Former president Joe Biden will publish a memoir this fall, publisher Little, Brown and Company told the Associated Press.

Promise Me, America, which Biden says will touch upon everything from the economy to his decision to drop his bid for re-election, is scheduled to come out on 17 November.

The timing of the book – two weeks after midterm elections in which Democrats seek to regain control of Congress – could raise concerns within his party. Many Democrats remain divided on Biden’s legacy and his ill-fated determination to seek a second term in the White House, and leaders hope to keep the fall campaign focused on the record of Donald Trump .

“Promise Me, America is about the challenges we faced as a nation. It’s about the decisions I made and why I made them,” Biden said in a video statement accompanying Wednesday’s announcement. “Most of all, it’s about my faith in the promise of America.”

Reports of Biden’s book have circulated for more than a year, and the former president himself has referred to it during public remarks, appearing to suggest it would be released before November’s election.

Biden, who will turn 84 three days after the publication of Promise Me, America, has long presented himself as an upholder of standards and traditions; presidential memoirs are one of them. With a handful of exceptions, modern presidents since Harry Truman in the 1950s have published books about their White House years. Little, Brown declined to release financial details for Promise Me, America, although presidents have usually reached deals worth at least seven figures.

The book’s title echoes a 2017 memoir by Biden, Promise Me, Dad, which centered on the death of his son, Beau Biden.

Vowing as a candidate to “restore the soul” of his country, Biden was sworn into office in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and in the aftermath of the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to stop his certification as president. Biden’s term was defined by a wide range of conflicts and achievements, from his handling of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to the passage of ambitious infrastructure and economic aid bills. But many readers will probably want to know more about his health while president, including the disastrous debate in June 2024 against Trump that led to his giving up his re-election bid. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who ran instead, lost decisively to Trump.

Former first lady Jill Biden wrote in her own book that her husband seemed so weak and disoriented during the debate that she feared he was having a stroke. In View from the East Wing, published in June, she noted that the White House had initially said he was suffering from a cold.

“The biggest lesson for us, I think, was that if you don’t explain something well enough then the question won’t go away,” she wrote. “There was never a satisfying enough explanation offered for Joe’s debate performance, and a lot of people never got over it.”

Biden was the oldest man to serve as president and his health was a source of speculation for much of his term; Biden and his White House advisers have faced intense criticism from Democrats and Republicans for allegedly concealing the extent of his problems. A notable book release from 2025, Jake Tapper’s and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin, was subtitled President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.

That year, Biden announced he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Biden’s previous books also include Promises to Keep, a campaign work published to boost his run for president in 2008, when Barack Obama was the eventual nominee and Biden his running mate. Promise Me, America comes out during a year when nonfiction sales have declined and few political books have caught on, although recent bestsellers have included Vice-President JD Vance’s Communion and an inside account of Trump’s second term, by the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Regime Change.

A Little, Brown spokesperson said that Biden planned to tour on behalf of the book and give interviews. In his video announcement, Biden said that many people had been asking him how he was doing.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time with my family. I’m dealing with a cancer diagnosis, been getting treatment, and it’s going really well,” he said. “I want to thank all those who have offered their prayers and support and well-wishes. It’s meant the world to me and to Jill.”

Jill Biden recalled the immense pressure that Joe Biden faced in the aftermath of his disastrous 2024 debate performance, saying he told her “Jilly, I had no choice,” following his decision to drop out of the presidential race.

The former first lady made the comments during a Tuesday book event coinciding with the release of her new memoir, View from the East Wing. The event was held at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, and moderated by comedian and co-host of The View, Whoopi Goldberg. Former president Biden was in attendance at the event and received two standing ovations from the crowd.

Biden’s poor debate performance against Donald Trump had sparked widespread alarm among Democrats, prompting calls for him to withdraw from the race. When asked on Tuesday if she and her husband had been surprised at the response from their party, she said: “Joe and I were devastated.

“To have people who we really considered close friends come out publicly and say really terrible things about Joe … if you want to come to us and say that to us personally, that’s one thing. But to go on TV shows or out in the press or send me op-eds or whatever – it was really hurtful.”

