Nate Evans, who has taken the lead on Jake Tapper’s PR campaign, worked for Biden’s 2020 campaign and Harris’s 2024 run
Been there, spun that.
CNN’s Jake Tapper hired a former spin doctor on the 2020 Biden-Harris and 2024 Harris-Walz campaigns to try to soften the critical coverage he has received around the launch of his new book. The anchor—who played an integral role in attacking coverage of former president Joe Biden’s cognitive decline—has toured around the country to promote Original Sin, an insider account of the cover-up in which he participated.
Tapper retained the public relations firm Heller earlier this month, Breaker reported. Its founder and CEO, veteran communications maven Risa Heller, has flacked for Elizabeth Holmes and Anthony Weiner, among other clients with deep pockets in deep trouble. Heller is no stranger to journalists in hot water—she ran interference for another CNN personality during the Toobin Missile Crisis.
While she herself is involved in the Tapper media campaign, an individual familiar with the matter told the Washington Free Beacon that Nate Evans, the former Democratic campaign official who now serves as a senior vice president at Heller, has taken the lead on behalf of the company.
“It’s hysterical,” a former Biden aide said. “It’s a book that the Bidens don’t want anyone to read or believe, but now a former Biden admin official is doing the flacking for the book.”
Unlike Tapper, coauthor Alex Thompson of Axios did cover the story at the time and has called out colleagues who put their heads in the sand.
“We, myself included, missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it,” Thompson said during remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month. “We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”
Evans’s work softening up the famously ornery CNN anchor seems to have already borne fruit. During an appearance on Megyn Kelly’s podcast, Tapper offered a rare moment of contrition, admitting that he had been wrong about Biden’s condition.
Tapper also said he had privately apologized to former RNC chairwoman Lara Trump, whom he had mocked and shouted down upon hearing her concerns about Biden’s mental state in 2020.
“I called her months ago and said, ‘You were right,’” Tapper told Kelly. “She saw something that I did not see at the time, 100 percent, and I own that.”
Evans joined Heller in January 2025, escaping the wreckage of both his former bosses for a comparatively cushy decampment. He previously worked as the spokesman for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, deputy chief of staff to Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), and deputy press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s doomed 2016 presidential campaign. Evans also spent 10 months on former vice president Kamala Harris’s 2020 primary bid.
Risa Heller did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment.
