Over the weekend, the office of former President Joe Biden announced that Biden had been diagnosed with advanced, aggressive prostate cancer that had metastasized to his bones.
“Last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms,” Biden’s personal office said in a statement. “On Friday he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone.”
Though everyone in media and politics alike wished the former president well as he battles this cancer, many also cried foul about the timing of the announcement and about how long Biden and his staff have known about this diagnosis.
“I think this may be as big a scandal as Watergate. Between the questions of his dementia, if you added prostate cancer to that pile, they might have felt they had no choice but to invoke the 25th. There would be incentive to hide it,” said Assemblyman Mike Fitzpatrick (R,C,I-Smithtown). “As an American, it makes me angry, not just as a Republican.”
Fitzpatrick added, “Clearly they did not want the 25th Amendment to be brought up. They were not going to relinquish power to Kamala Harris. They all knew that that she was a disaster waiting to happen, that she was not up to the job. They pulled the wool over the eyes of the American people for a very long time.”
Physicians and pundits on the Sunday shows openly wondered if this cancer diagnosis had been hidden from the public in the same way insiders unsuccessfully tried to hide Biden’s substantial cognitive impairment. Doctors said there was essentially no chance that the cancer was not present during his presidency. Cancer of this aggressive type and that has spread to the bones does not occur suddenly. Some speculated that the original diagnosis may have even been a few years ago.
New York Conservative Party Chairman Gerry Kassar said, “As usual former President Joe Biden’s health raises more questions than there are answers. While wishing him well I cannot help but wonder how deep, wide and long was the obvious health cover up conducted by his family, the White House and his campaign.”
“It's un-American and it's probably treasonous. This country was left totally exposed. God forbid if Russia and China or any adversary Iran, in the Middle East, and we were left without a commander in chief or we had a commander in chief whose faculties were not up to the job,” said Fitzpatrick.
The timing of the cancer diagnosis announcement does feed the idea that it was done as a distraction – something to break the “declining Biden” press cycle that was gaining legs in recent weeks.
Fitzpatrick concluded, “We can't allow something like this to ever happen again. This partisan one upsmanship is at such a level that we're now likely hiding the physical condition of the president from the American people for partisan advantage. It's inexcusable.”
With the release of a book by CNN’s Jake Tapper about the cover-up of Biden’s decline, former staffers ‘coming clean’ about what they saw at the time, and the release of the audio recording of Special Counsel Hur’s interviews with then President Biden showing the obvious difficulty with Biden’s memory and speaking in full sentences, attention to Biden’s decline, the cover-up, and calls for investigations about who was actually president were growing. It is not unheard of for a politician to release news to distract from an issue they don’t want to talk about.