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Former President Joe Biden struggled to get through filming campaign videos, or quick, filmed keynote addresses for various groups during the 2024 campaign due to his declining health, according to a new book.
The book, "Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again," said that Biden stumbled through filming campaign videos so much that the footage was ultimately deemed "unusable." The nonfiction book was published Tuesday and is authored by journalists Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios.
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In one case, Biden’s team sought to film a video for the campaign for ads on television in a high school gym where people could ask questions like they would at a town hall meeting.
"The campaign was trying to make it look like the president was out there taking off-the-cuff questions from voters in public," the book said. "But the event was closed to reporters, and the campaign had the full list of questions that people would ask."
However, Biden had so much "trouble" getting through the questions that his team decided to scrap the footage. While some attributed challenges to poor lighting in the gym, the book said that others identified Biden as the real problem.
Similarly, when groups requested a five-minute video address of Biden for keynote events, the White House would work to provide a one- or two-minute video, the book said. Still, given the time constraint, Biden "often couldn’t make it through one or two minutes without botching a line or two," according to the book.
"The man could not speak," one person familiar with the effort said, according to the book. The person said Biden faced an "inability to find words, to remember what he was saying, to stay on one train of thought."
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"Aides would sometimes make the videos in slow motion to blur the reality of how slowly he actually walked," the person said. "If he was off, editing footage in a way that cast him in the best light would require hours of work."
The book also pinned the blame on Biden for then-Vice President Kamala Harris' unsuccessful run in the 2024 election after Biden took so long to exit the race. David Plouffe, former President Barack Obama’s campaign manager in 2008 and a senior advisor on Harris’ 2024 campaign, said that Harris' campaign was "a f---ing nightmare" because of Biden.
A former Biden staffer pushed back on the claims included in the book, and told Fox News Digital, "This isn’t true. The book is riddled with falsehoods."
Biden's team has also challenged the material in "Original Sin," which chronicles the 2024 election cycle and how Biden’s team allegedly plotted a cover-up to hide just how severely his mental faculties had declined.
"There is nothing in this book that shows Joe Biden failed to do his job, as the authors have alleged, nor did they prove their allegation that there was a cover up or conspiracy," a Biden spokesperson said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "Nowhere do they show that our national security was threatened or where the President wasn’t otherwise engaged in the important matters of the Presidency. In fact, Joe Biden was an effective President who led our country with empathy and skill."
The book is one of several that detail Biden’s decision to run in 2024 and details the deterioration of his cognitive function.
English (US)