National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, emphasized the severity of the scandal that is emerging concerning efforts to conceal information about Joe Biden’s health while he was president.

“We know from revelations that have been confirmed over the last couple of months, but suspected and really understood for years before that, that Joe Biden was in a bad way while he was president,” Cooke said, in the wake of the former president’s cancer diagnosis and amid new revelations about his mental acuity. The indications included but were not limited to Biden’s not recognizing friends and staff members, his poor debate performance, and how “he was embarrassingly senile in his interview with Robert Hur.”

Cooke said that “these things would all have been obvious to a doctor. And if that doctor as a result did not pick up on other maladies exhibited by Joe Biden, one has to wonder whether or not the doctor was either handpicked to avoid such inquiries or didn’t want to know.

“I don’t think that the medical malpractice option can be divorced from the mendacity option. . . . So my instinct is that this is part and parcel in one way or another of a serious scandal, which is the covering up of the terrible health of the president of the United States, so that his party might benefit.”

Cooke said this is a scandal “because of the plan that it implies, which was to keep Joe Biden on the ballot, have the public vote for him to be president again . . . and then have that person resign or die in favor of the second stringer who was not elected. That was the conscious, deliberate plan.”

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