The shocking details of how many people were pulling the strings with former President Joe Biden during his time in the White House continue to unravel.
Now, a surprising report has broken with information that things with Biden were so bad, his own team cut off access to his personal phone!
In a bombshell new report, three journalists, Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, claim that Biden’s aides appeared to disconnect the phone number after attempts from the trio to contact the former president for interviews.
In an excerpt in their new book titled “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America” Pager alleges that he got ahold of Biden’s number who agreed to talk to him when he called, but shortly after he was met with fury from the former president’s team.
“My brief conversation with Mr. Biden prompted a cascade of concern among his top aides. One screamed at me for calling the former president directly. One screamed at me for calling the former president directly. Others texted furiously, trying to figure out how I had obtained Mr. Biden’s phone number,” Pager wrote, according to an exclusive interview in The New York Times.
Pager says he later called Biden again because he seemed open to talking, but the next two calls went to voicemail. His automated greeting, Pager stated, was just “Joe.”
“Two days later, that greeting was replaced by a message from Verizon Wireless: ‘The number you dialed has been changed, disconnected or is no longer in service,’” Pager wrote.
In other words, the media couldn’t even get ahold of Biden.
Pager wrote that his incident with Biden was a reflection of how the aides insulated the former president during his campaign.
“Mr. Biden’s aides never had him meet with his campaign’s pollsters. Instead, they often presented overly optimistic outlooks of the political landscape, alarming members of the campaign staff, who looked for ways to bypass his longtime advisers Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon to get information to the president,” Pager said.
“For the most part, they failed to reach him.”
A spokeswoman for Biden declined to comment to Pager on his story at the time of publication.
However, the story comes as it’s widely known that President Donald Trump frequently takes calls from reporters.
According to a report from The Daily Caller, throughout Trump’s first six months in the White House in 2025, reporters across Washington, D.C., have had an easy time reaching the president on the phone.
And in some cases, Trump has even called reporters to get his message out.
After news broke of Trump’s approval to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities last month, the president gave six phone interviews to reporters across the media, including ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, NBC News’ Kristen Welker, Reuters’ Steve Holland, Axios’ Barak Ravid and Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Sean Hannity.
Many of the aforementioned reporters have butted heads with Trump and his team, but still have an open line of communication with the president, including Welker.
NEW: I just spoke to President Trump in a brief phone call. He said the operation in Iran was a “great success.”
He added it was a “complete and total success.” He then noted he had to go because he’s about to “make a speech” about it.
More as we know it on @NBCNews.
— Kristen Welker (@kwelkernbc) June 22, 2025
Even well before being elected, Trump was open in communicating with his media adversaries.
Moments after Biden dropped out of the 2024 election, CNN’s Kaitlin Collins was on the phone with Trump getting his thoughts.
“In a phone call with CNN minutes after Biden announced his exit from the 2024 race, former President Trump responded, ‘He is the worst president in the history of our country. He goes down as the single worst president by far in the history of our country,” Collins wrote in a tweet.
In a phone call with CNN minutes after Biden announced his exit from the 2024 race, former President Trump responded, “He is the worst president in the history of our country. He goes down as the single worst president by far in the history of our country.” While it's unclear who…
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) July 21, 2024
And even during times when interviews within the Oval Office have been denied by the Trump team, he would still pick up the phone.
This includes an instance after The Atlantic was denied an Oval Office interview, the reporters decided to call Trump and try to interview him that way. He picked up, and later their Oval Office request was approved.
And another instance happened in June, when Trump gave Fox News’ John Roberts a call after Gavin Newsom refuted that the pair had spoken on the phone in the last day, like the president said they did. The president provided a phone log of the call that had happened a few days earlier than he claimed.