Former President Bill Clinton insisted in an interview airing Sunday that former President Joe Biden was “in good shape” and he “never” saw him in cognitive decline in office.
While promoting his new book “The First Gentleman,” Clinton was asked by “CBS Sunday Morning” anchor Tracy Smith to comment on allegations made in the book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” by Axios’ Alex Thompson and CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Throughout “Original Sin,” Thompson and Tapper wrote there were ongoing efforts by the Biden administration to cover up signs of mental and physical decline by shielding him from the public and misleading political allies.
Former President Bill Clinton appears on “CBS Sunday Morning.” (Screenshot/CBS)
“Did you ever have a moment with him where you thought maybe he was unfit to run for president?” Smith asked.
“No. I thought he was a good president,” Clinton said. “The only concern I thought he had to deal with was, could anybody do that job until they were 86? And we’d had several long talks. I had never seen him and walked away thinking he can’t do this anymore. He was always on top of his brief.”
“You never saw any cognitive decline?” Smith asked.
“I didn’t know anything about any of this. And I haven’t read the book. I saw President Biden not very long ago, and I thought he was in good shape. But the book didn’t register with me because I never saw him that way,” Clinton answered.
When pressed about why he didn’t read the book, Clinton remarked that Biden wasn’t the president anymore and that he already thought he did a “good job.” Clinton also claimed the book was being used “as a way to blame him for the fact that [Donald] Trump was reelected.”
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The former president defended Biden from accusations that he wasn’t fit to run for another term. (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Though Clinton spoke highly of Biden’s job as president during the interview, he and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, were among some of the earliest Democratic figures to endorse then-Vice President Kamala Harris for president, just hours after Biden dropped out of the race.
Since “Original Sin” was published last month, the Democratic Party and the mainstream media have been getting renewed criticism for allegedly downplaying or covering up Biden’s shortcomings until his first debate with President Trump last year.
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Clinton, 78, is four years Biden’s junior. He took office in 1993 as one of the nation’s youngest-ever presidents at age 46, while Biden was 78 when his presidency began in 2021.