Jill Biden says that the public outcry from Democrats is ultimately what led him to drop out of the race.

Goldberg also asked her about reports that she had encouraged her husband to stay in the race after the debate, even though others within the president’s inner circle felt differently.

“I would support Joe whether he wanted to stay in or he wanted to get out,” she said. “But the thing to me was, he had to make this decision by himself … because it was a decision he had to live with for the rest of his life.”

In a rally shortly after the June 2024 debate, Jill Biden had praised her husband’s performance, saying: “Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question. You knew all the facts.”

However, in the book – and subsequent press tour – Biden revealed that she thought her husband was having a stroke. “That moment happened, and honest to God, it scared the hell out of me,” she said. “I thought: ‘What in God’s name is happening?’”

While Jill Biden didn’t specify which moment in the debate she was referring to, Biden memorably tried to attack Trump’s policies on tax cuts and the national debt, but mangled the line and instead declared: “We finally beat Medicare.” His team later clarified that he had meant to say his administration had “beat big pharma”, but the misspeak crystallised longstanding concerns about the then-81-year-old’s mental acuity and physical condition.

“It was one of those moments to me that was just inexplicable,” she said during the event.

During the conversation, Goldberg asked Biden if she was still angry about the way the president was treated following his debate flub. “No, I’m not angry,” she said. “What’s the purpose of anger now?”

“I think Joe’s cancer diagnosis really puts life into perspective,” she added. Biden’s office announced in May 2025 that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer which had metastasized to his bones.

The conversation between Goldberg and the former first lady also touched on the scrutiny that the family has endured, specifically their son Hunter Biden. “It’s hard for me to say this, but Hunter was a drug addict,” she said. “It was a really hard time for our family to go through.”

“So many families in America deal with addiction. And I’m sorry that I didn’t talk about it a little bit more,” she said. Hunter Biden posted on Twitter/X earlier on Tuesday that he was celebrating seven years of sobriety, writing: “Thank you to everyone who walked this road with me.”

In addition to his struggles with substance abuse, Hunter has also run into legal trouble over the years. He was found guilty in June 2024 on three felony counts relating to his purchase of a handgun in 2018. He had written on his gun-purchase form, falsely, that he was not a user of illicit drugs. He also pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges in 2024, opting for an “open” plea, where a defendant pleads guilty to the charges and leaves his sentencing fate in the hands of the judge.

After previously saying that he would not use his executive authority to pardon his son, the president issued “a full and unconditional” pardon to Hunter covering his convictions on federal gun and tax charges shortly before he left office. In her memoir, Biden defended her husband’s decision.

“The current president kept saying that he wanted retribution, and he kept pounding it and pounding it,” she said. “So we couldn’t let that happen.”

Kamala Harris has revealed she was “angry and disappointed” when Joe Biden called her hours before her US presidential debate with Donald Trump to suggest powerful associates of Biden’s brother refused to support her.

The former vice-president and Democratic nominee recounts the episode – and other criticisms of Biden – in her campaign memoir 107 Days, obtained by the Guardian before its publication next week.

Harris writes that in September she was in a hotel room in Philadelphia, poised to take on Trump in a potentially decisive debate, when the then president called to wish her good luck – and to ask if she would be back in Philadelphia before the election.

Harris wondered why Biden would ask such a non sequitur. According to the book, he told her: “My brother called. He’s been talking to a group of real power brokers in Philly.” He offered several names and asked if Harris knew them. She did not.

Harris writes: “Then he got to his point. His brother had told him that those guys were not going to support me because I’d been saying bad things about him. He wasn’t inclined to believe it, he claimed, but he thought I should know in case my team had been encouraging me to put daylight between the two of us.”

The then vice-president asked Biden to put the group in touch with her directly. But he was not done with the call. He sought to rewrite the history of his own disastrous debate performance against Trump three months earlier.

“Joe then rattled on about his own former debate performances. ‘I beat him the other time; I wasn’t feeling well in that last one.’ He continued to insist that his debate performance hadn’t hurt him much with the electorate. I was barely listening.”

Harris goes on to reflect that her debate against Trump would be like “a big prizefight”, with huge consequences for America and the world, and she needed to be at the top of her game.

