New York Post)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has blamed President Joe Biden's "halting" 2024 debate performance against Donald Trump on the stress of his son Hunter's federal weapons trial in a new tell-all book.
Jean-Pierre, 51, also claims she "saw no such decline" in the oldest-ever president's mental acuity before the fateful night of June 27, 2024, and insists that Biden watching his "only living son" face decades in jail "broke" his heart.
"As soon as President Biden opened his mouth at the debate podium, I became worried," she writes in her tome, "Independent," out Tuesday.
"Then our phones started going off. It was clear that he was sick, and that this was the beginning of the end."
Asked during a closed-door meeting of Democratic governors about his health days later, Biden responded that he was fine and attempted to joke that the main problem was "just my brain," the New York Times also reported.
Jean-Pierre's book, subtitled "A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines," is meant to pull back the curtain on what she calls the "three wrenching weeks" before the 46th president ended his bid for a second term on July 21, 2024.
"First of all, he'd been traveling back and forth to Europe," she recalls of the run-up to the debate, before adding: "Granted, traveling extensively is what world leaders do, and if that completely wipes you out, there's a good argument to be made that you have no business in the office. But, in the middle of all those trips, Biden's only living son was also on trial."
"It had to be straining Biden's spirit. And frankly, I think his heart broke," she said of Hunter's conviction in Delaware federal court, which was prosecuted by his own father's Department of Justice — though Jean-Pierre suggests the president's son was politically targeted.
In July, Hunter claimed during an interview with YouTube personality Andrew Callaghan that his father's incoherent ramblings during the CNN forum — including the infamous phrase "We finally beat Medicare" — were due to newly prescribed sleeping pills, a remedy which was not publicly disclosed at the time.
"He had to travel. He had to be president," Jean-Pierre writes. "And finally, he had to stand on a debate stage and go head-to-head with Trump, who lies like he breathes. All that would rattle the most seasoned debater."
"We were barely eleven minutes into the ninety-minute debate when Biden began to stumble over numbers, mixing up trillionaires and billionaires, drifting off midsentence," the former press secretary recounted. "My phone began to blow up. 'What's going on?' a reporter who buzzed my cell texted. 'Does the president have Covid?' 'Is the president sick?' asked another."
"Maybe I was so focused on the thought that voters would get to see the contrast between an honorable politician and a sore loser running for office to stay out of jail that I didn't pick up on how tired Biden might have been," she adds. "I'm not sure how I missed the signs, but I had no clue Biden had a cold and was off his game until he began to speak at the debate."
The stumbling performance caused an outcry among Biden's fellow Democrats, causing Jean-Pierre and other White House flacks to insist that the president would not drop out.
"That's what I'd been told. That's what I believed," she reveals in the new book — after testifying to House lawmakers last month that senior Biden advisers provided her talking points on the president's "health and mental acuity" for daily briefings.
Days before the debate, Jean-Pierre bizarrely accused The Post and other outlets of promoting so-called "cheap fakes" by reporting on video footage of a bewildered Biden wandering off from other world leaders during the G7 summit and freezing on stage at a Hollywood fundraiser before being led away by President Barack Obama.
The former press secretary told members of the House Oversight Committee in September that the "cheap fakes" line was specifically added to her briefing binder — but was unable to disclose which senior adviser placed it there, according to a source familiar with her testimony.
Elsewhere in the memoir, Jean-Pierre writes that concerns raised by Hollywood star George Clooney in a New York Times op-ed calling for Biden to abandon his campaign "weren't completely unjustified."
"But I was also aware of something ugly surging behind the scenes," she goes on in her book. "There were whispers, phone calls, texts. A campaign was underway to push the president out of the race. I just never realized the attack would succeed."
That campaign — led largely by House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — would "betray" Joe Biden and "fumble" Vice President Kamala Harris' chances of defeating Donald Trump, she wrote.
"Nancy Pelosi never went on television and said, 'We don't want Kamala,'" according to Jean-Pierre. "But the congressperson who first told me Pelosi believed Biden had to go also said Pelosi was explicit in declaring she didn't want Harris to replace him. Many party insiders speculated that Pelosi preferred Newsom, California's charismatic governor and her fellow San Franciscan, to be the nominee."
Jean-Pierre writes that she authored the book to challenge the Democratic establishment "about why it failed to connect with the millions of Americans who didn't even bother to show up at the polls, and why it couldn't articulate the achievements of the Biden/Harris administration well enough to get Harris across the finish line and into the White House."
The "bickering," "backbiting" and "behind-the-scenes machinations" ahead of Biden's withdrawal also made her reconsider her party affiliation, prompting her to author the 2024 tome and ask, at one point: "Did I really want to be in a party that treated people this way?"
