WASHINGTON — Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has blamed 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 up on stage at a Hollywood fundraiser before being led away by former 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.”