She writes of Biden: “I just couldn’t understand why he would call me, right now, and make it all about himself. Distracting me with worry about hostile power-brokers in the biggest city of the most important state.”

Her husband, Doug Emhoff, “could see how angry and disappointed I was. ‘Let it go,’ he said. He knew I had to redirect my focus. ‘Don’t worry about him. You’re dealing with Trump. Let it go.’”

During the campaign and in its aftermath, Harris had avoided criticism of the president she served beside and defended him amid questions about his mental acuity.

But in 107 Days she lays bare tensions between the two. When the supreme court overturned the Roe v Wade decision on abortion in 2022, for example, “Joe struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment.”

Harris acknowledges there was a distinction between Biden’s ability to govern and to campaign, and that she had concerns about the latter. “His voice was no longer strong, his verbal stumbles more frequent,” she writes.

There was an awkward meeting on 4 July, when Biden was facing growing calls to step aside after his feeble debate performance. Harris hugged him and notes that “he felt so frail”, while Emhoff was led away to see the first lady at the time, Jill Biden.

Harris reports: “She seemed tense, even angry. ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded. ‘Are you supporting us?’ Of course, Doug said. Of course we are supporting you. ‘OK. That’s really important. We need to know that.’

“When I joined him,” Harris continues, “Doug was wearing a grim expression. Doug runs cool. He’s slow to anger. But I could tell something had gotten to him.

“Later, he unloaded. ‘They hide you away for four years, give you impossible, shit jobs, don’t correct the record when those tasks are mischaracterised, never fight back when you’re attacked, never praise your accomplishments, and now, finally, they want you out there on that balcony, standing right beside them. Now, finally, they know you are an asset, and they need you to reassure the American people.

“And still, they have to ask if we’re loyal?”

Harris had felt similar frustrations, recalling how she was once castigated by Biden’s team for apparently delivering a speech too well. “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed.”

Biden bowed to the inevitable and dropped out of the election race on 21 July, then endorsed Harris. Campaign advisers urged her to distance herself from the president. David Plouffe, a senior aide, eventually told her: “People hate Joe Biden.” Harris admits: “It was hard for me to hear that.”

She had just over three months to fight Trump and his army of rightwing influencers. At the end of July, the Republican nominee falsely claimed that Harris, whose mother was Indian and father is Jamaican, “happened to turn Black” a few years ago, a remark that blew up all over the media.

Harris told the campaign aide Brian Fallon that she was not going to take Trump’s bait. She writes in the book: “‘Today he wants me to prove my race. What next? He’ll say I’m not a woman and I’ll need to show my vagina?’

“Brian, on the other end of the phone, fell silent. I imagined the deep crimson of his blush.”

In the aftermath of the disastrous debate against Donald Trump that ultimately ended his political career, Joe Biden skipped a White House meeting with the congressional Progressive caucus in favor of a Camp David photoshoot with the fashion photographer Annie Leibovitz, a new book says.

“You need to cancel that,” Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff and debate prep leader, told the president, as he advocated securing the endorsement of the group of powerful progressive politicians perhaps key to his remaining the Democratic nominee.

“You need to stay in Washington. You need to have an aggressive plan to fight and to rally the troops.”

As described by Klain to Chris Whipple, the author of an explosive new book on the 2024 campaign, Biden “seemed to relent. ‘OK,’ he said.”

“But the president’s resolve didn’t last,” the book continued. “That weekend, Biden and his family were at Camp David having their pictures taken” by Leibovitz.

The president did speak to the progressives by Zoom, Whipple writes, only to scold them over their stance on Israel and claim to have stronger progressive bona fides than they did.

Whipple’s book, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Klain was White House chief of staff from 2021 to 2023. He became chief legal officer for Airbnb but returned to Biden’s side last June to prepare him to debate Trump.

Concern over the octogenarian president’s fitness for the job was a feature of Biden’s White House term. As reported by the Guardian, Klain told Whipple debate preparations left him alarmed by Biden’s physical and mental decline.

