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But first, here’s Abby on the House’s chronic senioritis…

House Democrats have reportedly set a date, June 24, to select the next ranking member of the House Oversight Committee after Rep. Gerry Connolly tragically passed away last week. According to Politico, the four candidates most likely to jump into the race are Jasmine Crockett of Texas, Robert Garcia of California, Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, and Kweisi Mfume of Maryland. Perhaps more than anything, the contest will reveal where Democrats land on the seniority issue. Until very recently, it was practically a given that the member who had stuck around the longest would be elevated to committee leader. That system has seemed increasingly fragile since last fall’s leadership shuffle, although institutionalists struck back earlier this spring when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s own bid to replace Connolly fell flat. Ultimately, she withdrew from consideration, saying that “the underlying dynamics in the caucus have not shifted with respect to seniority.” (By then she’d left for the Committee on Energy and Commerce anyway.) By the logic of the old system, Lynch, who’s been in Congress since 2001, would be in pole position, followed by Mfume, who joined the committee in 2020. The latter also served in the House in the ’80s and ’90s (albeit on different committees), before leaving Congress to lead the N.A.A.C.P. Meanwhile, Garcia and Crockett are both members of the ’22 class. Of course, fundraising chops matter, too. According to internal party documents I obtained, all four potential contenders had a sluggish first two months of the year—which is normal for that time in the cycle. Crockett raised $15,000 for the D.C.C.C., and Garcia donated $25,000 to the committee. Last cycle, however, Crockett was an unusually active freshman, raising and donating $4.7 million to the D.C.C.C. and battleground candidates. Garcia surpassed $2 million raised and distributed, while Lynch’s total was just shy of $1 million. Mfume cutting $75,000 worth of checks directly to the D.C.C.C.

And now, here’s Heilemann with the latest Sinners discourse…

Every so often a book comes along that manages to become the incessant, inescapable talk of the town in Washington, while tapping into the highly polarized, beyond-the-Beltway political zeitgeist: a book that manages, in other words, to be applauded and pilloried in roughly equal measure but also proves impossible to ignore. Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, is just such a tome. In the week since its publication, last Tuesday, it’s kicked up a dust storm of headlines and positive reviews, as well as moving serious units (if the Amazon bestseller charts are any indication). It’s also generated a metric ton of commentary, pro and con, including a profile of Tapper in the Times that led with the observation that the book has achieved the improbable result of “getting Megyn Kelly, Jon Stewart, and Hunter Biden all rowing in the same direction”—which is to say, attacking the authors.

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Tapper, of course, is the lead Washington anchor for CNN, where he hosts a daily show and co-hosts State of the Union every Sunday, and the author of six other books, both fiction and nonfiction. Thompson is a national political correspondent for Axios and CNN contributor, whose résumé includes stints at Politico, The New York Times, and Vice News. I spoke to both of them for my Impolitic podcast about Original Sin’s news breaks related to Joe Biden’s declining mental acuity during his four-year stint in the Oval Office; the book’s loudly trumpeted claim that the former president’s inner circle engaged in what amounted to a “cover-up” of his condition, deceiving both the country and the Democratic Party with disastrous results (and, yes, I pressed them to name names of the key co-conspirators in that purported plot); the national political media’s complicity in the above; some of the controversies that have swirled around their sourcing and methods; and much more. The following transcript of that conversation, which you can hear in full here, has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, as always.

John Heilemann: You guys are still early in doing the rounds publicizing the book, but a lot of the biggest news you’ve broken—like the White House considering a wheelchair for Biden if he won a second term—has been covered extensively. So tell me what’s been overlooked so far that you think is important? Alex Thompson: One thing I think is important, and it’s taken on increased potential importance in light of the very sad news of Biden’s cancer diagnosis, is how the Biden family dealt with Beau Biden’s cancer in 2014 and 2015. It speaks to how the Biden orbit operates: It’s them against the world, and that [outlook] can justify anything, including lying. It speaks to this culture within that family of not acknowledging inconvenient truths, and trying to will their way past them. Jake Tapper: The tension between [former Attorney General] Merrick Garland and Joe Biden by the end of the Biden presidency was shocking for me. Garland concluded that Biden, for all his talk about wanting to bring back an independent Justice Department and change things from Trump—and this is my language, not Garland’s—was full of shit and didn’t want that at all. [Biden] wanted a Justice Department that would protect him, that would protect Hunter. And Garland completely lost faith that Biden had been sincere when he brought him in with the promise that [Garland would] get to be an independent attorney general. Every White House staff and political operation works hard to put the president it serves in as flattering a light as possible, and every White House staff and politico downplays and even conceals things about the principal that will be politically damaging to him. But you guys allege (right there in your subtitle!) that Biden’s team engaged in a “cover-up” of his deteriorating health. What exactly constituted that cover-up and who was principally responsible? Thompson: There were members of Biden’s cabinet, members of his administration, and Democrats across the party who had seen the Joe Biden who was on that debate stage [versus Donald Trump last June] and they made attempts to hide it from the American public—which was skeptical about his age but had not seen the extent of his decline. I think we showed pretty conclusively that, especially beginning in 2023, the at-times addled, non-functioning Biden had been seen behind closed doors. And people either didn’t say anything, or the people in the White House made increasing accommodations to make sure the public did not know about the extent of his cognitive and physical decline. So that’s what we mean by cover-up. We are not insinuating a crime. A lot of people, when they hear the word “cover-up,” think Watergate. I don’t think Watergate owns the word “cover-up.”

