Debate Moderator Jake Tapper’s History of Covering Up Biden Family Corruption and Scandal

President Joe Biden tapes an interview with Jake Tapper of “The Lead with Jake Tapper” in 2022.

When Joe Biden takes the debate stage against Donald Trump this week, he will have a particularly friendly face sitting across from him – CNN anchor Jake Tapper.

Back in 2020, Tapper played a crucial role in the collusion between the media and Biden campaign to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the election as he followed the direction of CNN executives to ignore the scandal – and even called it “too disgusting” to repeat on air. Then, after the election, Tapper played another key role in helping tamp down any further investigation into the Biden foreign influence-peddling effort that had enriched the vice president’s family by tens of millions of dollars.

This occurred when the Biden transition team surprised, indeed shocked, political observers by scheduling an interview with Tapper where President-elect Biden would talk about his son’s businesses at the very moment when these same operatives and an ever-servile media had successfully managed to kill off any real public notice or interest. What wasn’t known at the time was that Biden’s handlers were spooked the day before by otherwise barely-noticed Breitbart stories about the scandal. They were also aware of a growing IRS probe of Hunter that might become public, and so sought out the ever-compliant Tapper for a cream puff interview.

In that interview, the CNN anchor – proving himself a maestro of both preventative maintenance and damage control for the Biden forces – dutifully asked one harmless question that allowed the unchallenged Biden not only to blow by the scandal but, more importantly, gave him the chance to make a rather grand and statesman-like announcement that under no circumstances would his son’s businesses be doing any contract work with the federal government during his time in office. Far from laughing out loud, Tapper showed his solemn assent to Biden’s embrace of high ethical standards and asked not a single follow-up question.

Tapper’s interview was of course just a continuation of a vast collusive effort by all the major media outlets and Big Tech companies to censor the New York Post and bury the paper’s bombshell report on the Hunter Biden laptop as “Russian disinformation,” an effort in which CNN and Tapper played a particularly pivotal role. According to recordings released by Project Veritas, now-former CNN president Jeff Zucker and political director David Chalian urged staff in October 2020 not to cover the Post report on the younger Biden’s shady overseas business dealings.

“Obviously, we’re not going with the New York Post story right now on Hunter Biden,” Chalian is heard saying during a conference call on October 14, the same day the Post published its first story on the scandal. Eight days later, on October 22, even as more evidence pointing to the veracity of the Post’s initial reporting had come to light, Tapper said on air that the allegations against Hunter Biden were “too disgusting” to repeat and that the “right wing is going crazy.”

It was only after the election that Tapper and CNN begrudgingly acknowledged that the laptop was indeed legitimate. But however embarrassing that might seem, it was not enough to discourage Tapper from continuing to dutifully play the role of Biden PR agent.

Just one day before the December 3 interview with President-elect Biden, two stories appeared in Breitbart just as coverage of the laptop scandal was beginning to die down. The first detailed the aforementioned Project Veritas recordings exposing CNN’s effort to bury the laptop story ahead of the election. CNN executives in the tapes can be heard falsely claiming that “Senate Committees looked at and found nothing wrong in Joe Biden’s interaction with Ukrainians.”

The second Breitbart piece which was even more likely to spook the Biden forces detailed a letter from six conservative leaders written to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-MA) suggesting that his concern for public integrity should lead him to ask for Joe Biden’s bank’s records as vice president as a result of the Hunter Biden matter. Neal had notably been demanding President Trump’s tax records, even when virtually no evidence of wrongdoing existed in that case and ample evidence of wrongdoing existed in the case of Joe and Hunter Biden.

“Graver questions have arisen about the suspect activities of the vice president [Biden] and his son,” the letter reads. “Disclosure of the emails from Hunter Biden’s computer show him speaking openly about paying out money to the rest of the family including his father who was apparently referred to — and these are just two examples— as ‘the big guy’ or someone entitled to his ten percent.”

As the letter details, the Hunter Biden laptop appears to not only implicate Joe Biden in illegal activity, it also directly contradicts public statements made by the president, including his repeated claims that he had “no knowledge” of his son’s business dealings.

Just days after these stories appeared and the Tapper cream-puff interview was aired, on December 9, the Biden-Harris Transition Office announced under its official logo and stationery that the U.S. Attorney in Delaware was investigating Hunter Biden on a tax matter. This investigation would ultimately lead to an egregious sweetheart plea deal by U.S. Attorney David Weiss and his Department of Justice superiors which also suppressed evidence uncovered by IRS whistleblowers. That deal was ultimately tossed out by a judge for, among other things, granting Hunter broad immunity from any other more serious crimes he may have committed.

In short, the recent prosecutions of Hunter Biden for which the Biden Department of Justice is trying to claim credit were forced on them by public outcry following the judge’s ruling and House Republican investigations into the attempted DOJ cover-up, including the harassment of IRS whistleblowers.

In this context, Biden’s interview with Tapper on December 3 in which he intentionally reignited discussion of the laptop and his knowledge of his son’s business dealings was an effort, albeit a clumsy one, to control the narrative and pre-empt any further damaging revelations – an effort that Tapper played a more than willing role in.

After asking a series of softball questions, Tapper asked Joe Biden to respond to a report claiming that there was enough evidence to charge Hunter with tax fraud and gun charges. The elder Biden responded only that he was “proud” of his son.

It was here Tapper failed to ask any follow-up questions, including about the “10 held by H for the big guy” mentioned on the laptop, the Hunter Biden business partner who said Joe Biden attended meetings with Chinese executives, what exactly Joe Biden thinks his son’s business did to earn a $3.5 million check from the wife of the mayor of Moscow, or how Hunter Biden managed to land a spot on the board of a Ukrainian energy company despite having no experience or knowledge in the field.

All of these are questions that the American people undoubtedly wanted and still want answers to. Yet Tapper at a critical moment abandoned journalistic ethics and instead chose to be a willing media accomplice of the incoming administration and its attempted cover-up of First Family corruption.

Given Tapper’s record of actively working to cover for the sitting president, rather than embracing the proper role of a journalist to investigate potential scandals and corruption, Americans have little reason to expect any sort of objectivity or fairness from him when Trump and Biden take the stage on June 27. Again, it seems, the once respected media tradition of vigorously pursuing public corruption will be abandoned and discredited to prop up the media’s favored candidate.

B.C. Brutus is the pen name of a writer with previous experience in the legislative and executive branches.