International
Years Of Media Misdirection Over Biden Mental State Are Unraveling Before Our Eyes

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By JASON COHEN
Corporate media’s years-long effort to sweep questions about President Joe Biden’s mental fitness under the rug took a devastating blow after his debate with former President Donald Trump.
Voters have long been concerned about Biden’s mental fitness being insufficient to be president, and Republicans have repeatedly raised doubts about his cognitive competence, including during the 2020 campaign as he made numerous gaffes. Despite concerns from Americans, legacy media outlets have consistently downplayed their legitimacy and criticized those who voiced them, even suggesting the narrative of incompetence stems from Russia.
WATCH:
Joe Scarborough, March:
“I’m gonna tell you the truth, and f* you if you can’t handle the truth: This version of Biden is the best Biden ever” pic.twitter.com/RWij2c4Zfg— Philip Reichert (@PhilipReichert) June 28, 2024
CNN published an analysis in August 2021, concluding that concerns about Biden’s cognitive capabilities were mostly a “moot” issue. The analysis suggested it was primarily Republicans who were pushing the narrative that Biden is diminished.
“This is the sort of gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that drive people away from public life,” the analysis by former CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza stated. “If Republicans have some sort of proof that Biden is declining, they should bring it forward. If they don’t, they should stop doing what they’re doing. Immediately.”
The NYT published an opinion piece in November 2020 titled “Stop Worrying About Biden’s Age. We Need His Wisdom Right Now” that stated, “I can’t be bothered with the despicable Sleepy-Joe canard that the right is peddling, except to say that if this is what dementia looks like, I don’t know what to call my own flashes of forgetfulness, in which words, keys and hair scrunchies regularly desert me.”
Moreover, The Hill published a piece in November 2019 suggesting Biden’s frequent gaffes are due to a stutter he has had since he was a child rather than cognitive decline.
“Some have been quick to question Biden’s mental fitness, hinting at a possible age-related cognitive decline (he just turned 77 years old), but it’s important to consider that many of those missteps could have been caused by his lifelong struggle with a speech impediment,” The Hill stated.
Special counsel Robert Hur published a report in February finding Biden mismanaged classified documents, but he opted not to seek charges against the president because of the improbability of obtaining a conviction based on the likelihood a jury may perceive the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Corporate media defended Biden’s lucidity and attacked Hur as partisan and deceptive after a transcript of their interview was published, revealing memory lapses, such as appearing to forget when he began and ended his vice presidency and the date of his late son Beau’s death.
For instance, the NYT reported that “Biden appeared clearheaded most of the time” and that he “went into great detail about many matters,” while The Washington Post noted that “Biden doesn’t come across as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.”
NBC News acknowledged Biden’s “memory lapses” during the interview, but highlighted the “detailed exchanges” that took place in its headline.
Several clips about Biden in June amassed attention for underscoring the 81-year-old’s diminished fitness and increased gaffes, including the president freezing and wandering off. The White House, in the month leading up to the debate, characterized concerning videos of Biden as “cheap fakes,” and the media picked up on the narrative.
“‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead,” a headline by The Washington Post on June 14 read.
“The use of these clips is an especially pernicious couple of examples of manipulated video… because it’s intended to create a false narrative that doesn’t reflect the event as it occurred,” the outlet asserted, stating that the style of editing made them misleading. The NYT published an article titled “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts” on June 21, similarly claiming the cropping of the videos makes them deceptive.
The latest panic about Biden’s age and fitness has led to the president facing growing high-profile calls to drop out of the race, such as from a prominent columnist and a Democratic representative. Five significant media publications, including the NYT, called for Biden to withdraw, and two urged him to at least consider it, The Hill reported on Sunday.
“There’s ample speculation online about what the news media did and didn’t do with respect to covering the president’s age,” NYT executive editor Joe Kahn said in a note to NYT journalists on Wednesday that the outlet shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “What I’ve seen and what our readers have experienced from our team is steadfast, fact-based reporting on the subject that began a couple of years ago as we documented Biden’s age-related challenges in multiple, industry-leading articles. We have stayed on that story at every turn, always with nuance and context, through today’s outstanding report.”
The coverage of Biden’s competence should have been more intense, some reporters who cover the White House told CNN anonymously on Tuesday. One reporter told the outlet they erred by not probing more after Hur’s report.
“The right-wing media was calling him senile from day one, and that wasn’t true,” the reporter told CNN. “Then whenever you report on the age you were in some ways solidifying, giving credence to some people that were actually of bad faith.”
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough said in March that the current “version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever. Not a close second and I’ve known him for years… If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it.”
Scarborough asked on Friday, after the debate, if Biden should withdraw from the race, raising concerns about his capability to run the country and beat Trump.
The Washington Post, NBC and The Hill did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Crime
‘We’re Going To Lose’: Steve Bannon Warns Withholding Epstein Files Would Doom GOP

