Jake Tapper said President Biden's failure to bring up the events of Jan. 6 during the debate before the CNN host and moderator was a "missed opportunity."
"One of the things that was expressed was the shock that I was actually the first person to mention Jan. 6 at the debate and that Joe Biden wasn‘t. And it does seem to me like that was a missed opportunity by President Biden. Over and over, you had an audience of whatever it was, 70 or 80 million, if you include streaming, and he could have raised Jan. 6 in the very first answer," Tapper said.
Tapper moderated the debate alongside CNN host Dana Bash on Thursday. After the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that presidents have some level of immunity from prosecution for official acts committed while in office, the CNN panel lamented Biden's performance and his failure to immediately paint former President Trump as someone who tried to overthrow an election.
CNN's John King said Biden "wasted about 70 of the 90 minutes of that debate."
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"There’s been a lot of pushback from Democrats. Team Biden says they believe democracy, institutions, Trump trying to subvert the election is the No. 1 issue. A lot of Democrats have said, ‘sir, the cost of living is the number one issue. You’re the incumbent. Your performance is issue one.’ And the Biden team has consistently said, ‘we will prove you wrong, like we did in 2020 when you didn‘t think we could win,' we will prove you wrong by making democracy a key issue. And yet he did not raise it right out of the bat," King said.
Tapper connected the debate performance to the Supreme Court's ruling on whether Trump is immune from prosecution regarding his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, which it handed back to the lower courts.
The question stemmed from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal election interference case.
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"There was the No. 1 Democrat in the country, with an audience of 70 or 80 million people, he didn‘t have to go into detail about the evidence, but he could have said there’s this, there’s that, there’s this," Tapper said. "And that would have been a much bigger audience than Jack Smith is ever going to have."
The editorial boards at several media outlets have called on Biden to drop out of the race after his debate performance.
The New York Times' editorial board, for example, wrote that "Biden is not the man he was four years ago."
"The president appeared on Thursday night as the shadow of a great public servant. He struggled to explain what he would accomplish in a second term. He struggled to respond to Mr. Trump’s provocations. He struggled to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans. More than once, he struggled to make it to the end of a sentence," the editorial board wrote.
Fox News' Joseph Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
