As RedState's Nick Arama reported, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) recently sat down for an interview with CNN "State of the Union" co-anchor Jake Tapper to talk about the latest developments on the "Big Beautiful Bill" and to counter media and Democrat-driven narratives about what the bill will and won't do.
In it, Johnson pushed back on claims made by the left and even some on the right that people who really needed it potentially could be stripped of their Medicaid benefits.
"The purpose of this is to preserve these very necessary, very important safety net programs for the people who actually need and deserve them, and not those who are gaming the system," Johnson explained, while also touting work requirements and pointing out that some 1.4 million illegal immigrants were currently on Medicaid.
As the interview was wrapping up, Tapper snuck in a question about the "meme coin dinner" President Trump held last Thursday, and asked if Johnson was concerned about the supposed lack of transparency surrounding the guest list of so-called "crypto influencers" and Trump meme coin investors not being made public.
Though Johnson correctly pointed out that he'd had a lot on his plate in recent weeks in trying to pull his caucus together on the bill, and didn't know much about the dinner, Tapper pressed him by trotting out the Hunter Biden card.
The way Johnson smoothly turned it around on Tapper was pretty remarkable. Here's how the back and forth went down from there (bolded emphasis added):
TAPPER: You oversaw, as speaker, a congressional investigation into President Biden's ties to his son Hunter's questionable business dealings to enrich him. You seemed to think it was your responsibility to look into this sort of thing then.
M. JOHNSON: Yes, Jake, the big, important distinction, the Biden crime family, as they were named, earned that title. Why? Because they use shell companies, fake LLCs, series of what appeared to be money laundering operations. And Hunter Biden, of course, with his difficult past and his -- the corruption in his past, the family on the public dole -- or on the president's dole.
The president lied about his involvement in the business dealings, all of that. The evidence just piled up. And, by the way, at the same time, the evidence of his diminished mental capacity, subject of your book, of course. I wish had been published a year earlier, because everybody saw it. Everybody saw what was happening.
But Johnson was just getting warmed up:
He used the autopen. And, by the way, there's investigations right now going on in the House - Jamie Comer in the Oversight Committee -- or will be investigating the use the autopen, when the president's mental capacity declined and whether all those things are even legally valid now, given the obvious fact that he was not the one making the decisions.
It's huge implications from all this. And so I think the American people had a reason to doubt. And we had great reason and I think a responsibility to investigate those things. The difference, of course, is that President Trump does everything out in the open. He's not trying to hide anything. There's no shell companies or fake LLCs or fake family businesses. He's putting it out there, so everybody can evaluate for themselves.
Translation: You saw Biden's decline (and the corruption) happening, Jake. You just chose to shame and mock other people for asking questions about it, and only decided to write about it once Joe Biden was out of office, and you could profit off of it.
Watch:
WATCH: Jake Tapper tries to corner Speaker Johnson with a Hunter Biden whatabout, gets hit over the head with his own book pic.twitter.com/AJMq54PYKJ
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) May 25, 2025
Tapper may have thought the "Original Sin" book he co-authored with Axios reporter Alex Thompson was going to absolve him of his Biden-Harris era reporting sins (and his one-sided reported during the first Trump administration), but instead, it's caused people to push back on him when he feigns outrage over supposed Trump scandals.
It's a credibility crisis of Tapper's own making and one that won't go away, something Johnson brought to light once again with a smile on his face and without breaking a sweat. Nice work, Mr. Speaker.
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