Axios reporter Alex Thompson said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that former President Joe Biden’s inner circle of family and advisors chose loyalty to him over duty to the country.
Co-host Jonathan Lemire said, “So every White House, no matter which party Republican or Democrat administration part of the job is to make the president look good.”
He asked, “What makes this administration do what they did to protect their principal? Why is that a cover-up?”
Thompson said, “I think a lot of these things start innocently enough, to your point. You know, the speechwriting team early on realized that he couldn’t give the speeches the way he used to, and so the vocabulary shrank, the sentence shrank, the paragraph shrank. By the end of 2023, I think it becomes clear that there is a bigger issue than just him struggling in ways beyond a normal principal, and that there’s actually a decline and in his ability to do the job. And I think there is a point when loyalty — there’s always a tension between loyalty to the principle and loyalty to the larger institution — and I think it was at that point that there was that tension. And I think they chose loyalty to the principal.”
Host Joe Scarborough asked, “And who is they? Who is the who in this conspiracy, the inner circle?”
Thompson said, “The people in charge were Mike Donilon, Steve Riccheti, Bruce Reed, Anthony Bernal, the first lady’s chief of staff, the first lady, and Annie Tomasini. Those are the people that saw him the most and that had the most control over what he was doing and his day-to-day.”
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