The Bidens slammed CNN’s Jake Tapper after he co-wrote a book painting an unflattering picture of the family, including the notion that they were involved in covering up former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline as he campaigned for a second term last year. 

Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, written by Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, was released on Tuesday. During an interview promoting the book that day, Tapper characterized the family as severely dysfunctional. And he described Joe Biden’s son Hunter as serving in an “almost chief of staff” capacity for the family — a role the CNN host found “bizarre because I think he is provably, demonstrably unethical, sleazy and prone to horrible decisions.” 

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Hunter Biden soundly condemned Tapper the following day, claiming the CNN anchor repeatedly called him in 2015 in an effort to get an exclusive on when his brother, Beau Biden, died.

Hunter Biden said he ran into Tapper at the 2018 Super Bowl in Minneapolis, several years after Beau Biden’s death. Hunter Biden said the pair had a bitter confrontation over Tapper’s alleged attempts to get the scoop on Beau Biden’s time of death. “Go f*** yourself, Jake,” Hunter Biden reportedly yelled at the CNN anchor, telling Breaker Wednesday he was “furious” because “it would be impossible to forget or misremember something that upsetting and out of line during one of the toughest moments of my life.” 

Tapper, however, told Puck that it was a “patently false lie” that he tried to contact Hunter Biden as his brother was dying at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. 

“At no point in my life have I ever called Hunter Biden — I’ve never even had his phone number — and I would never have contacted a person’s immediate family during such a challenging and personal time,” he said.

While the CNN anchor did confirm he interacted with Joe Biden’s son at the Super Bowl, he denied claims that the conversation with Hunter revolved around Beau. 

“Hunter did once confront me at a Super Bowl party, but it was over an unrelated issue — coverage he wrongly believed I had done regarding divorce allegations of drug use and using prostitutes, which I actually had never done,” Tapper said. He did discuss some of those claims during an October 2014 CNN segment.

The two men’s renewed feud comes after Original Sin’s release. The book focuses on Joe Biden’s apparent descent into dementia over the past few years, as detailed by close associates and Democratic colleagues. As part of his inner circle, Biden’s family, including Hunter Biden and former first lady Jill Biden, was instrumental in sweeping details about the former president’s health under the rug and shielding him from scrutiny in a bid to keep his campaign for reelection alive last year, according to the book.

On Tuesday, Tapper outlined additional scathing details about Hunter Biden during an interview with journalist Katie Couric while promoting the book. During his appearance, Tapper described the former president’s son, who has struggled with drugs, as “provably, demonstrably unethical, sleazy and prone to horrible decisions.” 

Although he praised Beau Biden as a “great, upstanding guy,” calling his death a “real loss for the country,” the CNN anchor told people to “just look at the record” when it came to Hunter Biden. 

“I mean, after his brother died, he cheated on his wife with his brother’s widow, and then got her addicted to crack,” Tapper said. “And the idea of letting him drive the family car, as it were, is just really, really questionable. But one of the things we heard from somebody who is close to the family, shall we say, is that denial is a big part of the family.” 

Meanwhile, Jill Biden, Tapper said, was driven to cover up her husband’s decline into dementia because she thought she was protecting both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden from a Trump victory, which she feared would result in prosecutions against her son. 

“She thought she was protecting her husband. She thought she was protecting Hunter from a Republican president who was going to prosecute him. She thought she was protecting the country from Donald Trump,” Tapper said. 

Tapper’s book also disclosed details about Hunter Biden’s encounters with the law, including his criminal trials last year, which resulted in two convictions on gun and tax felony charges.

Tapper and Thompson wrote that Joe Biden repeatedly offered to testify in his son’s trial on federal gun charges in Delaware last June, a move they said would have fueled controversy over “a sitting president taking the witness stand in a case involving his own son.”

“Probing questions and old text messages presented by the prosecution … made the president’s son look more like an erratic dad than a good father who was getting sober in the week after he bought the gun,” the journalists wrote.

Naomi Biden, Joe Biden’s eldest granddaughter and the 31-year-old daughter of Hunter Biden, condemned Tapper and Thompson for writing Original Sin on Monday.

Labeling the book “political fairy smut,” she accused the two men of being “irresponsible self-promoting journalists out to make a quick buck” and called their work “a bunch of unoriginal, uninspired lies.”

“Just read a copy of this silly book, and if anyone is curious for a review from someone who lived it first-hand: this book is political fairy smut for the permanent, professional chattering class,” Naomi Biden wrote on X. “The ones who rarely enter the arena, but profit from the spectacle of those that do.”

DEMOCRATS MUST ADDRESS THEIR CREDIBILITY CANCER

The book relies on “unnamed, anonymous sources pushing a self-serving false narrative that absolves them of any responsibility for our current national nightmare,” she continued.

The authors contend their work is based on more than 200 interviews that featured multiple aides, strategists, and Cabinet secretaries sharing their experiences with Biden throughout his presidency.