"The View" co-hosts melted down on Tuesday while discussing the new book by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson about the cover-up of former President Joe Biden's decline while in office, with some deflecting criticism of Democrats and instead slamming the reporting itself.
Co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin criticized President Donald Trump throughout the discussion, wondering why it was important to learn about the Biden cover-up now amid what they claimed were Trump's "atrocities" early in his second term.
Tapper and Thompson's book, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again," was released Tuesday.
"All he is doing is hawking his book on CNN, and he's flanked by other people - Brian Stelter and Van Jones - also hawking his book," Behar said, referring to Tapper. "When did CNN become a place to hawk your book? Is Wolf Blitzer coming out with a cookbook?" she asked.
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"When is Jake Tapper going to write about the cognitive decline of the person in charge right now?" Behar asked earlier in the discussion.
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin defended Tapper and Thompson, saying, "And this is where I take issue with some folks on the left. They're 'We stand with journalists. We stand with the free press.' When they're going after their opponents, like Donald Trump, but when they critically cover Democrats, 'Oh, no, they're lying. It's fairy dust. It's not true.'"
Griffin noted that criticism from Biden's family was to be expected, as his granddaughter, Naomi Biden, rebuked the book, calling it "political fairy smut."
"With political figures attacking these two, how is that pro-democracy? How is that pro-fourth estate to say, 'Oh, but when you come after Democrats, suddenly you're liars'?" Griffin added.
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Goldberg questioned the sources in the book, and asked why they weren't able to come forward during his presidency.
"If you're telling me that hundreds of people knew that he was not able to do his job, then where the hell was everybody?" Goldberg asked.
Hostin noted that Tapper had said most of the reporting from the book came after the election, before directing her criticism at former Trump officials who wrote books after serving in his first term.
"What I do think that we should be very, very concerned about are the people who were in the Trump administration that did hold on to information about how Trump was conducting the presidency, saw they could make money off of their book," Hostin said.
"We're talking about former national security adviser John Bolton, who came on the show hawking his book, and I told him, 'Why didn't you say something before?' Former Attorney General Bill Barr, he wrote a book, didn't say anything while he was in there. Former Secretary Mark Esper and that White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, all of them knew what Trump was, who he was, how he was doing it."
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Biden sat for an interview with "The View" in early May, addressing criticisms of a health cover-up, his initial decision to run for re-election and his later decision to exit the race. Former first lady Jill Biden also joined the former president as the pair shot back at allegations of a cover-up, calling the many books about the former president "wrong."
"They are wrong," Joe Biden said, before Jill Biden jumped in to say "that the people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us."
The former first lady insisted the former president worked nonstop at the White House.
