Former first daughter Ashley Biden is pushing back against the reporting in a bombshell book detailing her father’s decline and the effort to cover it up. She says the book is “bulls—” and “fake news.”

Ms. Biden is the only child of President Biden and the former first lady, Jill Biden. She has long defended her family against all kinds of accusations, including during a primetime address at the Democratic National Convention and sitting in the front row at her half-brother Hunter Biden’s criminal trial last year. 

In a lengthy Instagram post Monday, Ms. Biden did not hold back against the reporting in the book from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson. The book now sits at no. 1 on the New York Times best seller list. 

“The truth is, Dad gave his ALL to America and continues til this day. He NEVER gave up on you. And he listened to all of you. And he acted,” Ms. Biden says. “The man has led his life by ACTIONS not words.”

The photo Ms. Biden posted to accompany the text was of herself and her parents on the beach. She wrote that the “ONLY coverup” was a “BEACH coverup.” Over the photo she attached the caption: “I am so grateful. Too grateful to be angry about all the bulls—.”

She admitted in her post, however, that Mr. Biden has clearly aged, and that the “stress of the presidency” wasn’t helpful. “He aged, YES! As we all do! And the stress of the presidency accelerates. But he was always MORE than capable of doing the job,” Ms. Biden said. 

“He worked harder than anyone I have ever known — he took his duty and sacred obligation to this country very seriously. The noise is so DAMN disrespectful and untrue,” she continued. “AND, it’s just that — noise/static — created by those committed to perpetuating and profiting from some real BS.”

“Get lost with your anonymous sources and fake news,” Ms. Biden wrote. 

She is the second member of the Biden family to publicly criticize the book by Messrs. Tapper and Thompson. Ms. Biden’s niece, Naomi Biden, said she read the book, “Original Sin,” shortly before it was released. The president’s eldest granddaughter, whose father, Hunter Biden, spent most of 2023 and 2024 in the headlines for his legal troubles, called the book “political fairy smut” in her own review. 

“It amounts to a bunch of unoriginal, uninspired lies written by irresponsible self-promoting journalists out to make a quick buck,” the younger Ms. Biden wrote at the time. “It relies on unnamed, anonymous sources pushing a self-serving false narrative that absolves them of any responsibility for our current national nightmare.”

“There are real stories to be told and one day they will be. I suspect history will reward the truth,” she added. 

Asked about the book last week, the former president himself said none of it is true and bizarrely suggested that he could “beat the hell” out of Messrs. Tapper and Thompson. “You can see that I’m mentally incompetent and I can’t walk,” Mr. Biden joked to a reporter when asked. “I can beat the hell outta both of them,” he said with a smile.

When pressed about other Democrats now coming out publicly to say that it was a mistake for the former president to seek a second term in 2024, Mr. Biden asked: “Why didn’t they run against me then?”

“Because I’d have beaten them,” he said. Mr. Biden said he had no regrets about running again and said he was “very proud” of his record as president.