We need congressional hearings to learn the full story.
We need congressional hearings to learn the full story.
L ate on Friday, the House Oversight Committee announced that it will resume its investigation of just how the White House operated near the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, given Biden’s cognitive impairment. Kevin O’Connor, the president’s former doctor, who never recommended that Biden take a cognitive test, will be called. So too will White House staffers who oversaw an overuse of the autopen, a mechanical device that replicates the president’s signature, to authorize executive orders and grant pardons.
The question is: Who decided what would be signed? It’s unclear. “Five people were running the country,” an unnamed source close to the Biden administration told CNN’s Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios, the authors of the explosive new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. “And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”
The book, which will be published on Tuesday, follows last week’s release by Axios of five hours of tapes from Biden’s October 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur, who was probing into Biden’s retention of classified documents from his time as vice president. Hur ultimately decided that Biden “willfully” kept the documents, but he did not recommend that charges be pressed because a jury would find that Biden is “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
A transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden was published last year, but the Biden White House tenaciously fought against releasing the tapes, citing “law enforcement” concerns. We now know the real reason. The tapes reveal a president who can’t recall key facts, has to frequently pause mid-sentence, and changes the subject often. The interview was conducted the day after Hamas massacred Israeli settlements on the Gaza border, throwing the entire Mideast into turmoil.
“The presidency requires someone who can perform at 2:00am during an emergency,” Tapper and Thompson write. “Cabinet secretaries in his own administration told us that by 2024, he could not be relied upon for this.”
Biden has decided to fight back against the doubts about his cognitive ability with recent interviews with BBC and on ABC’s The View. These were, in short, a disaster and did far more to prove the thesis of Original Sin than to refute it. (Separately, the former president’s office said on Sunday that he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer.)
Democrats such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer insist that the country should be “looking forward” rather than analyzing how Biden came to run for reelection despite his cognitive impairment. But some Democrats disagree. Representative Adam Smith, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee from 2019 to 2023, says, “Joe Biden clearly just was not capable of delivering the message we needed to deliver in 2024” and asks, “Why was it so hard to recognize that and make the change? So I guess to some degree it is helpful to have that conversation.”
There are other good reasons why the House Oversight Committee’s investigation is useful and necessary.
(1) There was indeed a massive cover-up inside the White House. As The Atlantic bluntly reports this week:
Dozens of people in Biden’s orbit suspected that he was not physically or mentally equipped to be the president of the United States, yet they helped him seek that office and keep it when he couldn’t reliably perform its duties. These people then sought to return Biden to that office for four more years, even if that meant the country would most likely have been quietly run by unelected aides.
Indeed, those same aides admitted to each other that Biden was becoming so physically frail that he might need to use a wheelchair in his second term. But their primary concern appeared to be that nothing be seen that would endanger his reelection — or their own hold on power, which they enjoyed as a result of Biden’s weakness. At a minimum, those who actively concealed Biden’s true condition from the American people, and even his own cabinet, should be informally barred from serving in positions of trust in the government again.
(2) Biden’s condition began to deteriorate as early as a decade ago:
“Those close to him say that the first signs he was deteriorating emerged after the death of his beloved son Beau in 2015,” report Tapper and Thompson. Recordings from 2017, of Biden talking with a ghostwriter, show a man in distress: “Biden was really struggling in 2017. His cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.”
(3) The authors of Original Sin make it clear that previous cover-ups of the health problems of presidents (Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy) pale by comparison with the Biden cover-up.
A senior White House aide, who quit as a result of Biden’s initially seeking reelection, told the authors that “we attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023.”
“If he had won, people in the Biden world believe that there would’ve been a constitutional crisis,” Thompson told the New Yorker. “Because clearly the people in his inner circle were not willing to cede power.”
(4) There is an unhealthy confluence of interests between the White House and the reporters who most frequently cover it.
The media are supposed to be watchdogs of potential governmental abuse. Instead, they are in danger of becoming lapdogs serving the interests of some of those in power. (The danger, with Trump in office, is dramatically reduced.) In Biden’s case, his aides worked overtime to conceal the president’s frailty from the media and intimidate anyone who questioned his abilities, and the media failed in their duty to probe more deeply and question the official White House line.
“This was a cover-up — plain and simple,” admits Chris Cillizza, a former reporter with the Washington Post and CNN. “For at least two years (or close to it) senior people in the White House knew that Biden’s condition was bad enough that it needed to be concealed from people working in the administration.”
The media should have realized how powerful a motivation their sources had to deceive them. The Economist notes in January 2024: “His staff’s desire to serve has surely been tainted by ambition. It is in the nature of administrations that many of a president’s closest advisers will never again be so close to power. Of course they do not want to see their man surrender the White House in order to focus on his presidential library.”
The same month that Economist article was published, I warned that “the worst nightmare of progressives — a second Trump stint in the White House” could become reality if Democrats and their allies in the media–industrial complex either willfully or blindly ignored Biden’s cognitive decline.
And that’s exactly what happened. Will anyone draw any lessons from all this? I fear the answer is no, but there’s a chance that something worthwhile will come out of the congressional hearings that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has just announced. At their best, congressional hearings can make use of depositions and subpoenas to force facts out into the open and give them prominence. Even Democrats, who were so eager to use congressional hearings to investigate the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, should realize that and cooperate. Their hearings, although largely partisan and performative, unearthed parts of the story that needed to be known and informed the public.
Let’s hope that the hearings into the Biden health cover-up are handled better by both parties.