Various advisers entered talking points for her binder, but the ones about Biden’s mental capacity were handled by senior officials.
Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre could not say specifically who provided the talking points she used to deflect concerns about former President Joe Biden’s mental acuity.
Jean-Pierre testified before the House Oversight Committee Friday and could not recall who fed her the Biden administration’s talking points about online “cheap fakes” being used to undermine him, a person familiar with the interview told NR.
She said “cheap fakes” were a talking point put into her binder, but she does not know specifically who put it in. Various advisers entered talking points for her binder, but the ones about Biden’s mental capacity were handled by senior officials.
In June 2024, Jean-Pierre infamously used the term “cheap fakes” to describe viral videos of Biden’s mishaps, including footage of him freezing up at a lavish Hollywood fundraiser. Not long after, Biden’s disastrous debate performance brought his worsening mental capacity to the forefront of American politics.
In the middle of the debate, Jean-Pierre recalled senior staff telling her Biden had a cold — a talking point the administration used during the immediate aftermath of the debate. Jean-Pierre said she never spoke to anyone in the White House who was personally concerned about Biden’s health.
Jean-Pierre worked for Biden in several different capacities and did not notice a change in his competency from 2009 to 2025. She acknowledged that he is not the same speaker as when she met him, but does not know why his abilities changed.
Jean-Pierre could not recall any instance where she heard Biden stutter, although she remembered him talking about it and connecting with people who struggled with stutters. Biden’s childhood stutter was often used to deflect from his diminishing mental capabilities, even though the stutter was not a problem during his decades-long political career.
The closed-door interview with Jean-Pierre is key for the Oversight Committee’s investigation into Biden’s mental decline and how White House officials handled it. The panel is specifically looking into whether White House staffers used the presidential autopen for pardons at the end of Biden’s term. The Trump administration is also investigating the matter to see if any criminal conduct took place.
Jean-Pierre is one of several Biden spokespeople to testify for the investigation. Last week, former senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates downplayed Biden’s mental decline and blamed the media for turning it into the demise of Biden’s political career. Another spokesman, Ian Sams, recalled hardly seeing Biden during his tenure in the administration, despite the high-profile nature of his job.
Now a registered independent, Jean-Pierre was the highest-profile spokesperson for the Biden administration. She routinely defended Biden’s mental capacity and even told CNN in 2022 that she struggled to keep up with him.
“Oh, my gosh, he’s the President of the United States, you know, he – I can’t even keep up with him,” she told CNN’s Don Lemon.
Former senior Biden officials Mike Donilon and Steve Richetti defended Biden’s mental capacity during their closed-door testimony. Both men asserted that Biden was mentally capable of being president, as did former White House chief of staff Ron Klain. Other Biden officials, including Biden’s physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor, chose to invoke their Fifth Amendment right rather than testify for the Oversight Committee’s investigation.
Biden has dismissed the possibility his aides used the autopen to give out pardons and commutations without his knowledge. Internal emails from the Biden administration show a chaotic process for approving the sweeping pardons in Biden’s final days, to the point where the families of the victims of the violent offenders pardoned were kept in the dark.
Jean-Pierre has a memoir coming out next month about her time in the Biden administration and the issues with America’s two party system. Her book was widely criticized by former Biden administration colleagues bitter about her poor performance and penchant for self promotion. She is a career Democratic operative and liberal pundit who served as White House press secretary from May 2022 until the end of Biden’s term in January.
After a sustained Democratic revolt, Biden dropped out of the presidential race in July 2024 and threw his weight behind then-Vice President Kamala Harris. President Donald Trump defeated Harris convincingly in the 2024 presidential election and carried the GOP to a 53-47 Senate majority. Harris’s memoir is coming out at the end of this month, and in the book she places the blame on Biden for her defeat, much to the chagrin of Biden’s inner circle.