Not a Conspiracy: The Bidens Have a Long History of Lying About Health Issues

Efforts to conceal Beau Biden’s cancer diagnosis in 2013, including a fraudulent doctor’s note, raise troubling questions that journalists are already dismissing as right-wing lunacy

Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis, announced over the weekend, raised a lot of new questions about the president’s health since taking office in 2021. Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota, the only elected Democrat who challenged Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary, spoke for many when he suggested the cancer announcement was deliberately timed to elicit sympathy and deflect criticism surrounding the release of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. “I don’t think it’s coincidental,” Phillips told the New York Times. Dr. Zeke Emanuel, who served in the Obama administration and worked on Biden’s transition team, argued it was highly likely—based on the diagnosis of metastatic prostate cancer—that Biden had cancer “at the start of his presidency in 2021.” Many began to wonder, understandably in light of the extensive cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline, if the Bidens were lying again.

Doing what comes naturally, mainstream journalists lashed out at Biden skeptics for being “totally online” and promoting a “MAGA conspiracy about a ‘cover-up’ of Biden’s health.” That’s exactly how they reacted to anyone who suggested Biden wasn’t fit to serve another term—which he clearly wasn’t. In fact, there is every reason to be skeptical of anything the Bidens and their doctors are saying. They have been blatantly lying about health-related issues for years.

Tapper and Thompson recount in Original Sin how the Biden family covered up Beau Biden’s diagnosis of terminal brain cancer in the summer of 2013, when Beau was the sitting attorney general of Delaware and Joe was the sitting vice president. The family discussed how much information to disclose about Beau’s health, but ultimately said nothing as Beau started to limit his public appearances. In November, Beau lied to a reporter and said doctors had given him a “clean bill of health.” Several months later, Dr. Wai-Kwan Alfred Yung released a fraudulent statement about how he was “very pleased to give Mr. Biden a clean bill of health” after removing a “small lesion” that was actually a “tumor the size of a golf ball.” Beau lied to reporters again and insisted he was “all good.” Local media noted that his physical appearance and low public profile had “fueled speculation that he has been undergoing some medical treatment.”

Beau continued to serve as attorney general throughout 2014, even as he began having difficulty speaking. In April, he announced his intention to run for governor of Delaware. Meanwhile, Joe Biden used his power as vice president to secretly fly Beau around the country for treatments using a false name. Occasionally, the vice president “instructed his team to mislead the media about his whereabouts,” Tapper and Thompson write. Beau’s wife, Hallie, didn’t understand why they were keeping his illness a secret, but Beau and his father insisted. Reports of Beau’s hospitalization days prior to his death in May 2015 do not mention his brain cancer. “He was the chief law-enforcement officer of the state of Delaware, hiding the fact that he was debilitated,” Tapper said in an interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, who downplayed the cover-up as “a personal issue” with low stakes.

The Bidens’ ability to get a doctor to lie in order to conceal Beau’s illness raises questions about the credibility of Joe Biden’s physician of more than 15 years, Dr. Kevin O’Connor. In his final report on Biden’s health in February 2024, O’Connor said Biden was “fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” He did not administer a cognitive test because he “did not believe the science required him to,” according to Tapper and Thompson. “We don’t need to. He’s here every day,” O’Connor told reporters at the time, while praising his mental cognition as “excellent.” O’Connor is a longtime friend of the Bidens who vacations with the family in Nantucket. In 2017, he teamed up with Biden’s crackhead son, Hunter, and sketchy brother, Jim, on a rural hospital venture that went bankrupt amid allegations of fraud and patient neglect. Following Beau’s cancer diagnosis in 2013, O’Connor consulted on treatment options while the family was hiding the illness from the public.

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, an internist and cardiologist at George Washington University who has served as a consultant to the White House, told Tapper and Thompson that Biden’s doctors “may have declined” to do cognitive tests and others kind of testing that could have led to a formal diagnosis. “If there’s no diagnosis, there’s nothing to disclose,” he said. “Personally, I don’t agree with this. The public should be informed of the whole truth. Not selective truth.” The reporting on the cover-up of Biden’s decline makes a strong case that neither the Biden family nor their doctors can be trusted to provide the whole truth. It’s not a conspiracy.

In another instance of cruel dishonesty, the Bidens refused for years to acknowledge the existence of Navy Joan Roberts, the daughter Hunter fathered with Lunden Roberts, a woman he described in his memoir as a random floozy he had “no recollection” of sleeping with. That was a blatant lie. Hunter told Joe and Jill “not to acknowledge” the child, even after a DNA test in 2019 confirmed he was the father. They did as they were told. A week later, Biden fumed at Fox News reporter Peter Doocy, who asked him for comment on becoming a grandfather again. “No, that’s a private matter and I have no comment,” he said. “Only you would ask that. You’re a good man. You’re a good man. Classy.” Tapper and Thompson write in Original Sin that Hunter refused to accept the DNA results, suggesting the test “could have been tampered with by the Republican-dominated state of Arkansas where Roberts was living.” The Bidens didn’t acknowledge the child until July 2023 in response to a public shaming by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

During an interview with Tapper in September 2020, Biden promised to be “totally transparent in terms of my health and all aspects of my health.” Clearly that was not the case, and the public has every right to be skeptical now.