As theories go, this is certainly … one of them. And it’s certainly possible that Peter Baker is correct, but it’s neither as neat nor as compelling a case as he lets on. The New York Times chief reporter at the White House told MSNBC’s Alex Witt on Saturday that the tapes really just rehash the previously released transcripts. Baker claims that the current White House did this to “embarrass” Joe Biden and his staff.
Baker does grudgingly admit that the impact of these tapes goes well beyond what the transcript suggests, however. And that may be an even better motive than Baker suggests:
WITT: Why release the full audio now? I mean, it’s after the fact. And do we know how Axios got the tapes?
BAKER: Well, the Trump administration decided to put it out, and they decided to take advantage of this news cycle because the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson is coming out next week about Biden’s physical and mental decline in office.
WITT: Hang on, Peter, you’re saying the Trump administration gave it to Axios.
BAKER: Well, I don’t know about Axios’s sources, but I think it’s very clear they’re the ones who had access to it, and they have told our reporters that they planned to put it out there. So, you know, the idea that it went to Axios first is not surprising, I suppose.
But they’ve already made the decision, they wanted to put it out there. The president himself has said he wanted this tape out there. Why does he want it out there? Obviously he wants to embarrass his predecessor and undercut President Biden even further.
We’ve had the transcript of this, we know the answers that were given or not given. We know that he struggled with memory lapses during this conversation. But obviously hearing the tape is a different thing. It does emphasize and underscore just how much trouble he had in that interview and why Robert Hur, the special counsel decided not to bring charges. Remember, Robert Hur said that he decided not to bring charges in part because the president seemed like a forgetful old man. And that that would be hard to convince a jury that he knowingly violated the law. Well, how did he make that determination? He made it in part through this interview that we’re now hearing. Through this audio tape.
And therefore, hearing the audio tape does have a value in that sense to help us understand, uh, what Hur was evaluating.
My friend and Mediaite columnist Caleb Howe blasts Baker for his blasé approach to a president who clearly can’t hold a conversation in the middle of a day with attorneys in a deposition. Nor is Caleb impressed with Witt’s journalistic indifference as to how Baker missed the story of a senile President despite his ringside seat:
Witt introduced the subject not with a question about what Baker knew as a White House correspondent, or what he did or does believe about Biden’s competence then or now. Instead, the MSNBC host opened by saying, with a full SMH tone of voice, “Why release the full audio now? I mean, it’s after the fact. And do we know how Axios got the tapes?”
Baker, who, again, is a White House correspondent, offered implied criticism of Axios for the distasteful accepting of the audio tapes from the Trump administration, gave some verbal side-eye to Tapper and Thompson, and said the audio of an American president which not only exonerates Hur but gives a living voice to the ongoing process of exposing the cover-up — of that significant piece of historic audio, Baker said it’s only obvious purpose is to “embarrass” Biden.
If the Department of Justice leaked these tapes, this might be the reason — to embarrass Baker and every other Protection Racket Media hack that sat in the briefing room for four years and refused to report this story. That makes a lot more sense than releasing the tapes to embarrass Joe Biden, who’s all but out of public life now and likely for good.
The better argument is that the release exposes a vast cover-up among Democrats at the top echelons of the party, all of whom should be held accountable for their crime against the American public. And that argument isn’t just coming from me or from Republicans, but also a few Democrats. Democrat strategist Julian Epstein went on Fox News to castigate his own party and to demand accountability for a cover-up that already was the worst in modern American political history before news of Biden’s Stage 4 cancer got out yesterday:
But this skips over a very odd point. Baker told Witt that he’s convinced the White House leaked the tapes because they had already stated their intent to release them. So … why not just release the tapes? Neither the White House nor the DoJ needed to leak these tapes to anyone. As I wrote Friday night, Attorney General Pam Bondi could just as easily held a press conference and posted the recordings on the DoJ website. She may not have done it late on a Friday afternoon either, after the “lid” for the weekend news cycle had been called, but waited for Monday morning to make sure everyone was on the job and paying attention.
And if the White House wanted to leak these tapes, would their first choice really have been Alex Thompson and Axios? Marc Caputo co-wrote that story as well and has good sources in both parties, but Axios would be a strange choice for this administration, and Thompson especially, given his attempts to spin the media as a victim of the cover-up rather than a co-conspirator. It’s not impossible, but it seems rather unlikely, especially since — again — the White House didn’t need to leak it at all.
Perhaps one day, we’ll find out the source of the leak. But I can almost guarantee that the person who finds and reports it won’t be the notoriously uninquisitive Peter Baker or the New York Times.
