During a tense and revealing exchange on her podcast, Megyn Kelly destroyed CNN’s Jake Tapper for his and CNN’s failure to report on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline until after it became politically convenient. The confrontation, laced with sharp jabs and uncomfortable truths, exposed Tapper’s role in what many view as a media cover-up that shielded Biden during his presidency.
Kelly opened the segment with a pointed question: “How did The Wall Street Journal get it in June of 2024 and Jake Tapper and CNN couldn’t find sources for this story then before he dropped out?”
Tapper scrambled to respond, deflecting to others’ work. “Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes did an amazing job in their reporting… they should be heralded and I heralded them. I had them on my show right after the debate to talk about their great reporting.”
But Kelly wasn’t letting that slide. “After the debate,” she shot back. “But you did not put them on when they published that story, which was before the debate.”
“Correct,” Tapper admitted after a long, awkward pause. “I don’t know what the booking situation was… I’m sure I said that day, ‘Let’s book…’”
Kelly jumped in again, refusing to let him rewrite the timeline: “You put on a Democrat, and you allowed the Democrat to ruin the report as a Rupert Murdoch-sponsored hit piece.”
Tapper, panicking about being cornered, tried to object: “No, no, no. Megyn, if we’re gonna do this, let’s just stick to the facts here, okay?”
But Kelly didn’t flinch: “That’s what I’ve been doing all along. One of us didn’t miss the biggest story of the century when it comes to presidential politics, and one of us did.”
Tapper then attempted to defend CNN’s editorial judgment, claiming that there’s a distinction between viral gaffe clips and real reporting: “There is a difference between the clips of Joe Biden falling on a stage… forgetting a Republican congressman had died… Those are embarrassing… but there is a difference between that and the investigative journalism that Alex and I were able to do—and only able to do after the election.”
Right. Only after the election.
Kelly wasn’t buying the spin. “I don’t diminish the importance of the book,” she acknowledged, referring to the exposé co-authored by Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson. “But there is no way we can have that conversation with an audience that is as skeptical of your ability to tell the story as mine is without addressing your role in this, right?”
And with that, she delivered the final blow: “Alex is a different story, but you know — you’ve watched the coverage since it came out that you wrote this book — there’s a legion of articles comparing you in some instances to like, O.J. Instead of ‘If I Did It,’ this is ‘If I Hid It.’”
This is humiliating for Jake Tapper and his employer. Good pic.twitter.com/PCpXruvoW3 via @CurtisHouck
— Eddie Scarry (@eScarry) May 20, 2025
In one masterful exchange, Kelly laid bare what much of the public already suspected. Legacy media figures like Tapper weren’t just slow to the story; they actively helped suppress it. And now he’s trying to absolve himself with a book that has come out only after Joe Biden left office.
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