Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted for the first time this weekend that she engaged in a cover-up to hide former President Joe Biden’s alarming mental decline while in office.
Psaki said she lied when she repeatedly defended Biden’s mental acuity to the American people and media, while she privately recognized the seriousness of his cognitive decline during his June 2024 presidential debate performance.
During her recent appearance on Semafor’s “Mixed Signals” podcast, Psaki revealed she told colleagues the debate was a “f***ing disaster” as she watched Biden struggle against Donald Trump.
Yet in the days and weeks following that pivotal moment, she repeatedly lied to viewers on her MSNBC program that Biden remained mentally fit for office.
“I never saw that person — not a single time, and I was in the Oval Office every day – that was on that debate stage,” Psaki claimed during the podcast interview, attempting to distance herself from any prior knowledge of Biden’s condition.
After the debate, Psaki used her platform at MSNBC to downplay concerns about Biden’s mental fitness and frame his performance as merely a “bad night” rather than more evidence of his serious cognitive issues.
“I’m not a doctor, aging happens quite quickly,” Psaki said during the podcast. However, numerous incidents during her tenure as press secretary — including Biden’s repeated falls on Air Force One stairs and communication struggles during softball interviews — raise further questions about her credibility.
A December 2024 Wall Street Journal investigation found that Biden’s team had attempted a “deliberate and years-long cover-up” of his declining cognitive health, including hiring a vocal coach, scheduling around his “bad days,” and instructing press aides to exclude negative stories about the president from news clips.
Still, Psaki rejected the term “cover-up” as “loaded” and “dangerous,” comparing it to Watergate. “I would like to think they would not be a part of an active ‘let’s hide from the public what we see happening privately,'” she said of her former White House colleagues.
The fallout from Biden’s disastrous debate performance was swift and devastating.
Within weeks, Biden was forced out of the presidential race by Democratic Party leaders. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who later lost to Trump in a landslide.
Axios reporter Alex Thompson, who is co-authoring a book on Biden’s decline with CNN’s Jake Tapper, addressed this failure of transparency at the recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Thompson said.
Thompson also acknowledged the mainsteam media’s role in the cover-up, where they regularly attacked independent conservative outlets like The Horn News for covering the story.
“We—myself included—missed a lot of this story. And some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows,” he said while accepting the Aldo Beckman Award for his reporting on Biden.
Psaki left the White House in May 2022 and claimed she had only seen Biden once since then. She defended her former boss and blamed Republicans for showcasing Biden’s regular senior moments, claiming “the majority of which wasn’t true, in 2019-2022.”
Still, Psaki continued to make claims on MSNBC following the debate where she minimized concerns about Biden’s mental state, even as she now admits she recognized his mental health as a “disaster” in real-time.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” — George Orwell, 1984.