Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy responded to new information in the upcoming book “Original Sin” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson and the nely-released audio of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur demonstrating just how out of it President Biden was mentally, during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “By 2024, the American people had decided that they wanted somebody new. They wanted somebody younger. And it was a mistake. It was a mistake for Democrats to not listen to the voters earlier and set up a process that would have gotten us in a position when we could’ve been more competitive,” he said. “Ultimately, in retrospect, you can’t defend what the Democratic Party did because we are stuck with a madman.”

SEN. CHRIS MURPHY: Well, I don’t know that that’s a particularly fair excerpt. That’s a very emotional topic for the president. But obviously, in retrospect, the president should have gotten out of the race earlier. There’s no doubt that the Democratic Party would have been better served by having the ability to have an open primary. Kamala Harris probably would have done very well in that process. But in retrospect, we lost. And so you can defend the way in which our politics played out. I mean, listen, what I — I’ve said is that, you know, like anybody who reaches that stage in their life, you know, there is some level of diminishment. But I got to work with the president pretty closely in 2022, in 2023. And I saw a president who was passing legislation and helping the American people at a pretty unprecedented rate. That being said, by 2024, the American people had decided that they wanted somebody new. They wanted somebody younger. And it was a mistake. It was a mistake for Democrats to not listen to the voters earlier and set up a process that would have gotten us in a position when we could’ve been more competitive that fall. KRISTEN WELKER: Let me ask you this. The new book, Original Sin, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, goes even further and actually details what they call a cover-up from the White House, from top aides around the president. Here’s a little bit of what they have written, quote, “One senior White House aide, who left because they didn’t think Biden should run again, confessed to us that ‘we attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023.'” Do you think some top officials in the Biden White House covered up the state of his mental health at the time? SEN. CHRIS MURPHY: Well, I — I haven’t read the book, and so I don’t know what to say about the allegations they make. But I know that I worked with him throughout 2022 on the gun bill, which has saved, by the way, thousands of lives. He was intimately involved in those negotiations. I was in the White House in the fall of 2023 doing an hour-and-a-half long meeting on some really complicated developments in the Middle East. And I saw a president who was in control. So I — that’s my experience. But I admit that by 2024, the American public had made up their minds, right, that they wanted the Democratic Party to nominate somebody new. And it was absolutely a mistake for the party to not listen to those voters. KRISTEN WELKER: Just to be very clear, do you bear some responsibility as well? SEN. CHRIS MURPHY: Oh, I think we all bear responsibility. Listen, and I think, you know, we maybe didn’t listen as early as we should have in part because we have immense loyalty to this man who had led this country out of a pandemic, who had been maybe the most prodigious legislator as a president– the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Act, the bipartisan gun bill– in a generation. But ultimately, in retrospect, you can’t defend what the Democratic Party did because we are stuck with a madman, with a corrupt president in the Oval Office. And we should have given ourselves a better chance to win.
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