Biden Struggled Through Fundraisers for Months Before the Debate. The Press Said Nothing.

"Hell has no fury like a press corps deceived," was how Axios described some reporters’ realization that they were allegedly "duped" by the White House over questions about President Joe Biden’s mental acuity.

The post Biden Struggled Through Fundraisers for Months Before the Debate. The Press Said Nothing. appeared first on .

"Hell has no fury like a press corps deceived," was how Axios described some reporters’ realization that they were allegedly "duped" by the White House over questions about President Joe Biden’s mental acuity.

The idea that journalists in the White House press corps, who spend virtually every day tracking the president’s whereabouts, were unaware of his general fitness for office came as a surprise to many. A large majority of voters, polls show, have said Biden is too old to run for reelection for at least a year.

But a Washington Free Beacon review of dozens of White House press corps pool reports—essentially transcripts and notes from Biden’s after-hours fundraisers and short remarks that are only distributed on an exclusive listserv—raises questions about whether Biden’s disastrous debate performance truly caught the press by surprise. For more than six months, those transcripts show Biden stumbling over his words, trailing off, and making baseless claims about his past and presidential record.

Nearly every fundraiser Biden held from December 2023 through July of this year features multiple verbal slips. At times, the reporter in attendance was unable to transcribe his words, such as during a May fundraiser in Seattle where the official transcript says "inaudible" seven times.

At other times, Biden's words were audible but the sentences incomplete or illogical. At a Washington, D.C., fundraiser in May, Biden said he was "honored to see that heritage across most of the diversem [sic]—and I—let me say it another way. I told you, when I get elected, I was going to have an administration that looked like America."

"[Trump] said in that Time interview, his—he has two goals, one of which is to drill, drill, drill," Biden said later at that same fundraiser, appearing to reference Trump's April interview with Time magazine. "He's determined to cut taxes for the very wealthy while cutting Social Security and Medicare and do so much to—other damage."

Less than a week before that, Biden had difficulty explaining his position on the Affordable Care Act to donors in New York, a topic which prompted his worst cognitive episode during June’s presidential debate. "Because Obamacare—and when [former White House chief of staff] Bill [Daley] was helping the President—is—is what the Affordable Care—Healthcare Act is," Biden said at the fundraiser. "It's Obamacare on steroids. But he can't—because it was Barack Obama, he wants to get rid of it. And he's determined to get rid of So-—to reduce Social Security, rai-—raise the age to get rid of Medicare."

No outlet with access to that pool report wrote about Biden’s difficulty in articulating his opponent’s health care plan. The White House Correspondents' Association, which runs the White House pool, did not respond to a request for comment or for audio recordings of the fundraisers mentioned in this report.

Clues about Biden’s diminished capacity in private meetings were hard to come by before June’s debate. Although public footage of Biden's missteps was dismissed by both the press corps and the White House as distorted "cheap fakes," some of his largest backers, such as Hollywood megastar George Clooney, have now admitted that "the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at [a June fundraiser] was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020."

Reporting has surfaced since June regarding, in the words of New York Magazine, a "conspiracy of silence to protect" Biden, which involved members of the media. CNN reported on July 2 that some White House reporters "acknowledge" that "Biden’s mental fitness could have been better covered," but was not, in part, because "Biden’s age was … a right-wing talking point for years."

Fear of spreading a supposed "right-wing talking point" may explain why no reporter who received a pool report from a March fundraiser bothered to mention Biden's trouble with explaining his own rationale for running for president in 2020.

"I don't—you know, I made a speech when I—you got me nominated and I was first elected be-—while I was running in 2020—at—at Independence Hall, saying our democracy was at risk," Biden said.

There, Biden also falsely claimed that Trump wants to "enact another $2,000 tax cut—they’re not bad, if you can pay for it—the very wealthy and the biggest corporations." A White House pool reporter later edited the transcript to correct Biden by replacing "thousand" with "trillion."

Other falsehoods from Biden fundraisers went unmentioned by the press, too. On January 30, Biden addressed donors in Jupiter, Florida, and said his administration was "saving the planet" because "we built a national network for 500,000 EV st-—charging stations." In reality, just seven EV chargers have been built with federal money since 2021, the Free Beacon reported in June. A Department of Transportation spokesman later told the Free Beacon that "the goal has always been for 500,000 publicly available chargers total, not 500,000 government funded chargers." The department did not respond to a request for comment about Biden’s remarks at the Florida fundraiser.

Biden had other verbal stumbles at that fundraiser, such as when he tried to warn what a second Trump administration would do to the country.

"And Trump says, quote, he's—and he's seeking to, quote, ‘terminate elements of the United States Constitution,’ threatening— threatening our—to embrace—and he embraces political violence," he said.

Although it is not clear whether every fundraiser Biden spoke at over the last year included a teleprompter, there is evidence to suggest that is the case. The Washington Post reported earlier this month that "[i]n the past year, Biden has almost never appeared in public without the use of the teleprompter," a fact that has "disappointed" donors.

Biden addressed the press at a fundraiser in New York on Feb. 7 and criticized the news industry, charging that "there’s no editors anymore."

The post Biden Struggled Through Fundraisers for Months Before the Debate. The Press Said Nothing. appeared first on .