"Now that I can speak fully from the heart, I have an answer," Jean-Pierre says. "After being a party insider for twenty years, I now believe I can fight harder for my country from outside the Democratic Party than from within it. From here on, I am politically an independent."
No personal insults
No death wishes of any individual
Trolling, taunting, spamming, references to "MAGA" and off topic comments may be removed at the discretion of group mods. NT members that vote up their own comments, repeat comments, or continue to disrupt the conversation risk having all of their comments deleted. Please remember to quote the person(s) to whom you are replying to preserve continuity of this seed. Any use of the term white supremacist or Christian Nationalist will be deleted.
Tags
Who is online
123 visitors
You can't make this shit up.
Yes, Joey, we knew it was your brain LONG before the debate. Everybody knew it but you.
To be fair, that's not his fault. If you've cared for an aging parent, you understand that often times they are the last to know how diminished they are.
It IS the fault of the people around him, who should have intervened.
And every single one of them are making excuses for not stepping in. Just like KJP. It doesn't help that there are voting people gullible enough to believe the nonsense.
Correct. Although the real reason was probably just as simple as "didn't want to lose my job in the WH".
They didn't want to lose power. Now that they have lost power, look at them.
It's no longer jet lag from a trip two weeks before?
LMAO. I forgot about that pathetic little excuse. Seems that when the Democrats realized what kind of idiot they were running they panicked. Too bad they didn't see the problems earlier like the rest of the country.
Dude just got old. I don’t know why that’s so hard to just say out loud.
It was a bit more than that. People were running things under his name.
People run things under every president.
What bull. The people surrounding Biden were acting on their own.
There is "running things" that we see with every President, then there is "running EVERYTHING" like we saw under Biden.
Authority to act is part of the job for everyone in the Executive branch. If you have evidence of actual wrongdoing, let’s see it. Otherwise, you’re just randomly whining about invented nonsense.
My response is the same as for Vic.
The border was opened. The crime is called TREASON.
Even if the first half of that was true - which it isn’t - that would not support the second half. The whole thing is hysterical nonsense.
The border wasn't opened?
YOU ARE FULL OF [Removed][✘]
The way they tried to spin it was there was no official order making the border open, therefore, to them, it was considered closed.
I asked ChatGPT to fact check: "The border was opened. The crime is called TREASON."
Response:
What bull shit.
Whoever programed ChatGPT is obviously a silicon valley lefty.[✘]
They are incredible. Kind of like telling the American people that there were reports proving the economy was great during Biden's 9% inflation.
Imagine anyone denying that the border was wide open under Biden!
LLMs like ChatGPT are not programmed conventionally as you envision. They are sophisticated algorithms that (at their core) implement deep, multilayer neural networks with all sorts of pattern/inferencing mechanisms. What is produced by tools like ChatGPT is a synthesis of the corpus on which the AI was trained. It is, in a very real sense, just a summary of a vast corpus and this summary was not produced by what you envision as program code -- it is what the corpus net holds as true.
In a sense, ChatGPT is producing a synthesized summary of what it has learned.
Given its corpus includes US Law, CotUS, case logs, etc. when you see an answer like it provided, it will almost always be spot on.
You can, however, do your own research to see if it is indeed wrong.
But labeling the response bullshit with no supporting reasoning shows that this research was not done.
[✘]
Do you believe that illegals merely walked across the border and set up house in the USA? That is what 'wide open' means.
You can argue that more illegals entered the nation under Biden then under Trump, but when you go to the extreme, your claim becomes nonsense.
In short, I suggest you make claims that correlate with sources like this:
The sources allow you to claim that more illegals entered our nation under Biden than under Trump. But when you go to 'wide open' you will not find any factual support.
Whatever defense you choose for it, the US border was OBVIOUSLY opened by the people running the Biden administration. It is a grand act of gaslighting to try and deny it.
You can read this when you have the time:
You did not read the link I provided. The link (and my comment) states that more illegals crossed the border into the USA under Biden than under Trump.
Or, you read the link and want to argue a straw man.
The truth inspires nastiness in some people. I’m not going to defend Biden on immigration unless you say stuff that just isn’t true. And the assertion that the border was open is just not true. It’s not my fault you use the words “open” and “treason” incorrectly.
Fact: The border was wide open.
As a matter of fact, the Biden administration extended things like "parole" and even flew people around the country.
And btw: Multiple sources confirm that more than 2 million illegal aliens were assigned Social Security Numbers (SSNs) in fiscal year 2024 alone during Biden's presidency.
