Dean Phillips on timing of Biden's cancer news: 'I don’t think it’s coincidental'

Former Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who challenged former President Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, suggested in a new interview that Biden timed his cancer diagnosis announcement to deflect from renewed scrutiny of his time in the White House.

“I don’t think it’s coincidental that this was announced this week,” Phillips told the New York Times in an interview published Monday.

“It’s hard to comport otherwise,” he added.

The interview comes as new reporting from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson about the extent to which members of Biden’s inner circle took to shield the American public from signs of Biden’s cognitive decline, toward the end of his term.

Phillips — who faced intense blowback from Democrats when he voiced concern last year about Biden’s age on the campaign trail — said these efforts from Trump allies are, in some ways, worse than what he described as President Trump’s “corruption.”

“Donald Trump isn’t shy about his corruption,” Phillips told the Times in the interview. “What’s so troubling is that what the people around Joe Biden clearly were doing was in some ways more egregious.”

Biden’s personal office announced this weekend that the former president was diagnosed on Friday with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. The announcement was met with a bipartisan outpouring of support, though some have raised questions about how the cancer was not detected earlier.