And Jake, when it comes to naming names of the people you guys report were at the center of that effort, it really comes down to Bidenworld’s innermost inner circle: the family, [top political advisors] Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, and Joe and Jill’s closest personal aides. Reading the book, my takeaway is that this very small group is where you’d lay the blame as being the architects of what you characterize as a cover-up—or am I wrong about that? Tapper: You’re 100 percent right. I would include President Biden himself in that list—it’s him, Jill, and Hunter. Biden is not so addled that he doesn’t know what’s going on all the time. There are moments like the debate, where he can’t communicate, he loses his train of thought, etcetera, but he is aware of what’s going on. So he has enough agency to be the chief cover-upper of it all. Donilon, Ricchetti, Anthony Bernal, who was Jill’s chief of staff—that is the main group. Outside of that, is [former White House chief of staff] Ron Klain part of it? Yes. Is [former White House senior advisor] Anita Dunn part of it? Yes. Is [former deputy chief of staff] Annie Tomasini part of it? And there are other people here and there… but those are the main people.

Joe Biden went on The View in an effort to offer a kind of prebuttal to the book. Do you think that worked out well for the Bidens? Tapper: I think that appearance was a disaster. And it reminded me of [the period] after the debate, when a lot of Democrats were taking the Biden team’s word for it and saying, It was just a cold, just a bad night, just a bad debate, no big deal, etcetera. I said [on-air] that there was an easy way [for Biden] to put the questions aside: Have him go out, do 10 tough interviews, two town halls, a press conference, whatever, to show that he has the acuity. But he didn’t have the ability to do it. So when finally they trotted him out for George Stephanopoulos, that was a disaster. Then they gave him to Lester [Holt]. That was a disaster. They had him call into Morning Joe, and you could hear him shuffling his notes; that was a disaster. He did the NATO press conference where he referred to Zelensky as Putin. He couldn’t do it. The problem was not that he had a bad night. The problem was that that bad night underlined to the American people that there was a serious problem. It was not a perception; it was real. And that’s why the appearance on The View was a disaster, and why the people around him—this Algonquin Round Table of brilliant minds—are not able to come up with an actual way to pre-but this book. They still think he’s great. They still think he could be president until January 2029. And that’s madness. Thompson: One thing about the clip from The View [in which Biden is asked directly about allegations regarding his deteriorating mental faculties] is that, as soon as he starts to struggle with his answer and he starts to say, “Well, anyway,” Jill jumps in. We have been told that behavior like that became increasingly common, especially during 2023 and 2024—she would interject to help him with sentences, to remind him who people were, etcetera. For four years, the Democratic Party failed to do what a functional political party does, which is assess its self-interest and say, the key thing for us to be able to implement our values, goals, and policies is to win the next election. At the last minute, though, Biden’s party was finally able to get him out. How did that happen? Tapper: It is remarkable how weak political parties are. Jaime Harrison, the D.N.C. chair for the four years of Biden’s presidency, is not even remotely a factor in any of this discussion. Jaime Harrison is so impotent, nobody cares to go to him and say, Can you tell Joe Biden [to drop out]? He can’t call Joe Biden and tell him anything. You guys have said you were so concerned with making sure Original Sin was bullet-proof that you hired a New Yorker fact-checker to check the book. On the other hand, there’s been some reporting that a number of the main characters in the book never heard from any fact-checker. How are we supposed to resolve the apparent contradiction here? Tapper: There’s nothing really to resolve. We stand by every word in this book. There is not one part of it that has been credibly refuted or disproven, not one part. We talked to more than 200 people for this book. If you have heard of a Biden person other than Joe or Jill Biden, the odds are, we talked to that person, usually off the record, and then, if possible, on background. We obviously try to get as many people on the record as possible. We have one hand behind our back, because people who told us things for the book go out and say they don’t remember them or deny them—and we can’t come forward and say, what about this five-page off-the-record interview transcript we have? We can’t do that, because we have a sense of journalistic ethics that we abide by, and they’re out there, lying, spinning, doing whatever. This group of people lied to the American people, lied to Democrats, lied to cabinet secretaries, lied to Democratic officials, lied to donors for years. And now they’re coming forward and saying whatever they’re saying. We feel very confident in our process [and] in the truth and accuracy of what’s in the book. Democrats are now coming to terms with what the Bidens and their team put everybody through and the deceptions that were going on. I certainly understand why the Bidens are not happy about this book.

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