Karine Jean-Pierre slams Jake Tapper’s Biden takedown, says she 'saw no such decline'

WASHINGTON, DC: Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed Jake Tapper's new book, 'Original Sin', which claims that former President Joe Biden is in decline.

According to her, she has seen no such decline during her time working with him. She further criticized Tapper's book as inaccurate and misleading. 

Karine Jean-Pierre hits back against Jake Tapper’s claims

In her upcoming memoir, ‘Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines’, Jean-Pierre described her absolute loyalty to Biden and said that he merely had a 'cold' the night of his disastrous June 2024 debate against President Donald Trump. 

She said that CNN's Jake Tapper, along with Axios' Alex Thompson, later wrote a tell-all claiming Biden was hiding mental decline and his aides tried covering it up. 

“I was technically a part of the president's inner circle and saw Biden every day and saw no such decline. I never read Tapper’s book and don’t ever plan to because that does not track with what I saw in the White House,” Jean-Pierre wrote.

Describing how daunting it was to face the White House press corps in the aftermath of the debate, she said, “On and on it went,' she recalled. 'What cold medications was Biden taking before the debate? Did a doctor give him a neurological scan afterward? Did he have dementia?”

"Were they asking the same questions about Trump?" she asked, suggesting that questions from the press were unfair. 

"During the campaign, Trump would froth at the mouth for hours on end, bringing up the fictitious movie villain Hannibal Lecter and, at one appearance, making obscene gestures with a microphone. But no reporter asked to speak to his doctor," she later added.

Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis and leadership

She said that former Rep Dean Phillips claimed that Biden announced his cancer diagnosis to overshadow Tapper and Thompson’s book. 

"Suffice to say, Biden’s cancer diagnosis, regardless of what he knew when, would not have been directly related to his alleged cognitive decline, nor would it have affected his ability to make competent decisions as a world leader," she wrote, claiming that even cancer wouldn't have slowed the 82-year-old president down. 

Workplace challenges and decision to leave Democrats

Jean-Pierre, who announced in June that she was leaving the Democratic Party to become an independent after Biden dropped out, has been writing the book since then.

She even stated that the Democratic Party is still failing. Her disappointment in the Democrats also came from her own White House experience. She said she was "exasperated with the shady way Democrats do business." 

In the book, she recounted how an unnamed white female superior had orchestrated a campaign to push her out of the press secretary's job.