But Klain told Whipple: “This was about something other than his age. It was a struggle over power in our party.” According to Klain, Democratic donors were “tired” of Biden because of his ties to labor, and wanted a more business-oriented leader.

Such calls grew deafening after the debate, in which Biden performed with painful, halting confusion. According to Whipple, Klain called Biden the next day, 28 June, and said: “Look, we’re hemorrhaging badly. We need to get the progressive caucus to the White House this weekend. And you need to agree with them on an agenda for a second term, and they will endorse you. So you can walk out there with one hundred members of Congress saying, ‘You should stay in the race.’

“Biden wasn’t convinced: ‘Well, I’m supposed to go to Camp David this weekend for a photo shoot with my family.’”

Klain offered his “blunt” advice and Biden seemed to back down, Whipple writes. But the president left Washington anyway, for a stay with family members who were widely reported to be urging him not to drop out of the race.

“Klain was angry,” Whipple reports. “He called [Jeff] Zients, his successor as White House chief of staff. The president needed to rally the progressives ASAP, Klain told him. But Zients didn’t share his alarm. ‘Look, we’ve got a plan,’ he told Klain. ‘We’ve got a schedule. We’re going to stick to the schedule.’”

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Zients and his team had been trying to rally support for Biden from Democrats in Congress but Klain “felt more drastic action was needed”. A Zoom call was set up with the progressives. It proved a “fiasco”, with Biden giving members of Congress led by Pramila Jayapal of Washington state “a scolding”, saying: “All you guys want to talk about is Gaza … What would you have me do?” and “I was a progressive before some of you guys were even in Congress.”

Jayapal called Klain. Klain called Zients. Zients passed blame to another Biden aide, Steve Ricchetti, “the progressives’ least favorite White House official”. Klain told Zients: “Jeff, this is life or death for this presidency this weekend.” Zients pushed back. Klain was convinced Biden’s aides did not have “a strategy to save his presidency”.

The battle to force Biden out continued. On 21 July, the president bowed to pressure and quit. Klain told Zients: “Jeff, that’s too bad. I think that’s a mistake. I think this was an avoidable tragedy.”

Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, fought off attempts to deny her the nomination, then fought a 100-day campaign that ended in defeat by Trump.

Despite his first-hand experience of Biden’s struggles, and his failure to corral the president into doing simple political legwork instead of attending a glitzy photoshoot, Klain still thought Biden could have won a second term.

In August, he told CNN the president was “clearly up to the job. He’s doing it every day. He’s doing it successfully.”

He also said Biden had “done well” in debate preparation.

In their book Fight, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes offer an account of the “Wildest Battle for the White House” – and a scathing indictment of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the losers of that battle.

By 2023, a year before the campaign, Biden’s age and fitness to be president were the topic of conversation among senior aides. He had difficulty stringing together a coherent sentence yet, there was no serious discussion of his exiting the ticket until it was way, way too late. Harris, meanwhile, was isolated in her party and terrified of facing the press. She took the wheel of a badly listing ship. It sank.

Allen is a veteran political reporter, now at NBC. Parnes is a senior political correspondent for the Hill. Both were once with Politico. Together, they have written two books on Hillary Clinton, HRC and Shattered, and Lucky, an account of how Biden beat Donald Trump to win the White House in 2020. Parnes and Allen possess perspective. Their writing is sober, their sourcing solid.

Their message is clear: Biden should never have sought reelection and his selection of Harris as his running mate was a mistake from the start. By 2024, Biden was too old and too unpopular. He appeared feeble, if not outright addled. But his aides came to view Harris as a liability and so did those at the top of the party. The president’s wife, Jill Biden, opposed Harris’s place on the ticket. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi lacked faith too.

At the same time, Jill and Hunter Biden, the 46th president’s wayward surviving son, bolstered the president’s determination to cling on. They could not let go.

“Nobody walks away from this,” Mike Donilon, a longtime Biden adviser, purportedly told one prominent Democrat. “No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter.”

Allen and Parnes add: “That was doubly true for the first lady.”

