A former top journalist at CNN offered up a “confession” and an “apology” on Thursday by admitting that he should have “pushed harder” on covering President Joe Biden’s mental decline.
Chris Cillizza, the former Washington Post political reporter who later joined CNN as editor-at-large before leaving the network in 2022, posted a video on his YouTube page on Thursday acknowledging that he failed to adequately cover signs of Biden’s slippage even though Republicans prodded him to do so.
“As a reporter, I have a confession to make,” Cillizza said in the video clip on Thursday.
“I should have pushed harder earlier for more information about Joe Biden’s mental and physical well-being and any signs of decline.”
According to Cillizza, Republicans would “regularly ping me” during his tenure at CNN to quiz him as to why he didn’t address obvious signs of the 82-year-old president’s deterioration.
Cillizza recalled how he would “brush them off” because he had not seen “evidence” that Biden was faltering — despite numerous verbal gaffes, physical stumbles and instance during which the president appeared to have lost his train of thought while speaking in public.
A bombshell report by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday detailed how Biden’s aides carefully stage-managed his presidency in order to conceal the extent of his age-related decline.
According to the Journal, meetings that were scheduled between Biden and top national security officials as early as the spring of 2021 would either be rescheduled or could be scrapped altogether because the president “has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day.”
Lawmakers told the Journal that they had limited contact with the president, who was largely insulated by his fiercely loyal staff.
The former CNN pundit, who read excerpts from the Journal report in his video, said that he accepted the White House’s position that Biden was fine and that he was deterred from pursuing the matter due to the guilt he felt about “age shaming” the president.
“The White House and the people around Joe Biden were absolutely adamant that suggesting anything- asking the question about whether he was in some physical, mental or both decline, was offensive,” Cillizza said on Thursday.
“‘How could you? It’s age shaming.’ And I think that impacted me at some level,” he admitted.
Cillizza said that “while I did ask the question from time to time… I didn’t really push on it, if I’m being honest.”
“Now, once I left CNN and once it became a little bit more clear to me about Biden’s age, I think I did write pretty regularly and talk pretty regularly about how I wasn’t sure that this guy was up to it,” the former pundit added.
“And then obviously, after the June 27 debate, everybody, including me, was writing and talking about it.”
The debate, which made it obvious to the public that Biden was diminished, led Democratic power brokers including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to nudge him from the presidential race.
Biden then endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who went on to lose the Nov. 5 election to Donald Trump.
“I probably should’ve pushed harder on the Biden age stuff because, in retrospect, it’s clear that the people close to him knew that at best, he had some good days and some bad days,” Cillizza acknowledged.
“June 27, the debate clearly was a bad day. But if the bad day was that bad, as bad as he performed on that debate stage, the fact that he had been president without a whole lot of questions being asked about his physical and mental decline…I think is a little bit concerning and begs the question of, like, when did people near him know, what did they know, and why did they not share?” Cillizza said.
Meghan McCain, the daughter of the late Sen. John McCain, blasted Cillizza while noting that “there was no bigger and more obsessive ‘McCain truther’ regarding my dad’s age when he ran in 2008 [when he was 71 mind you) than Chris.”
“He ignored Biden because he’s a hack,” McCain wrote on X.