Jake Tapper slams RFK Jr for ‘wild and false’ story about them working together

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared a video of him doing push ups outside the legendary Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach – as he called for a debate with Joe Biden.

Accompanying the video was the caption: ‘Getting in shape for my debates with President Biden!’

His tweet comes as other videos began to surface of the 69-year-old lifting weights at the same gym, which is dubbed ‘the Mecca of bodybuilding’.

RFK Jr has long been saying he wants to debate Biden but the White House has largely ignored those calls –  a recent poll indicated the majority of Democrats wanted to see a debate.

‘So start doing your morning calisthenics everybody. Get yourself in shape for a Kennedy Presidency!’ he wrote in another tweet, and also addressed the fact he was only recorded doing nine push ups.

‘And yes, I can do more than 10 pushups. That was my last set,’ he said.

It comes after CNN anchor Jack Tapper published a column accusing him of telling a ‘wild and false’ story about an interaction they had in 2005.

Tapper’s account states that he did not collaborate with Kennedy but merely interviewed him over the phone for an ABC TV segment. He is pictured in May 2019

Kennedy’s contested comments were made during an appearance on a podcast hosted by Jordan Peterson on June 5 and part of an attack on how the media covers Big Pharma.

RFK Jr. said he spent three weeks working with Tapper, who was at ABC News at the time, on a documentary critical of vaccines that was suddenly axed.

Tapper’s account states that he did not collaborate with Kennedy but merely interviewed him over the phone for an ABC News segment, which was not axed.

‘RFK Jr. has made so many false and wild claims about any number of vital topics,’ noted Tapper in the column, published on June 22, before claiming he is ‘untethered from the facts’.

Tapper provided a fairly lengthy account in the column, and began explaining that their interaction stemmed from the fact that Kennedy in 2005 was co-publishing a piece with Rolling Stone magazine and Salon.com.

In it he claimed that there was some connection between certain vaccines that contained mercury and autism – both publications have since retracted it over factual inaccuracies.

A photo accompanies the video and shows RFK Jr. shirtless and well-built

Tapper provided a fairly lengthy account in the column, and began explaining that their interaction stemmed from the fact that Kennedy in 2005 was co-publishing a piece with Rolling Stone magazine and Salon.com

Even a majority of Democrats want to see President Joe Biden debate his top-polling rival, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In the Jordan Peterson podcast, which has been deleted from YouTube but remains on Twitter, RFK Jr. said he had been working ‘for three weeks doing this incredible documentary’ with Tapper.

He then said Tapper notified him over the phone that the ‘documtary’ was going to be killed by ‘corporate’ – something that had never happened before.

‘RFK Jr. has been misrepresenting the content of this call for years,’ wrote Tapper. 

Tapper in his CNN column suggested he would never have used that word and that a number of his stories would have been axed prior.

He said that though the plug was not pulled on his piece he did delay the segment for a day to interview other experts, and that it did eventually air on June 22, 2005.

‘Now in his retelling, a two-minute piece was an ‘incredible documentary,’ a few days of work was three weeks, one remote interview was me working intensely with him, and a piece that got delayed one day so we could interview some actual experts is a piece that got killed,’ wrote Tapper.

Tapper also appeared on a podcast last week, Pod Save America, in which he cast similar dispersions on Kennedy.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper is pictured with his wife Jennifer Marie Brown at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2018

‘[Kennedy] spreads dangerous misinformation about childhood vaccines,’ he said, before saying he would not host Kennedy for a town hall on CNN.

‘He was so dishonest in that experience and since then he lies about the experience frequently,’ he said.

Tapper also quoted from his own segment to reflect how he had covered Kennedy’s article.

Tapper claims he said over his segment: ‘The medical community overwhelmingly disagrees with Kennedy, who is not a scientist or a doctor. They point out that autism rates are not decreasing, even though thimerosal has been removed from most childhood vaccines as a precaution.’

He wrote at the end of his column that ‘we did the fact-checking for our piece that RFK Jr. didn’t do himself,’ before adding: ‘And he remains someone you cannot rely upon for facts, truth or accuracy.’