CNN anchor Jake Tapper hit back at journalist Glenn Greenwald on Thursday for claiming Tapper helped cover up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.
On his Tuesday podcast, Greenwald—the journalist who exposed government spying during the George W. Bush administration—accused Tapper of hypocrisy over the promotion of his book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.
Greenwald said Tapper was “one of the primary people in the media, not just covering it up and denying it, but aggressively attacking and maligning the character of anyone who was raising this.”
ADVERTISEMENT
A representative for Tapper rejected Greenwald’s claims in a statement to the Daily Beast on Thursday.
“Glenn Greenwald did an entire segment based on false attacks that could’ve been fact-checked in seconds,” the representative said.
Greenwald further called the promotion of the book a “brazenly fraudulent scam“ on X after Tapper on Wednesday praised two Wall Street Journal reporters for a June 2024 report titled “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.”
Greenwald then aired a supercut from the media monitoring service Grabien of Tapper commenting on the Journal report from June last year and interviews he did with Democratic lawmakers about Biden’s health.
“Tapper went out of his way to malign the WSJ‘s credibility by gratuitously noting that they are owned by News Corp and thus controlled by Murdoch. And while the WH used insinuation to imply that, it was Tapper who made it explicit, with no pushback,” Greenwald told the Daily Beast in an email Thursday.
“All of this was part of Tapper’s overall year-long campaign to attack, malign and express disgust toward anyone who came on to question Biden’s mental acuity.”
A representative for Tapper said the clip was deceptively edited.
“He spliced up a video that took what Jake said about Biden White House attacks on WSJ reporting completely out of context, then misled about the timeline of the reporting of the book,” the representative said. “Lies from bad faith actors will keep coming for whatever reason but the truths of the book remain.”
CNN did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
Greenwald came to prominence as one of the reporters to whom Edward Snowden leaked a trove of documents from the National Security Agency in 2013 that revealed the agency had been spying on Americans during the administrations of former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
The clip Greenwald shared featured Tapper derisively referring to the Journal as “owned by News Corp., which is run by the Murdochs,” claiming Tapper was “trying to act as if The Wall Street Journal‘s reporting was the partisan hit-job.“
However, Tapper had referenced a statement made by then-White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt, who speculated whether the Journal reporters were “taking orders from” a boss.
“Maybe that’s an insinuation because The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp., which is run by the Murdochs," Tapper said in the full CNN segment in June last year.
News Corp. is run by Lachlan Murdoch, the son of conservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, though the news side of the Journal operates independently.