Pushback could be construed as disloyalty. Biden’s closest advisers were family members or dependent on him for their living. That proved to be a problem. There were no social peers with incomes and lives of their own, figures in the mold of James Baker, secretary of state and chief of staff to George HW Bush, or Valerie Jarett, senior adviser and confidante to Barack and Michelle Obama. Biden bristled at being challenged but was a schmoozer, not a leader. He owed his comeback to Covid-19.

On 27 June 2024, Biden faced Trump on the debate stage in Atlanta – and gave perhaps the most disastrous display in history. Allen and Parnes describe a reception hosted by Phil Murphy, governor of New Jersey, two days later. The president’s aides had affixed fluorescent tape to the carpet, “colorful bread crumbs [that] showed the leader of the free world where to walk”.

“He knows to look for that,” one aide explained. Think, President Grampa Simpson. It’s a lousy image, whoever the other side is running.

In 2020, the Trump campaign mocked Biden for hiding in his basement. In turn, Bidenites twitted Trump for his inability to handle stairs. Time passed. By 2023, Trump was approaching 80, but Biden had shuffled past it. In public, he froze. The memes flowed but Biden’s woes were not comedic.

According to Parnes and Allen, Harris aides “strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office”. Jamal Simmons, Harris’s communications director, drew up a “death-pool roster” of federal judges who might swear his boss in.

After the debate, Obama and Pelosi were distraught. The debacle left Obama shocked, if not exactly surprised.

“The 44th president never had much faith in [the] political ability” of his former vice-president, Parnes and Allen write. “Less than two weeks earlier, at [a] Los Angeles fundraiser, Obama led Biden offstage by the wrist after the president stood frozen for a few moments while staring into the crowd.”

Obama was disturbed. Parnes and Allen describe a post-debate call.

“What is your path?” Obama asked Biden.

“What’s my path? Biden thought as he listened to Obama. What’s your fucking plan?”

He intuited Obama’s endgame. But Obama also lacked faith in Harris.

“Obama already had determined that he didn’t think Harris should take the president’s spot on the ballot,” Parnes and Allen write. “‘That was his position from the outset,’ according to one person who spoke to him at the time.”

Pelosi, like Harris from northern California, unlike her a hardened politico with ruthless instincts, thought the same way.

“She actually was worried when people were panicking the night of the debate, saying ‘Oh my God, it’s going to be her,’” Parnes and Allen quote “someone who spoke to Pelosi”.

Obama and Pelosi applied pressure. Biden caved. Harris generated buzz, but not enough. She bested Trump in debate, but memory of that triumph faded swiftly. Harris would not and could not put distance between herself and Biden. The president, his family and his handlers wanted it that way.

Biden and Harris’s shortcomings had been clear for years. In June 2019, on the debate stage, Harris trashed Biden over his record on race. Less than six months later, having burned through millions of dollars, she dropped out of the Democratic primary. Her place on Biden’s ticket resulted from the threat posed by Trump, the protest-filled aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, and the leftward drift and outsized role of identity politics within Democratic ranks.

His opponents brought to a historic low, Trump openly weighs running for a third term, in defiance of the constitution. Whether the Democrats can respond is in grave doubt indeed.

The Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward forcefully denied making statements attributed to him by James Comer, the Republican chair of the powerful House oversight committee, in which Woodward supposedly said Joe Biden was financially corrupt.

“The statements attributed to me in what is apparently his book are false,” Woodward said. “I made none of those statements he attributes to me. I repeat none, and not even in a paraphrased form.”

Woodward said Comer was “peddling stories, conclusions and allegations that just do not check out at all”.

Comer lays out his claims in a book, All the President’s Money: Investigating the Secret Foreign Schemes That Made the Biden Family Rich, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

The book is named in tribute to All the President’s Men, the seminal account of the Watergate scandal that Woodward wrote with Carl Bernstein, with whom he brought down a president, Richard Nixon.

As oversight chair, Comer led Republican attempts to bring down Biden, by tying the president, his surviving son, Hunter Biden, and other family members to alleged financial corruption involving foreign interests.

Riddled with conspiracy theories and discredited witnesses, Comer’s investigation flopped – publicly so in one high-profile hearing when a key witness, the law professor Jonathan Turley, said evidence against the president fell short of the necessary threshold for impeachment and removal.

