“What did he know, and when did he know it?”
This 1973 question, which came from the mind of United States Senator Howard Baker, resounded through the halls of Congress. A powerful Republican stood up and, as the kids say, “called out” President Richard Nixon on his role in Watergate.
The Watergate scandal has receded far enough into history that one should not assume common knowledge. A handful of individuals working for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (unintentional acronym CREEP) broke into a Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate hotel to steal the secrets of the George McGovern campaign.
A few months later, Richard Nixon won re-election by the largest electoral margin since President James Monroe ran for re-election against nobody. So much for needing campaign secrets.
The burglars placed masking tape on the door latch to keep themselves from getting locked in. If they had not left the tape, their crime may have gone undiscovered.
Nixon likely did not authorize this action, but no doubt exists that he particiapted in covering up the crime. Interestingly enough, in October 2004, operatives stole a laptop computer from the Republican National Committee office in Seattle. Information from that computer ended up as part of efforts to defeat President George W. Bush. The event was barely covered in the media at the time.
Change a pronoun from the singular to the plural in 2025 and the question inquires about what may be the largest, most destructive, and perhaps personally abusive scandal in Presidential history.
When asking “what did they know and when did they know it,” however, even the identity of “they” remains murky at the moment.
What “they” did from 2021 to 2025 may well go down as not only a massive scandal, but also an event that significantly damaged the Presidency itself, the stability of the Republic, and eliminated the last vestige of credibility enjoyed by the national press.
Two events, one following on the heels of the other, cracked open the wall. First came Jake Tapper’s new book on the coverup of President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. Then came the revelation that the former president suffers from a stage four prostate cancer, a condition that takes many years to reach stage four.
Tapper wants his readers to believe that he just learned the information in his book recently and those who benefited most from having a puppet of a President want everyone to believe that he just learned that he had cancer.
They claim this even though he mentioned having cancer on stage at a public event in 2022, a statement about which the Greek chorus in the media loudly and collectively sang “gaffe!”
Biden at his best resembled the age-addled and easily misled Claudius. At this point, it seems almost certain that a cadre of staff used their boss as a human shield while they implemented the fever dreams of the Left as federal policy.
This included offloading billions of dollars into friendly non profits who turned around and supported Leftist candidates as the nation racked up many trillions more in debt.
This included, as a US Senate report just revealed, covering up the potentially serious complications caused by some of the COVID vaccines.
This included opening the border wide to whoever wanted to come in, including large numbers of organized criminals who turned too many poor neighborhoods in American cities into their own lawless potentates.
This included pardoning or commuting the sentences of over 2,500 on one day, January 17, 2025, and thousands more on other occasions.
George Stephanopolous once said of executive orders while still working for President Bill Clinton “stroke of the pen, law of the land. Kind of cool.” Of course the President himself wielded that pen at the time.
Now the question is who had control of the virtual pen that only Biden himself should have been using.
Compare this and more to a few yahoos stealing files from a cabinet and the President with the highest recorded IQ of any holding that office choosing to be dumb enough to cover it up.
Tapper’s book, “Original Sin,” written on the cover up of Biden’s cognitive decline came only four months after the end of his Presidency. He also heads up the CNN program called “The Lead.”
It’s possible that someone devoting full time hours to such a project could have completed the research and writing in four months, but more likely that Tapper sat on this information for a very long time. If so, he chose the option that would line his multi-million dollar pockets even more rather than reporting news that Americans needed to know at a vital time in the history of the nation.
In the end, Tapper was hoist by his own petard. The book he hoped would make him a journalism legend ended up being him telling on himself for neglect of duty.
Somehow even worse, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said in March 2024 that Biden’s mental capabilities were the best they’d ever been, even as the Presdient struggled to speak coherently, made impromptu caretakers out of international leaders at different events as they tried to keep him from wandering off, and may have (according to some reports) even repeatedly soiled himself in public.
And one should take a minute to think of Joe himself, even if one opposed every second and every iota of the Biden Administration. Cancer rips and tears at the body ruthlessly. As his staff put him through even his limited paces, imagine the physical pain, the intense frustration often felt by dementia sufferers, and the mental confusion that had to bedevil him as he tried to do his job.
Imagine that from his perspective, as chilling as that might be.
Whichever public officials who – like the President and servicemen all take a Constitutional oath of office – participated in this fraud, they need exposed and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Expect that this silent cadre will offer up Dr. Jill Biden as the selected scapegoat. Though she has her own reckoning to face as a wife and as a human being, making her the start and end of the scandal only continues the cover up.
In no way was she the only person who covered up Biden’s condition or benefited from it. Also, like the media who also worked hard to ignore the problems, Dr. Jill did not take an oath of office and probably committed no actual crime outside of elder abuse.
Joe Biden lusted for decades after the highest office in the land. He served as a solid, but not spectacular senator, always in the shadow of more luminous lights such as Robert C. Byrd. Biden over the course of his career took criticism for plagiarism, making up stories of his past (Corn Pop), and dipping his toe in the pool of racist politics (Corn Pop, again) in a time when that helped politicians from his neck of the woods.
By the time that he achieved his dream, however, he had no business serving in office. Biden ended up with a vice president in Kamala Harris with, shockingly, even less ability than he had left. The Democrats could have gone with a combination package of Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema, who represented at the time the last vestige of true American liberalism left at the highest levels of the Democratic Party.
While the Left would have been left out of the halls of power (never a bad thing), almost certainly either a President Manchin or a President Sinema, if elected, would have pursued a more sane and less destructive compromise path in office both in the foreign and domestic realms.
Even either one of these as vice president under Biden could have asumed responsibilities as he declined, or taken over the office themselves permanently.
But they would also have not played ball with the rot spreading behind the scenes as Biden fumbled through his tenure of office.
And that brings us to the end of this editorial, written on the occasion of the start of this story of not only a deep and broad fraud perpetuated upon the nation, but almost unimaginable cruelty fostered on a helpless old man.
