A camera stayed fixed on Hunter Biden’s face as he delivered a message meant for one man alone: Jake Tapper. There was no hesitation, no softening. Biden looked straight into the lens and let the CNN anchor have it.
The moment unfolded during Biden’s sit-down with Don Lemon on the former CNN host’s YouTube channel.
Lemon, who spent 17 years as Tapper’s colleague at the network, steered the conversation toward the anchor almost immediately.
Biden, 56, first mentioned having friends inside CNN. Lemon jumped on the opening and asked whether Tapper was one of them. Biden shut that down fast. “No,” he said, then added, “Well, I knew Jake forever.”
From there, Lemon brought up Tapper’s 2025 book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
The book had already sparked a public back-and-forth between the two men during its promotional rollout.
Biden let out a sigh, then a laugh, before answering. “I think that, um, Jake is a, um, a complete and utter, uh, a**hole,” he said. He didn’t stop there.
“I think that he is, um, a really poor journalist. And beyond that, I don’t think he’s a very decent human being,” Biden continued. He said plainly that he does not “like” Tapper “as a person.”
Pressed further, Biden escalated. “I think he’s full of fcking sht. That’s what I think,” he told Lemon, who repeated the line back to him with a grin: “You think Jake Tapper’s full of sh*t?”
Biden’s reply drew a pop-culture comparison. “I think he’s the Brick Tamland of his generation, yeah,” he said, invoking the bumbling weatherman from the 2004 comedy “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.”
Lemon reminded his guest that Tapper remained a former colleague of his. Biden acknowledged it but pushed forward anyway, citing how Tapper has discussed him and his parents publicly.
“What Jake espoused and has continued, and the way that he has spoken about me, the way he has spoken about my mother, the way that he has spoken about my father…” Biden said, his sentence trailing off.
He made clear he felt no need to soften his opinion for the cameras. “I’m not running for anything.
I’m certainly not running for class president. I’m not running to be the most popular man, you know, on TV,” Biden said, framing his dispute with Tapper as “a real personal grievance.”
Asked what he’d say to Tapper directly, Biden laughed and answered, “I’d say exactly what I just said.” He then turned toward the lens and spoke as if Tapper were standing in front of him. “Jake. I do not like you. I don’t like you at all. And I have a whole host of reasons why. And that’s final. There you go. I’m looking directly into the camera.”
The animosity did not begin on Lemon’s show. In July 2025, Tapper told Katie Couric that Biden functioned “almost like a chief of staff” to his father during the Biden administration.
Weeks later, Biden pushed back on that claim in an interview with former Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison, insisting, “I was in that White House 12 days over the course of the last two years of the administration. Clearly, because I had other things going on, OK?”
During that same Couric interview, Tapper called Biden “probably, demonstrably unethical, sleazy and prone to horrible decisions.”
He drew a contrast with Biden’s late brother, Beau, calling him “a great, upstanding guy” before adding, “But Hunter’s not that.”
Tensions deepened when Biden told the newsletter Breaker that Tapper called him repeatedly while Beau lay dying at Walter Reed Hospital. Biden claimed he answered one call by telling Tapper, “Go **k yourself, Jake.”
A spokesperson for Tapper called that account “a patently false lie,” insisting “the idea that Jake could do something so heartless… completely defies logic.”
Tapper has separately defended his network’s coverage of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline while in office, saying reporters were not part of any cover-up but that “we were just lied to over and over again.”
Joe Biden dropped his 2024 reelection bid after a debate performance in Atlanta that Tapper co-moderated with Dana Bash.
CNN responded to Hunter Biden’s latest comments with a statement defending its anchor.
“Jake Tapper is a respected journalist and his work speaks for itself. For decades, he has challenged and scrutinized those in power, regardless of party, ideology, or title. That’s the job, and he’s done it exceptionally well,” the network said, calling Biden’s remarks “frankly ridiculous.”
Tapper has spent 13 years at CNN.
