President Biden’s top aides have allegedly created a “wall” to avoid having him speak at unscripted events or sitting down for long interviews in an effort to prevent potential gaffes, a new book says.
“Peril,” a new book by Bob Woodward and Washington Post reporter Robert Costa, claims that Biden’s aides intentionally kept the president away from “unscripted events or long interviews,” according to a Fox News report. These aides included chief of staff Ron Klain and adviser Anita Dunn.
“They called the effect ‘the wall,’ a cocooning of the president,” the book says, describing the effort to counter Biden’s “tendency to at times be testy or mangle statements,” according to Fox News.
Despite the efforts to protect him from himself, the president’s misstatements continued, with incidents such as a misleading announcement of a bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden said was contingent on another spending bill being passed, Fox News reported.
The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment.
Biden’s handling has been a subject of recent Republican attacks. During questioning of Secretary State Antony Blinken before Congress last week, Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) asked him about claims that White House aides have a button to silence the president.
“Anyone who knows the president, including members of the committee, knows that he speaks very clearly and very deliberately for himself,” Blinken responded. “No one else does.”
The “wall” around Biden is one of the many anecdotes from “Peril” that have been making headlines through the week, ahead of its expected release on Tuesday.
In another, Woodward and Costa reported that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley communicated with China to assure the U.S. adversary that he would alert them to any coming attack in the final days of former President Trump’s time in office.
Milley has since said that the calls were “routine” and “perfectly within the duties and responsibilities” of his role, according to The Associated Press.