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Say, maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea by the Bidens to blame White House advisers and debate preppers for Joe’s cognitive collapse Thursday night after all. That spin came directly from the Camp David emergency family meeting, when the Bidens decided to go all-out in finding scapegoats for the president’s aphasiac performance. They took aim at Ron Klain and Anita Dunn in particular, for supposedly failing to prepare Biden for the CNN debate.
That got almost instant blowback from someone one step removed from inside the house, former press secretary Jen Psaki:
There are a lot of important discussions and debates about this political moment we are in and the path forward, but the notion that the issue at the debate was the prep process done by people like @RonaldKlain and Anita Dunn who have successfully prepped many candidates…— Jen Psaki (@jrpsaki) July 1, 2024
. including Obama, Clinton and Biden is absurd. It was a bad debate. I have no doubt they were tough, strategic and direct. (Believe me I have seen them in action) but prep does not always determine the outcome. Biden was bad. Important convos about what happens next. But if you are directing your ire at “prep” you are not talking about the right things.
Psaki usually serves to carry Biden’s water in her media appearances, so this sharp retort raised a number of eyebrows. « Important convos about what happens next » is exactly what the blame-the-preppers spin was designed to prevent. The Bidens had apparently strategized that throwing a few trusted friends under the bus would assuage the media and allow them to get back to normal.
Instead, the attack on insiders seems to have touched off a leak-fest mutiny in all phases of Team Biden. David wrote about the New York Times’ report on whispers from insiders around Biden expressing concern about his cognitive capacity.
