Now it can be told: “From the moment Biden shuffled on stage at the CNN debate and bragged about beating Medicare in June 2024, there has been a steady stream of revelations about all the Democrats who were (privately) concerned or even shocked by the extent of Biden’s cognitive decline,” our Andrew Stiles writes. Those revelations have accelerated thanks to two recently published books “on the Democratic Party’s abject failure to stop Biden from running for reelection.” Stiles has the definitive list. Here’s a preview:
- During a September 2021 meeting with Democratic aides and lawmakers, Biden “rambled off topic, telling unrelated stories about his days in the Senate,” according to Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House. Some attendees took it “as evidence that he was losing his grip.” Oh well.
- One year later, the journalist Chris Whipple, author of Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History,” became suspicious of Biden’s condition “when he asked to interview Biden for a book about the first two years of his presidency” and was granted access “on the condition that he provide the questions in advance via email.” “It seemed clear that the president’s aides didn’t want to risk having him interact in real time with a reporter,” he wrote—nearly three years after the fact.
- By 2024, just about every Dem operative was in on the open secret, including Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, Bill Daley, who (privately) confronted a longtime Biden aide over the president’s use of a teleprompter at a small Saint Patrick’s Day gathering. “This is crazy,” he recounted in an interview with Whipple. “How are they letting this fucking thing go on?”
READ MORE: THEY KNEW: 30 Times Democrats Worried (Privately) About Biden’s Decline Before the Debate Fiasco
Rewriting history: Minnesota AG Keith Ellison has suggested the Feeding Our Future fraudsters who siphoned $250 million in federal child nutrition funds under his office’s nose would have gotten away with it if not for his help with an FBI investigation. Then a leaked audio recording showed he offered to “help” the fraudsters during a friendly meeting he took with them in December 2021, when that investigation was in full swing. How does Ellison explain it all? Not convincingly, the Free Beacon‘s Collin Anderson reports.
Ellison defended the “routine” meeting in a Star Tribune op-ed, saying he did not know whom he was sitting down with ahead of time and was not aware of the FBI’s investigation into Feeding Our Future until after the powwow. “His defense flatly contradicts a statement his office released months after the meeting crediting him with working ‘for two solid years’ to ‘hold Feeding Our Future accountable,’ including by assisting the investigation in its early stages,” writes Anderson.
Ellison also said he “did nothing” for the fraudsters and “took nothing from them.” Nine days after the meeting, however, “he accepted four campaign contributions totaling $10,000 from men tied to Feeding Our Future. His op-ed does not address them.” We’d tell Ellison to call his office, but we’re not sure he knows the number.
Mostly peaceful detainees: The latest #Resistance darling is detained Columbia activist Mohsen Mahdawi. Vermont senator Peter Welch met with him at an immigration facility in the state on Monday, describing Mahdawi as a “friend from the Upper Valley” who has “worked with some of your Jewish brothers and sisters at Columbia.” Mahdawi, in turn, said his “work has been centered on peacemaking” and that most of his “partners at Columbia’s campus and beyond are Jews and Israelis.” Not quite.
“In the wake of Oct. 7, Mahdawi said he could ’empathize’ with Hamas’s decision to launch the attack and used a siren to drown out pro-Israel students protesting for the release of Israeli child hostages,” our Alana Goodman and Jessica Schwalb write. Columbia students who have crossed paths with Mahdawi, meanwhile, said he “was friendly with some Jewish students—including pro-Israel ones—a few years ago through his involvement with a campus Buddhist club. But those relationships soured after Oct. 7, the students said, when Mahdawi became focused on denouncing Israel and showed a reluctance to condemn Hamas.”
Mahdawi was featured in a December 2023 60 Minutes segment on campus activism at Columbia. He said he does not “justify what Hamas has done” but rather “can empathize” with their attack. Got that?
Away from the Beacon:
- The Trump administration “made at least three overtures to a Harvard representative in an attempt to restart talks” last week, but the “school’s leadership rebuffed them all,” according to the New York Times. So much courage!
- Executive producer Bill Owens is out at 60 Minutes, he told his staff in a memo, saying he is no longer “allowed to run the show as I have always run it.” It could have to do with a hostile interview the show aired with a released Israeli hostage, a segment that reportedly angered Paramount controlling shareholder Shari Redstone.
- Bill Gates routinely uses his charitable foundation to send money to China, including government entities. That could change under a potential Trump executive order banning nonprofits from sending grant money overseas.