Hunter Biden was separately convicted on taxation and guns charges, before receiving a hugely controversial pardon from his father.

In his book, Comer claims Woodward spoke about Joe Biden over dinner in February 2023, after Woodward and Robert Costa of CBS – his sometime writing partner, whose surname Comer misspells as “Costas” throughout his account – interviewed Comer for a book about Biden’s presidency.

“Woodward explained that everyone in DC knew that Joe allowed his family to sell access to him, but as far as he was aware, that was not illegal,” Comer writes. “He added that it should be, but it wasn’t. ‘You will have to prove all of Joe Biden’s wrongdoing,’ he said, ‘and you will likely not be able to do that.’”

He also writes that he asked Woodward “what he thought about my investigation. He replied that he thought Biden had obviously worked the system his entire political career, and that his son and both brothers had a troubled financial history. He predicted that my investigation ‘would either be bigger than Watergate or it would end up being a big nothing burger’.”

Comer also says Woodward bragged about Watergate and disparaged the current Washington political press corps.

In an email to the Guardian, Woodward forcefully denied Comer’s version of their conversation and said he had tapes which proved it had never happened.

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“The dinner with Comer was tape-recorded with his knowledge,” Woodward wrote, adding that he had listened again to the tape, which was “two hours and 55 minutes” long.

“The statements attributed to me in what is apparently his book are false,” Woodward said. “I made none of those statements he attributes to me. I repeat none, and not even in a paraphrased form – either about Biden or about the media. I never said Biden was corrupt or sold access.”

Woodward also said: “In the course of the interview Comer made a series of wild and over-the-top allegations about various people and political figures. It was an endless stream. None checked out.

“I say this on the record now. I don’t know any more about him or what else might be in his book. But it is a textbook case of someone seriously misremembering or putting his own comments into someone else’s mouth – in this case, mine. He is peddling stories, conclusions and allegations that just do not check out at all.

“The purpose of the interview was to hear what he had to say. He was the chairman of an important committee … As a reporter, you interview people who should be in a position to know something. At times they do, at times they don’t. This is a case where the person did not. But I’m surprised that someone in an investigative position would so misstate the facts.”

Representatives for Comer did not respond to a request for comment.

In a new book, James Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chair of the powerful US House oversight committee, claims that in a private conversation the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward told him “everyone in DC knew” Joe Biden was financially corrupt.

“Woodward explained that everyone in DC knew that Joe allowed his family to sell access to him, but as far as he was aware, that was not illegal,” Comer writes. “He added that it should be, but it wasn’t. ‘You will have to prove all of Joe Biden’s wrongdoing,’ he said, ‘and you will likely not be able to do that.’”

Comer’s investigation of the Bidens might end up “bigger than Watergate”, Woodward reportedly added, though he also cautioned it could be “a big nothing burger” too.

Now 81, Woodward is the author of numerous bestsellers about presidents and politics. The legendary journalist is famously well-connected and tight-lipped about the interviews and sourcing that produce his scoop-laden books. His career has been built on a scrupulously nonpartisan approach to reporting on presidents and their high-powered peers, and Comer’s recounting of an off-the-record conversation with Woodward presents a potentially rare glimpse into his work.

Woodward did not respond to a request for comment about Comer’s claims about his remarks about Biden.

In the last Congress, Comer mounted investigations of the president, his surviving son, Hunter Biden, and other family members, seeking to prove longstanding rightwing claims of financial impropriety linked to foreign governments, which the Bidens fiercely deny and which Republicans often mix with wild conspiracy theories.

Unable to prove wrongdoing, Comer’s work fizzled publicly, not least when a key Republican witness, the law professor Jonathan Turley, told a much-hyped hearing evidence against Joe Biden did not meet the threshold for impeachment and removal.

Nonetheless, allegations of corruption involving the Bidens remain controversial. Hunter Biden was eventually convicted on criminal charges relating to taxation and guns. Last month, to widespread uproar, his father gave him a pardon.