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Jason Cohen
Former White House adviser Steve Bannon warned on Friday that Republicans would suffer major losses if President Donald Trump’s administration does not move to release documents related to deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and associations.
Axios reported on Sunday that a two-page memo showed the Department Of Justice (DOJ) and FBI found no evidence Epstein kept a “client list” or was murdered, but public doubts have continued. Bannon said on “Bannon’s War Room” that failure to release information would lead to the dissipation of one-tenth of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement and significant losses for the Republican Party in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.
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“It’s not about just a pedophile ring and all that, it’s about who governs us, right? And that’s why it’s not going to go away … For this to go away, you’re going to lose 10% of the MAGA movement,” Bannon said. “If we lose 10% of the MAGA movement right now, we’re going to lose 40 seats in ’26, we’re going to lose the [presidency]. They don’t even have to steal it, which they’re going to try to do in ’28, because they’re going to sit there and they go, ‘They’ve disheartened the hardest-core populist nationalists’ — that’s always been who governs us.”
Bannon also demanded the publication of all the Epstein documents on “Bannon’s War Room” Thursday. He called on the DOJ to go to court and push for the release of the documents or for Trump to appoint a special counsel to manage the publication.
Epstein was arrested in 2019 and charged with sex trafficking. Shortly after, he was found dead in his New York Metropolitan Correctional Center cell shortly after. Officials asserted that he hanged himself in his cell.
However, Epstein’s death has sparked years of theories because of the malfunctioning of prison cameras, along with guards admitting to falsifying documents about checking on the then-inmate. The DOJ inspector general later confirmed that multiple surveillance cameras outside of his cell were inoperable, while others captured the common area outside his door.
Both Bannon and Daily Caller News Foundation co-founder Tucker Carlson have speculated that Epstein had connections to intelligence agencies.
Former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta allegedly indicated that Epstein was tied to intelligence, according to Vicky Ward in The Daily Beast.
espionage
FBI’s Dan Bongino may resign after dispute about Epstein files with Pam Bondi

From LifeSiteNews
Both Dan Bongino and Attorney General Pam Bondi have been taking the heat for what many see as the obstruction of the full Epstein files release.
FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino took the day off on Friday after an argument with Attorney General Pam Bondi over the handling of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s case files.
One source close to Bongino told Axios that “he ain’t coming back.” Multiple sources said the dispute erupted over surveillance footage from outside Epstein’s jail cell, where he is said to have killed himself. Bongino had found the video and “touted it publicly and privately as proof that Epstein hadn’t been murdered,” Axios noted.
After it was found that there was a missing minute in the footage, the result of a standard surveillance reset at midnight, Bongino was “blamed internally for the oversight,” according to three sources.
Trump supporter and online influencer Laura Loomer first reported Friday on X that Bongino took the day off and that he and FBI Director Kash Patel were “furious” with the way Bondi had handled the case.
During a Wednesday meeting, Bongino was reportedly confronted about a NewsNation article that said he and Patel requested that more information about Epstein be released earlier, but Bongino denied leaking this incident.
“Pam said her piece. Dan said his piece. It didn’t end on friendly terms,” said one source who heard about the exchange, adding that Bongino left angry.
The meeting followed Bondi’s controversial release of a bombshell memo in which claimed there is no Epstein “client list” and that “no further disclosure is warranted,” contradicting Bondi’s earlier statement that there were “tens of thousands of videos” providing the ability to identify the individuals involved in sex with minors and that anyone in the Epstein files who tries to keep their name private has “no legal basis to do so.”
The memo “is attempting to sweep the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal under the rug,” according to independent investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger in a superb analysis published on X.
“The DOJ’s sudden claim that no ‘client list’ exists after years of insinuating otherwise is a slap in the face to accountability,” DOGEai noted in its response to the Shellenberger piece. “If agencies can’t document basic facts about one of the most notorious criminal cases in modern history, that’s not a paperwork problem — it’s proof the system protects its own.”
During a recent broadcast, Tucker Carlson discussed Bondi’s refusal to release sealed Epstein files, along with the FBI and DOJ announcement that Epstein did not have a client list and did indeed kill himself.
Carlson offered the theory that U.S. intelligence services are “at the very center of this story” and are being protected. His guest, Saagar Enjeti, agreed. “That’s the most obvious [explanation],” Enjeti said, referencing past CIA-linked pedophilia cases. He noted the agency had avoided prosecutions for fear suspects would reveal “sources and methods” in court.
Investigative journalist Whitney Webb has discussed in her book “One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein,” how the intelligence community leverages sex trafficking through operatives like Epstein to blackmail politicians, members of law enforcement, businessmen, and other influential figures.
Just one example of evidence of this, according to Webb, is former U.S. Secretary of Labor and U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta’s explanation as to why he agreed to a non-prosecution deal in the lead-up to Epstein’s 2008 conviction of procuring a child for prostitution. Acosta told Trump transition team interviewers that he was told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” adding that he was told to “leave it alone,” The Daily Beast reported.
While Epstein himself never stood trial, as he allegedly committed suicide while under “suicide watch” in his jail cell in 2019, many have questioned the suicide and whether the well-connected financier was actually murdered as part of a cover-up.
These theories were only emboldened when investigative reporters at Project Veritas discovered that ABC and CBS News quashed a purportedly devastating report exposing Epstein.
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