CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford said the most underreported story in 2024 was concerns around President Biden's age, which came to a tipping point after members of his own party forced him to withdraw from the campaign.
"That would be, to me, Joe Biden's obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in a televised debate," Crawford said on "Face the Nation," the CBS Sunday show. "Unquestioned."
Reports from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other outlets have revealed that some advisers close to the president have been concerned about Biden's health since the early days of his administration. The White House frequently dismissed questions about his abilities and even called videos that appeared to show Biden confused or out of step "cheap fakes."
"It's starting to emerge now that his advisers kind of managed his limitations. It's been reported in the Wall Street Journal for four years, and yet he insisted that he could still run for president," she said.
"We should have much more forcefully questioned whether he was fit for office for another four years," Crawford continued, arguing that the added media pressure "could have led to a primary for the Democrats."
"It could have changed the scope of the entire election," she said. "Yet still, incredibly, we read in The Washington Post, that his advisers are saying that he regrets that he dropped out of the race, that he thinks he could have beaten Trump, and I think that is either delusional or they're gaslighting him."
Biden said that he was "feeling terrible" on the night of the debate with Trump in June, telling ABC News host George Stephanopoulos that more serious concerns over his cognitive health should not have been believed in a post-debate interview.
"I was feeling terrible," Biden said. "Matter of fact, the docs with me, I asked if they did a COVID test because they were trying to figure out what's wrong. They did a test to see whether or not I had some infection, you know, a virus. I didn't. Just had a really bad cold."
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Fox News' Elizabeth Elkind contributed to this report.
