This article was originally published by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge.
Alex Thompson, co-author of the provocative new book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, has ignited a firestorm across Democrat Party circles, asserting that a secretive cadre of aides ran the White House like a shadowy “politburo” to conceal President Joe Biden’s failing mental health.
Thompson told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that he began questioning the White House’s narrative about Biden’s mental fitness in April 2023, after hearing concerns from administration insiders about Biden’s capacity to endure a reelection campaign or another term. Despite repeated denials from the White House, which labeled such claims false, Thompson’s reporting uncovered a different reality, eroding his trust in their statements. He described a tight-knit group of aides – referred to by some within the administration as the “Politburo” – effectively steering the White House. This inner circle, Thompson noted, included longtime Biden aides like Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed, and Ron Klain, alongside key figures close to the Biden family, such as First Lady Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, Jill’s chief of staff Anthony Bernal, and deputy Annie Tomasini, who often serves as Biden’s traveling chief of staff.
The term “politburo” refers to the elite inner circle of a communist regime, wielding unchecked power at the top.
We note that Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas are conspicuously absent from this list.
In an interview, Thompson claimed Biden’s inner circle was prepared to take “undemocratic” measures to hide the former president’s mental decline, desperately clinging to power for another four years while blocking President Donald Trump’s triumphant return to the White House.
“If you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy — you can rationalize anything, including sometimes doing undemocratic things, which I think is what this person is talking about,” Thompson told Fox News host Shannon Bream.
A Biden staffer also reportedly told Thompson that the then-president “just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years.”
“He’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while,” the author said the aide relayed to him. “His aides could pick up the slack.”
“When you’re voting for president, you’re voting for the aides around him,” the aide reportedly said.
Thompson told CNN on Saturday that multiple Biden cabinet members expressed doubts about the president’s ability to handle a critical “2:00 a.m. crisis call.”
“We talked to two cabinet members that believed that he wasn’t up to that. If the 2:00 a.m. crisis phone call, they said like maybe he could have done it, but they did not have confidence that he was at every single day capable of responding to a national security crisis at 2:00 a.m.,” the author told the network. “And just because that 2:00 a.m. crisis did not happen doesn’t mean that it was not irresponsible in the views of these senior members of his own administration.”
“We have Senator Mark Warner in the book Democrat of Virginia saying that he, during a foreign policy national security conversation, they believe that Biden was not really up to snuff on all the issues,” he added. “We also have Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, a Democrat, who is probably running for governor, believing that Biden’s age made him unable to handle the immigration portfolio and all the factions of the Democratic Party, which led to such incoherence with the border and immigration policies of this country.”
Last week, Biden’s office announced that the former president was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
“On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone,” the statement said. “While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive, which allows for effective management. The President and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”
Meanwhile, these two seem to have escaped the list unscathed…
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