The co-author of a new book about the end of the Biden administration suggested even some of former President Biden’s close allies have raised suspicions about the timing of the former president’s cancer diagnosis.
“Of the diagnosis, I would say that even people — and my reporting with my colleague Marc Caputo says — even people that worked for Joe Biden in Joe Biden’s White House are suspicious of whether or not it is coincidental and are suspicious… of the idea that the diagnosis only came last Friday,” Axios reporter Alex Thompson said in a Tuesday interview on NewsNation’s “On Balance with Leland Vittert.” Caputo is a veteran reporter at Axios.
“Even people that are loyal to Joe Biden and love Joe Biden, they have doubts about it,” Thompson continued, “just because the timing does seem odd.”
The news of Biden’s cancer diagnosis on Sunday came at a moment when the former president’s name had been thrust back into the national spotlight by revelations in a series of books. The most recent is “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, And His Disastrous Choice To Run Again” by Thompson and CNN anchor Jake Tapper.
The diagnosis has done little to dampen talk about whether Biden should have dropped out of the race earlier, and instead seems to have triggered more conversations, some of them launched by President Trump.
Biden’s personal office sought to put any suspicions to bed on Tuesday, saying in a clear statement that Biden had not gotten the prostate cancer test since 2014 and that Friday was his first cancer diagnosis.
“President Biden’s last known PSA was in 2014. Prior to Friday, President Biden had never been diagnosed with prostate cancer,” Biden’s spokesperson said.
Many prostate cancers in the U.S. are detected with a blood test that measures prostate-specific antigen (PSA). But doctors for years have debated about the benefits of screening for prostate cancer, especially in older men.