🚨NEW: Chuck Todd questions whether Biden’s family man image was just “40-year bill of goods”🚨
Here is the dialogue with the speakers relabeled as Chuck Todd (Reporter) and Jake Tapper (Interviewee):
**Chuck Todd:** So, for me, the original sin was running in the first place.
**Jake Tapper:** Oh, well, yes, I’ve heard you talk about this because…
**Chuck Todd:** …because his family was in crisis.
**Jake Tapper:** Right, because his daughter and his son were addicted to drugs. I mean, when I read, I followed that Hunter Biden trial soup to nuts. I read every single transcript, I read all of the testimony. I cannot believe to this day, Chuck, that Joe Biden did this to his kids.
**Chuck Todd:** So somebody close to the family told us— and this is in the book— that everybody knows some of the family aphorisms like, “My word is a Biden,” or, you know, etc., etc. A lesser-known Biden family saying is, “Don’t call a fat person fat,” and by that they mean, it’s not about being polite, it’s about hiding truths, not acknowledging truths. And this person close to the family suggested that there are lots of truths that the family did not want to face up to. One, Beau was dying. Two, Hunter is addicted to drugs. Three, Joe Biden cares about his family more than he cares about anything else. And those three are not true, this family member suggested. And when you talk about his running in 2020, I think that comes to bear because, obviously, he was putting his ambition—and if you want to be charitable, his hopes to save the country from Trumpism or whatever—above what was going on with his family and his two children and their struggles.
**Jake Tapper:** Look, I mean, you and I covered, for most of our professional lives, the story of Joe Biden as this guy who cared about his family so much he commuted home every night from Washington.
**Chuck Todd:** Now here’s—by the way, here’s the— you know what else you could say is this man was so ambitious that after his family went through that tragedy, he commuted every day to work.
**Jake Tapper:** Right, like, it’s the same story. He had his sister help raise his boys.
**Chuck Todd:** And I don’t—I sit here, I look at this and I think, were we sold a 40-year bill of goods?