MSNBC correspondent and White House Correspondents Association president Eugene Daniels questioned why anyone should believe former Cabinet Secretaries who are now claiming they were kept away from President Joe Biden for months as part of a plot to hide his decline, if they dishonestly failed share that information before.

As part of the slew of interviews with journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson about their new book on the cover-up of Biden’s mental and physical decline while in office, host Daniels and co-hosts Elise Jordan and Jonathan Capehart spoke with Thompson on Saturday’s The Weekend on MSNBC.

In that book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again”, the authors lay out comments from several unnamed Cabinet members, quoting them describing being kept away from the president for months or more than a year.

“For months, we didn’t have access to him. There was clearly a deliberate strategy by the White House to have him meet with as few people as necessary,” reads one quote from a cabinet member in the book.

“At one rare meeting during that time,” that Cabinet Secretary was “shocked by how the president was acting. He seemed ‘disoriented’ and ‘out of it,’ his mouth agape,” Tapper and Thompson report.

Jordan brought up the Cabinet Secretaries on Saturday, and Thompson said that, not only did multiple members of the cabinet confirm they had little to no access to Biden, but told the authors that the reason they didn’t come clean about it was they felt it would help then-candidate Donald Trump. He also pointed out that the Cabinet members were “troubled” by what they saw when they were able to gain rare time with Biden.

Jordan followed up, saying if they “were deeply concerned and they weren’t sure who was making decisions, why didn’t they come forward while they were serving?”

That’s when Daniels asked why we should believe them now if they’re claiming to have withheld information then, and questioning their motives.

“But why should people trust them now, right?” he said. “Because I don’t know who these cabinet secretaries were, but maybe they probably want to work in a different administration. They want to be on K Street. They want be at some think tank. Why should anyone trust them when they spend all this time? Apparently no one got this information and not telling anybody. Now they have a lot to say.

Thompson called it a “fair question” and offered their fears of a Trump presidency as a dubious defense.

THOMPSON: there were also people that I talked to in the past that weren’t really candid and finally felt they could be candid and you know to give them the benefit of doubt I think a lot of them were scared because they felt that if they spoke out it wasn’t gonna get Joe Biden out of the race and also was only gonna help Donald Trump.

So, you know cabinet members, senior White House officials and to your point you know about the restricting access — remember, one that just comes to mind is, you know one person basically when Whenever the White House press team wanted to put someone on the phone with a reporter saying, Joe Biden’s great, Joe Biden is fine. At some point, this one person was like, I’m not gonna do that because I haven’t seen him in months.

They were like people that would normally see the president, even on a somewhat regular basis, were no longer allowed to. And even a few times we had one cabinet secretary that was allowed to go see him in that period, 2024, and they went in the meeting and they were shocked. His mouth was agape. He seemed incoherent, and they were really troubled.

JORDAN: When I think you have four cabinet secretaries, just to follow up on that, and they say that they were deeply concerned and they weren’t sure who was making decisions. Why didn’t they come forward while they were serving? Because it is a big deal. It is a huge deal for the president of the United States to not have all of their faculties.

DANIELS: But why should people trust them now, right? Because I don’t know who these cabinet secretaries were, but maybe they probably want to work in a different administration. They want to be on K Street. They want be at some think tank. Why should anyone trust them when they spend all this time? Apparently no one got this information and not telling anybody. Now they have a lot to say.

THOMPSON: I mean, it’s a fair question, and I think, you know, I would just encourage people to read the book. It’s also why we didn’t just trust one cabinet secretary, right. I mean we tried to get as many as possible. But I think it’s fair question why they did not speak out, and, I can tell you, there was some self-reflection in our interviews, and think they’re still sort of tortured about it.

At the end, their normal answer, believe it or, you can take it for what it’s worth, but their answer usually was, if we spoke out, it wasn’t going to change him from running, it was only going to help Trump.

Watch the clip above via MSNBC.

The post MSNBC Host Asks Why Anyone Should Believe Biden Cabinet Members NOW If They Hid Decline THEN first appeared on Mediaite.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/xR4pnvP