Chuck Todd tears into Biden's family-man image, questions if we 'were sold a 40-year bill of goods'
Former NBC News host Chuck Todd wondered on Monday if the media were sold a "40-year bill of goods" about former President Joe Biden being a family man during a discussion about Biden's decision to run for re-election.
"You and I covered, for most of our professional lives, the story of Joe Biden was: This guy cared about his family so much he commuted home every night from Washington," Todd said during his podcast, "The Chuck Toddcast," first reported by The Daily Caller.
Todd spoke to CNN host Jake Tapper about Biden while discussing Tapper's book, "Original Sin," which is about the former president's decision to run for re-election and the cover-up of his decline while in office.
"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, like it's the same story. I sit here, I look at this, and I think, were we sold a 40-year bill of goods?" Todd said.
"So for me, the original sin was running in the first place. Because his family was in crisis. I followed that Hunter Biden trial soup to nuts," Todd told Tapper. "I read every single transcript. I read all of the testimony. I cannot believe to this day, Jake, that Joe Biden did this to his kids. I just can’t believe that he did it. I can’t."
The CNN host said a person close to the Biden family had told him there were a lot of "truths 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 anything else, and those three are not true, this person close to the family said. 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, obviously he was putting that above what was going on with his family and his two children and their struggles," Tapper said earlier in the discussion.
Todd criticized the notion that Biden is a family man in March and has argued that he shouldn't have run for president at all.
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"You know, Joe Biden never should have been there in the first place, right? Number one, he shouldn't have run for president [in 2020]," Todd said during a March appearance on Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt's "The Warning" podcast.
"I completely got so angry at Joe Biden, the man, when I read the transcript of the Hunter Biden trial, and when I realized that not one, not two, but three Biden children, and I count Beau's widow, were all dealing with drug problems in 2018. And Joe Biden said, 'Now's a perfect time to run for president, because who cares about our family?'" he said.
Todd argued that there was a "mythology" about Biden caring so much about his family.
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Biden's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Fox News' Kristine Parks contributed to this report.