Despite insistent claims to the contrary from staff at the prior White House and their media allies, many Americans could see for many years that former President Joe Biden was suffering cognitive decline.

Now, a new book has exposed that many of those same former White House aides who dishonestly asserted Biden's perfect health were well aware of his diminished mental status since before he was even elected, as Fox News reported.

This begs the question of whether any of those fraudulent partisan hacks face any sort of accountability or repercussions for their deliberate and repeated lies to the American public about the cognitive capabilities of the elderly ex-president?

Biden aides knew

Released this week was the new tell-all book from CNN host Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which purports to expose the efforts to keep Biden's diminished status a secret from the American people.

The book reveals that, contrary to the public claims of Biden's aides and staffers, many of those same individuals knew that the president was not the same man he was as a senator or vice president long before his mental decline was finally acknowledged, albeit begrudgingly and belatedly in some instances, after his calamitous June 2024 debate against then-candidate Donald Trump.

As it turns out, and as millions of right-leaning and centrist Americans called out at the time, it had become obvious to Biden's inner circle during the 2020 election that he was not 100% mentally and had begun to forget basic things, including the name of longtime top aide Mike Donilon, who had worked with Biden since 1981.

The book further detailed how Biden's staffers were often "white knuckling" themselves through his performances during the campaign, how they "shied away from tough interviews" and tried to keep hidden the "diminished man" who was "not always 100%," and how they were aided in that subterfuge by the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, without which campaign staffers "doubted Biden could have otherwise kept up the pace of campaigning through November."

Curiously, in light of the recent revelation that Biden has full-blown, late-stage cancer, the book also highlighted the great lengths the Biden family went to in 2015 to keep deceased son Beau Biden's brain cancer a secret, even though he was the sitting attorney general of Delaware at the time.

Defenders still remain

Of course, while former aides and staffers are now anonymously telling all to journalists who are only just now beginning to report on what many Americans long observed on their own, some of those who remain in Biden's inner circle are still insistent that he is perfectly fine and displayed no signs of diminished capacity or ill health during his four years in the White House, according to Fox News.

One unnamed Biden spokesperson told the outlet that "there is nothing in this book that shows Joe Biden failed to do his job, as the authors have alleged, nor did they prove their allegation that there was a cover-up or conspiracy."

"Nowhere do they show that our national security was threatened or where the President wasn’t otherwise engaged in the important matters of the Presidency," the spokesperson added. "In fact, Joe Biden was an effective President who led our country with empathy and skill."

Trump blames Biden's circle for policy failures

Interestingly enough, given the ample harsh criticism he has dished out in the past, Trump seemed to indicate this week his belief that the horrible policies of the prior administration, such as open borders and lax enforcement of immigration laws, were not the fault of his predecessor but rather stemmed from the people by whom he was surrounded.

In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote, "It was the people that knew he was cognitively impaired, and that took over the Autopen. They stole the Presidency of the United States, and put us in Great Danger. This is TREASON at the Highest Level! They did it to destroy our Country."

"The Joe Biden that everybody knew would never allow drug dealers, gang members, and the mentally insane to come into our Country totally unchecked and unvetted. All anyone has to do is look up his record," he added. "Something very severe should happen to these Treasonous Thugs that wanted to destroy our Country, but couldn’t, because I came along. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"