CNN analyst Brian Stelter has questioned the timing of Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis announcement — insisting Sunday that it was “extraordinary” the news broke just as the former president was battling an onslaught of criticism over the cover-up of his cognitive decline while in the White House.
“The timing … is just extraordinary,” Stelter said during an appearance on the left-leaning network.
“We know from the statement from his personal spokesman that Biden learned of the diagnosis on Friday.
“Well, what was the biggest Biden story on Friday? It was the release of those audio excerpts from his conversations with [former special counsel] Robert Hur back in 2023,” Stelter noted.
Audio excerpts published by Axios captured Biden rambling through an interview with Hur in October 2023 — repeatedly losing his train of thought and struggling to recall key details of his political and personal life, including when his son Beau died.
Biden also botched commonly known facts, such as the year of President Trump’s first election victory, and appeared confused about when his vice presidency ended.
Transcripts of the Hur interview had been released last year, weeks after the former federal prosecutor decided not to pursue charges against Biden despite concluding the 46th president had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials.”
The Biden administration had long resisted efforts to make the audio public, claiming that they merely confirmed what was said on the transcripts.
“On the day that story was breaking, Biden was facing this personal news,” Stelter said. “So you have that as one element of the timing here.”
The CNN personality also noted the Tuesday release of a bombshell book, “Original Sin” by his network colleague Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, which includes troubling accounts of Biden’s mental and physical decline, as well as efforts by his aides to cover it up.
“And then you have… this book coming out, one of the biggest political books in several years,” he said.
The book, excerpts of which were widely reported on last week, has sparked a renewed reckoning within the Democratic Party about Biden’s mental state and attempts to conceal his condition during his abortive re-election run.
But the news of Biden’s cancer diagnosis has prompted some top Dems to call for conversations about the former president’s cognitive abilities to cease.
Longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod, said on CNN Sunday evening that such conversations “should be more muted and set aside for now as he’s struggling through this.”
Earlier in the day Sunday, however, Axelrod had participated in a panel that ripped into Democrats for their handling of his decline.
Stelter’s questioning about the timing comes as medical experts say it is “inconceivable” that the cancer was not caught earlier — while first son Don Trump Jr. even suggested it was part of a “cover-up.”
Previously, Stelter had been a prominent critic at CNN of conservative media coverage of Biden’s cognitive state during the 2024 campaign, with Biden allies accusing outlets like The Post of pushing “cheap fakes.”
