Joe Biden‘s ex spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre shocked CBS Mornings hosts as she doubled down on claims she saw no signs of the former president’s declining mental and physical ability during her time in the White House.
Jean-Pierre appeared on the show Monday to promote her upcoming memoir which details her decision to part ways with the Democratic Party.
During the discussion about the former press secretary’s time under Biden, Gayle King touched on a portion of the book where Jean-Pierre writes she ‘never saw the decline’, prompting the stunned host to ask ‘How?!’
‘So really I want everybody to know that I take this question incredibly seriously,’ Jean-Pierre responded.
‘I was his White House press secretary, which means I had a role that saw him practically every day.
‘I never saw someone who “wasn’t there,”‘ she continued. ‘I saw someone who understood policy, pushed us on policy and also understood history.
‘There were times where he would call me into the Oval Office and I would be like, “Oh no, oh no,” because I knew that whatever he was going to ask me was going to be direct, was going to be about a story he read, about how we’re pushing back, about how we’re pushing a message forward,’ Jean-Pierre recounted.
She went on to note that the Biden administration never planned to deny that the president was getting older.
‘We’ve always said, “We’re not gonna say he didn’t age,”‘ Jean-Pierre said. ‘He aged and he poked fun at it.
‘We always owned up and with age comes what happens when you get older -‘
‘Which is?’ Tony Dokoupil pressed, though Jean-Pierre avoided the question.
Karine Jean-Pierre left CBS Mornings hosts stunned on Monday when she insisted she saw no signs of former President Joe Biden’s declining mental and physical ability
Jean-Pierre has said that in her private meetings with Biden, he ‘understood policy, pushed us on policy and also understood history’
During her tenure, Jean-Pierre repeatedly denied there was anything wrong with the then-president from the briefing room, despite videos of him tripping over the stairs and stumbling over his words.
Jean-Pierre instead called those videos ‘cheap fakes’ that were deceptively edited to make the president look bad.
In the weeks before Biden dropped out, the former press secretary even assured reporters that the then 81-year-old was ‘sharp as ever’ and that when she interacted with him behind closed doors, Biden was engaged ‘strong and resolute.’
At another point in the interview, Jean-Pierre claimed she did not actually get to speak with the president before his disastrous debate against Donald Trump.
Instead, Jean-Pierre said the president was swarmed by his campaign staffers onboard Air Force One as well as his family – and she did not get to see Biden until after the debate was over.
Even then, though, she has said she was left stunned by the pressure the Democratic party put on her boss to drop out of the race.
When he finally did, Jean-Pierre said she was left ‘enraged and heartbroken.’
Jean-Pierre repeatedly denied the president’s physical and mental acuity were declining despite repeated videos of him tripping
‘I never thought Biden would step down,’ the former press secretary wrote in the book titled Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.
She continued: ‘The way the Democratic leadership was coming after him, I believed he would fight back harder.’
The excerpt echoes remarks she gave in February at the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
At the time, she told how the ‘toughest thing to see’ was a ‘firing squad’ during the weeks after Biden’s debate, when party stalwarts pushed him to drop out – arguing he could not defeat Donald Trump with his lousy approval ratings.
‘I had never seen anything like it before,’ she intoned. ‘I had never seen a party do that in the way that they did. And it was hurtful and sad to see that happening – a firing squad around a person who I believe was a true patriot.’
Jean-Pierre’s memoir detailing her decision to part ways with the Democratic Party goes on sale tomorrow
She writes in her memoir that the Democratic Party’s abandonment of Biden ultimately led her to become an independent.
‘Now the cloud of unease hovering over me solidified into an idea about how I could possibly do something different. How I could channel my disappointment into some kind of concrete action that would allow me to fight for what I believed in without giving blind loyalty to a party I felt no longer deserved it,’ Jean-Pierre remembered thinking.
‘You know what? I’m going to become an independent,’ she continued. ‘I don’t think I can stomach being in the Democratic Party anymore.’
The memoir has been described as an ‘urgent, timely analysis’ with publisher Hatchette urging Americans to ‘vote their values and maintain individuality within party lines.’
But some of her former colleagues have hit out at the former press secretary, whom they accused of being a ‘grifter’ for cashing in with the book.
‘I laughed reading her book announcement that claims she “presents clear arguments and provocative evidence” when our party failed to make a compelling argument for Democrats with her as one of our most visible messenger for three years,’ one former Biden administration official told DailyMail.com.
‘Probably best to purge the party of our most delusional and self-serving personalities,’ the former official added.
Another operative told Politico it was ‘the most grifty thing I’ve seen in a long time, and that’s saying something in Washington.’
The tome, which runs 256 pages, goes on sale tomorrow.