Fact Check: Did Biden have immigrants on Social Security
Why do you make such obviously wrong exaggerated claims?
If the border was wide open that means our border patrol was not doing anything. That they just let everyone who wanted to cross our border. You know that is not true. You know (or should know) that there was a dramatic increase in encounters and that each encounter represents an event where border agents processed an attempted illegal entry.
Biden dropped the ball on (or did not properly prioritize) border control; we know that. Why not just stick with the facts? Why exaggerate to the absurd? It just kills credibility on any point you make. SMH. A counterproductive tactic.
There is a branch of “conservatism” that always has to believe the world is going to hell in a hand basket, no matter what the facts are. I put the word in quotes because it’s not really conservatism. It’s more scapegoating and fabricated paranoia that identifies some threat to fight against. In such a case, there doesn’t seem to be any point in trying to argue the facts. They aren’t interested.
Why are you in such denial of basic facts?
If the border was wide open that means our border patrol was not doing anything.
They did a lot of processing, but for those who think the radical Biden years were ok, here is a reality check:
EXCLUSIVE — Border Patrol agents are lining up at the chance to leave the border and temporarily deploy to United States cities to re-arrest illegal immigrants whom they were forced to release into the country by the Biden administration.
U.S. Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks shared in an interview with the Washington Examiner that federal agents who lived through the nation's historic border crisis between 2021 and 2024 are fired up at the opportunity to go after people they knew should never have been let into the United States in the first place.
"We have a significant amount of United States Border Patrol agents assisting [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] on op-at-larges in multiple cities, not just Chicago's and LA's," Banks said on Wednesday. "Twenty-seven plus cities across this country where we are working on the interior. ... We have a long list of volunteers volunteering to go on those assignments."
The 27-city deployment is far broader than previously disclosed by Border Patrol, part of the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.
The border crisis not only ended and returned to normal levels of illegal immigration attempts when President Donald Trump took office, but the number of people caught attempting to enter the country from Mexico illegally has plunged to levels not seen in more than five decades.
It has freed up the Border Patrol to have the time and resources to assist ICE with its interior mission of arresting, detaining, and deporting illegal immigrants. Trump has vowed to carry out the nation's "largest-ever" deportation.
It's good for morale, Banks said, but added that the deployments were about more than just helping ICE; they were about agents getting a chance to right a wrong.
"Nothing could be better for morale than allowing a Border Patrol agent to go into the interior and look for those people that they were forced to release into this country, knowing that it was a safety threat to America," Banks said.
"They are lined up with the opportunity to say, 'I now get to go apprehend and provide a consequence for people that the Biden administration made me release into this country claiming that they were vetted, knowing good and well that the Biden administration was lying to the American people and they weren't being vetted because they couldn't be vetted because the countries they were coming from refused to share that information with us,'" Banks said.
During the first three years of the Biden administration, between 100,000 and 250,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry per month.
Families are not legally permitted to be detained by Border Patrol or ICE for more than 20 days, which is not enough time for their cases to be heard by an immigration judge, and forces federal law enforcement to release them into the country to show up for court down the road.
Similarly, law enforcement was so overwhelmed with the number of people coming across the border per day that they were unable to vet the identities and criminal records of adults who crossed the border unlawfully during the Biden administration.
At the height of the crisis, agents were overwhelmed apprehending people and processing them, and millions of people were released almost immediately, often onto the street.
In numerous instances seen since that time period during the Biden administration, individuals who posed as minors or claimed to be coming for economic purposes were only determined to be criminals after being released.
Border Patrol agents ‘lined up’ to re-arrest illegal immigrants, who Biden forced release of
Your game is obvious, Vic.
You claimed that the border was wide open. Even the most superficial observer can determine that the border was indeed still manned and illegals were being stopped. The border patrol was not sitting around drinking coffee and waving in illegals.
So you are, yet again, the one denying basic facts and then (a typical slimy tactic) pretending that it is your interlocutor who is doing that.
And now you post a bunch of text that talks about the overwhelming number of encounters during Biden's term. A fact that I stated in my post.
Just flat out intellectual dishonesty in your posts.
The border, Vic, has never been wide open. We have always had a manned border. Biden did not tell the border patrol to stand down and let everyone cross. His failure (as I noted) was to not act on the worldwide rise in illegal immigration for our borders.
Your exaggerations are unnecessary and serve to hurt the credibility of your claims.
Any honest human being knows it is true.
Wide open = illegals allowed to freely walk across the border; border agents doing nothing
Wide open ≠ border agents doing their jobs, but understaffed and underfunded
Get a grip.
Because it's better to be honest and speak the truth.