MARK HALPERIN, HOST: Regarding Joe Biden. When you looked at the question of whether the videos being played largely in conservative media that showed apparent cognitive decline of the president, what conclusion did you reach in Fact Checker about those videos?
GLENN KESSLER, FORMER WASHINGTON POST FACT-CHECKER: Well, you’re talking about when he supposedly meandered off to talk to the parachutists? Yeah. So that fact check was looking specifically at how that video was being portrayed on news sites.
MARK HALPERIN: Yes, sir.
GLENN KESSLER: And what we did was we went and got the full video in the full context, because it looked like the way it was cut, and particularly distributed by the RNC, it looked like Joe Biden was wandering off and he didn’t show him talking to parachutists. What we showed was that he was talking to parachutists. And I’ve said this before, fact checks are a complement to the news coverage, not a supplement.
Yes, sir. The overall context of the Washington Post coverage, we had coverage about, you know, was he too old? We had columnists saying he shouldn’t be running again.
And that fact was specifically about that video distributed by the RNC.
MARK HALPERIN: Understand, but the power of the Pinocchios and the power of the fact check, when you write that, people say that and say, the Washington Post is saying that that video is not reflective of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. That’s what people take from that. They do.
They do. Glenn, they do. You know the power that you had in that job.
So do you think the Washington Post, how would you rate the job the Washington Post did in covering Joe Biden’s, not his age, not whether David Ignatius thought he should run again, but how good a job would you say the Post did in covering the reality of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline?
GLENN KESSLER: I would say, so there was a lot of effort to produce a story that would look at very carefully at what seemed to be a cognitive decline. It never came together because we couldn’t get enough people on the record.
Dropping soon: an explosive new @NextUpHalperin.@MarkHalperin interviews with @GlennKesslerWP, former Washington fact checker.
WATCH: Kessler's stunning justification of his Biden "Deepfake" fact check.
Stay tuned for MUCH more… pic.twitter.com/Lo78lvWHtI
— Next Up with Mark Halperin (@NextUpHalperin) August 7, 2025
The Post didn’t come clean on Biden’s obvious decline until it was politically expedient to do so:
In retrospect, Mr. Biden should not have sought reelection. The June 27 debate was worse than just a bad night, as the president maintained afterward. The 81-year-old had shown signs of slipping for a long time, but his inner circle worked to conceal his decline. He and the country would have been better off if Mr. Biden had kept his implied promise from the 2020 campaign to be a “transitional” figure, perhaps by bowing out after the Democrats’ surprisingly good showing in the 2022 midterm elections.
As Ed Morrissey wrote in August of last year, “what does it mean to have ‘worked to conceal his decline’? It means that Biden doesn’t have the capacity to execute the duties of his office, which is why it had to be concealed. And if Biden can’t fully handle the duties of the office, who’s running the executive branch? Who is making the decisions about the exercise of presidential authority? If it’s anyone not named Joe Biden, then a soft coup has taken place and the inner circle are conspirators in it, including Kamala Harris.”
It’s remarkable how uncurious the Post can be about “all the president’s men” (to coin a phrase) when the president has a (D) after his name.
UPDATE: Former Washington Post Fact Checker Says Quiet Part Out Loud About Liberal Audience, with RCP Hosts Tom Bevan and Andrew Walworth. New video from Megyn Kelly:
“That’s one of the great things about Twitter and now X over time. That’s when you really started learning about these journalists
who were supposed to be objective. They would get on X or Twitter at the time and post this crazy left-wing stuff and just expose themselves. And so, I think that’s that that was part of the whole loss of credibility of the journalism industry and the fact checking was
part of that.”