CNN's Jake Tapper sat down for a PBS NewsHour interview to talk about his new book and ended up revealing an open secret about President Joe Biden. Tapper described, with the calm detachment of a man reading a dessert menu, how an unelected inner circle were the ones really running the country under the Biden administration.
Tapper did the interview with his book's co-author, Axios reporter, Alex Thompson. In the interview Thompson and Tapper revealed how a tight ring of Biden insiders, who called themselves the "Politburo," managed to "steer the government" by controlling access to President Biden for much of 2023 and 2024.
Not advising him. Not supporting him. Controlling him.
According to Thompson, this group controlled "Biden's time, who reached him and which decisions were placed in front of him." Cabinet secretaries, White House employees, and Democratic officials were all subject to restrictions on when and whether they could interact with their own boss.
And it gets worse.
Some Cabinet members reportedly feared that consequential choices were "framed so tightly that the final decision was barely a choice at all." The people running federal agencies believed the options presented to the President were pre-cooked. The decision was made before it reached his desk. He just had to sign.
The term "Politburo" didn't come from Thompson or Tapper. The insiders chose the name based off a comparison to Soviet central command.
Tapper relayed all of this on PBS like it was interesting historical trivia. A fascinating little footnote from a colorful era. No alarm. No outrage. No follow-up segment on CNN asking which specific policies were shaped by people nobody voted for. No panel discussion about whether the 25th Amendment should have been invoked. No prime-time investigation into who, exactly, comprised this circle and what decisions they made on behalf of 330 million Americans.
Just a calm nod and a book plug.
Now, some might argue that every president has close advisors and gatekeepers. Senior staff always manages the boss's schedule. That's just how the White House works. Which would be a reasonable point if we were talking about scheduling conflicts and lunch meetings. We're not. We're talking about Cabinet-level officials being walled off from the commander-in-chief while a shadow group pre-decided national policy.
The real question is why CNN — Tapper's own network — never treated this as a story while it was actually happening. During 2023 and 2024, while this "Politburo" was actively restricting access to Biden, CNN was running segments about the strength and vigor of Joe Biden's leadership. They weren't just failing to investigate. They were providing cover.
We spent two years being told that questioning Biden's capacity was misinformation. Or that people were selectively editing videos of Biden to make him look bad. Right-wing disinformation. And the whole time, the people closest to him were using Soviet terminology to describe the power structure they'd built around a president who apparently couldn't be trusted to receive unfiltered information or make unscripted decisions.
Tapper knew. He said "Politburo" out loud on public television. And then he went back to anchoring a network that had spent the previous two years telling viewers everything was fine.
Tapper and Thompson's book, Original Sin, laid out the architecture: who got access, who didn't, how decisions were pre-framed, how the circle tightened as 2024 wore on. It's all there, reported by an establishment journalist at a mainstream outlet. This wasn't a podcast theory. It was sourced, published, and discussed on PBS by one of CNN's biggest names.
And CNN still hasn't made it a story.
That's not a media failure. That's a editorial choice — and the choice tells you everything about what CNN thinks its job actually is.
