Finding out who talked Joe Biden into holding a debate in June may be key to unraveling the coup that ended his re-election campaign. Here’s my column from Real Clear Politics today.

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By FRANK MIELE

Calling Seymour Hersh!

The investigative journalist who broke the story about the CIA blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines may be the only reporter brave enough to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding the political coup that was waged against President Joe Biden this summer.

It looked for all the world as though Biden would survive his June 27 debate debacle. Biden had revealed himself to be woefully unprepared to challenge Donald Trump effectively in what many have called the most significant election of our lifetimes. Republicans warned that Biden was showing signs of senility or even dementia, and even Democrats worried that the president would be unable to prevent the reelection of Trump, whom they accused of being the greatest danger to democracy since the French Revolution.

And yet, President Biden insisted he wasn’t going anywhere. For more than three weeks, Biden endured the humiliating spectacle of being savaged by his fellow Democratic politicians and donors, but somehow he enjoyed the support of everyday people. Remarkably, despite the horrific debate performance and the non-stop media narrative that said he was the political equivalent of a dead man walking, Biden remained within the margin of error in national polls. He had barely dropped at all since “The Debate.”

He had the delegates, and he had the nomination unless he willingly surrendered it. But something happened. About the same time Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt and raised his fist in defiance, Democrats seemed to have concluded that Biden could not win in November. The four days of what is widely believed to be a successful Republican convention only hardened that belief.

And whether it is Sy Hersh or some young gun of journalism ready to make his or her name, someone needs to tell the truth about the 10 days that shook the nation, from the moment Trump took a would-be assassin’s bullet on July 13 to the afternoon Biden inexplicably dropped his reelection bid and Kamala Harris was coronated.

And the first question that needs to be answered, and which no one in the mainstream media is asking, is “Who convinced Joe Biden that debating Trump on June 27, nearly two months before the Democratic convention, was a good idea?”

This was unprecedented. Usually, the major-party candidates don’t meet on stage until September. Of course, if the first debate had been in September, and Biden had suffered the same kind of embarrassment that happened in June, the Democrats would have had no recourse except to suck it up and ride with Biden to defeat.

But they didn’t wait. Someone talked Biden into challenging Trump to a debate so early that it provided the only viable path to supplanting Biden as the Democratic nominee. Given what we learned after the debate – that dozens of those closest to Biden were convinced that he had suffered irreparable cognitive decline – we are forced to ask who led the president to the slaughter, politically.

Obviously, someone – or some cabal – had serious concerns about the president’s mental capacity, and made the calculated decision to promote the early debate as a means of exposing Biden’s infirmity to the nation while there was still time to do something about it. To believe otherwise is to accept the theory that between the time Biden proposed the debate to Trump on May 15 and the actual debate on June 27, Biden had – unbeknownst to his team – spiraled into senility, shocking them as much as the general public.

But we know that is not true, and we have it from an independent, unimpeachable source – Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden for his possession of classified documents dating back decades.

I would not be surprised if the scheme to unseat Biden was hatched in February when Hur declined to prosecute the president for classified documents violations on the grounds that a jury would clear Biden because they would see him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

With that declaration, the cat was out of the bag. Maybe Biden’s handlers initially thought he could survive that humiliation, but when the president gave a press conference to declare himself vindicated, he mistakenly identified Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi as the president of Mexico. The wheels may have started turning to jettison Biden in order to preserve the Democratic Party.

Yes, Biden was allowed to continue running for reelection and he trounced the limited opposition he faced, but the top Democrats probably had contingency plans in place already for how to replace the president on the campaign trail if necessary. Those plans came to fruition on June 27 when Trump knocked out Biden cold on the CNN debate stage.

What is hilarious is that for the intervening months since the Hur Report was released, Democrats who didn’t know the fix was in kept insisting that Biden was not just mentally competent, he was actually at the top of his game! “Sharp as a tack,” was the term of art.

That was laughable. The evidence was in plain sight. The question for historians is “Who knew the fix was in?” And equally importantly, how could these powers behind the throne unseat Joe Biden the candidate and still leave the nation in the hands of Joe Biden the president for another six months?

That dangerous proposition is why we can’t wait for history’s verdict, and why it is imperative for journalists to dig down immediately and unravel the plot that sought to undermine not just Biden but America’s democracy and left us weaker and wounded on the international stage.

You can bet the mainstream media won’t take up the challenge. They have bought wholeheartedly into the narrative that Biden is an American hero for resigning his campaign, so it will depend on a fearless outsider like Hersh or Bari Weiss to get to the truth. Let’s hope they get to it before Election Day.