Biden will soon cede the White House to Donald Trump but Comer will hope to keep controversy bubbling with his book, in which he repeats a torrent of unsubstantiated claims and conspiracy theories and skirts over embarrassing missteps. All the President’s Money: Investigating the Secret Foreign Schemes That Made the Biden Family Rich, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Indicating Woodward’s stature in Washington, Comer’s title is a tribute to All the President’s Men, the book Woodward wrote with his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, recounting their work to expose the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon in 1974 and which became a hit film starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein.

In his own book, Comer writes that in early February 2023, he “managed to have dinner with Bob Woodward”, who “had credibility in a town full of journalists with absolutely zero credibility”.

Comer says Bob Costa of CBS also attended the “quiet homemade dinner prepared by Woodward’s wife”, because the two reporters were “doing a book on Joe Biden’s presidency and wanted to interview me because they thought my investigation might have an impact”.

Costa co-wrote Peril, Woodward’s third book on Trump’s presidency, published in September 2021.

Comer says he gave Woodward and Costa their interview, “then asked Woodward what he thought about my investigation. He replied that he thought Biden had obviously worked the system his entire political career, and that his son and both brothers had a troubled financial history. He predicted that my investigation ‘would either be bigger than Watergate or it would end up being a big nothing burger’.

“The receipts had to show the money flowed all the way to the top.”

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Comer says Woodward then made his claim “that everyone in DC knew that Joe allowed his family to sell access to him”.

Comer says he told Woodward and Costa he planned to subpoena “all of the Biden characters’ bank accounts”, only for Woodward to tell him Biden’s lawyers would never allow it. “Costas [sic] piped in,” Comer adds, “and said that everyone knew Joe Biden had always been cash-strapped and always tried to live beyond his means”, but the whole family was “very good ‘at covering its tracks’”.

Describing the supposedly private conversation, Comer also claims Woodward boasted about Watergate (“He proudly declared that he solved the Watergate crime, not the senators. They just copied and pasted his work”) and disparaged “today’s reporters” for having no sources “outside of politicians and political operatives”.

Comer’s disdain for the press is evident throughout his book. So is vituperative abuse of fellow members of Congress. Fellow Republicans do not escape his wrath but he saves particular venom for a senior Democrat, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who as the ranking member of the House oversight committee worked closely with Comer, the two men often presenting at least an appearance of good humor before the press.

A professor of constitutional law, Raskin was a member of the House January 6 committee and lead manager in Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial, over the Capitol attack. Widely respected, the author of his own bestselling book, he is now the ranking Democrat on the judiciary committee.

As described in print by Comer, Raskin has a “warped partisan mind”; is “arrogant, usually dishonest”; is a “goon” and a “hoodlum”; talks to the press “with his trademark chest bowed out and head cocked back (much like what we of the Appalachian foothills call a banty rooster)”; and was guilty of telling “bald-faced lies” about an FBI document detailing a claim of wrongdoing at issue during Comer’s Biden investigations.

A spokesperson for Raskin did not respond to a request for comment.

Joe Biden is “privately defiant” that he made the right calls on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in summer 2021, a new book reportedly says, even as the chaos and carnage that unfolded continues to be investigated in Congress.

“No one offered to resign” over the withdrawal, writes Alexander Ward, a Politico reporter, “in large part because the president didn’t believe anyone had made a mistake. Ending the war was always going to be messy.”

Ward’s book, The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore Foreign Policy After Trump, will be published next week. Axios reported extracts on Friday.

Ward adds: “Biden told his top aides, [national security adviser Jake] Sullivan included, that he stood by them and they had done their best during a tough situation.”

Ward quotes an unnamed White House official as saying: “There wasn’t even a real possibility of a shake-up.”

The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, a month after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. The Taliban, which had sheltered the leader of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, was soon ousted but fighting never ceased.

Figures for the total US death toll in the country since 2001 vary. The United States Institute of Peace, an independent body established by Congress, says that 2,324 US military personnel, 3,917 US contractors and 1,144 allied troops were killed during the conflict. More than 20,000 Americans were wounded.

“For Afghans,” the institute goes on, “the statistics are nearly unimaginable: 70,000 Afghan military and police deaths, 46,319 Afghan civilians (although that is likely a significant underestimation) and some 53,000 opposition fighters killed. Almost 67,000 other people were killed in Pakistan in relation to the Afghan war.”

Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Furthermore, according to the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, “four times as many [US] service members have died by suicide than in combat in the post-9/11 wars [including Iraq and other campaigns], signaling a widespread mental health crisis”.

Biden entered office determined to withdraw, and in late summer 2021 US forces pulled out, leaving the defense of the country to US-trained Afghan national forces.

The Taliban swiftly overran that opposition, and soon scenes of chaos at Kabul airport dominated world news. Tens of thousands of Afghans who sought to leave, fearing Taliban reprisals after a 20-year US occupation, were unable to get out. More than 800 US citizens were left behind, notwithstanding Biden’s promise on 18 August that troops would stay until every US citizen who wanted to leave had done so.

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Ward, Axios said, quotes a senior White House official as saying: “There’s no one here who thinks we can meet that promise.”

On 26 August, 13 US service members were killed in a suicide attack. Three days later, a US drone strike killed 10 Afghan civilians, seven of them children. No Americans faced disciplinary action over the strike, which a US air force inspector general called “an honest mistake”.

According to Axios, Ward also details extensive infighting over the withdrawal between the Departments of State and Defense.

Biden, Ward says, tended to favour the state department, having been chair of the Senate foreign affairs committee, and to be wary of the Pentagon, having been vice-president to Barack Obama through eight years of inconclusive war.

Joe Biden is taking a “cheap shot” whenever he gleefully compares Donald Trump to Herbert Hoover, a prominent political commentator said, defending the 31st president whose single term in office coincided with the Great Depression.

“It’s such a cheap shot,” Margaret Hoover, the president’s great-granddaughter and a commentator for CNN and PBS, told Politico. “If a person spent a minute studying Herbert Hoover’s contributions, one would come to see that these political jabs have obscured a shining example of an uncommon public servant.”

Hoover was a mining engineer before entering government and earning the nickname “the Great Humanitarian”, for his work to keep allied nations fed during the first world war. A Republican, he decisively defeated the New York governor Al Smith to win the White House in 1928.

According to the White House website, Hoover’s “opponents in Congress … unfairly painted him as a callous and cruel president” as he sought to cope with the global economic catastrophe that struck less than a year after the start of his term.

Margaret Hoover was also accusing Trump of using her ancestor’s name in vain.

Last month, Trump said he hoped the US economy would crash “during this next 12 months” – before his seemingly inevitable election rematch with Biden – “because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover. The one president I just don’t want to be, Herbert Hoover.”

Biden, who had already compared Trump to Hoover, seized on Trump’s remark, saying in social media video: “He doesn’t want to be Herbert Hoover. He has to understand, he’s already Herbert Hoover. He’s the only other president who lost jobs during his term.”

Trump’s time in office, between 2017 and 2021, ended in the chaos of Covid, a pandemic that battered the global economy.

Biden, Politico pointed out, has used the Hoover comparison repeatedly.

Margaret Hoover said: “I will personally offer either Donald Trump or Joe Biden – or any elected official of either party – a tour of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum [in West Branch, Iowa]. This is an open invitation.”

Politico found other Hoover defenders including the historian George Nash, who said: “You don’t expect most political figures to have deep knowledge of these matters so [Biden and Trump] are looking for quick stereotypes to invoke. These are very superficial statements that both individuals have made.”

Lauren Hitt, a Biden campaign spokesperson, apologised “for any undue pain we caused Herbert Hoover by lumping him in with Donald Trump. While they do share the worst jobs record in American history, Hoover never said he wanted the economy to crash to improve his own political fortune – an important distinction.”

In its latest ranking of US presidents, issued in 2022, the Siena College Research Institute places Hoover 37th out of 45. The 141 presidential scholars behind the list put Trump six places lower, ahead of only James Buchanan, who failed to stop the civil war, and Andrew Johnson, the first president ever impeached. Not having completed a term in office, Biden does not yet place.

According to Siena, the best president is Franklin D Roosevelt, Hoover’s successor who steered the US through the Depression and the second world war, and who Biden has claimed as an inspiration for his work in succession to Covid and Trump.