The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a report titled, “The Biden Autopen Presidency: Decline, Delusion, and Deception in the White House,” exposing the concealment of former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. The report details how Biden aides exercised presidential authority without Biden’s direct authorization.
The report utilizes transcripts from 14 different Biden aides. “Not one of the Committee’s 14 witnesses was willing to admit that they ever had a concern about President Biden being in cognitive decline,” the report explains. “In fact, numerous witnesses could not recall having a single conversation about President Biden’s cognitive health with anyone inside or outside of the White House.”
According to the report, Biden’s executive decisions must be reviewed. “In the absence of sufficient contemporaneous documentation indicating that cognitively deteriorating President Biden himself made a given executive decision, such decisions do not carry the force of law and should be considered void,” it said, criticizing “haphazard documentation procedures.”
“The Biden Autopen Presidency will go down as one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history. As Americans saw President Biden’s decline with their own eyes, Biden’s inner circle sought to deceive the public, cover-up his decline, and took unauthorized executive actions with the autopen that are now invalid,” Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said in a statement. “Our report reveals how key aides colluded to mislead the public and the extraordinary measures they took to sustain the appearance of presidential authority as Biden’s capacity to function independently diminished.”
“Executive actions performed by Biden White House staff and signed by autopen are null and void. We are calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct a thorough review of these executive actions and scrutinize key Biden aides who took the Fifth to hide their participation in the cover-up,” Comer continued. “The D.C. Board of Medicine must also review the actions taken by President Biden’s physician to hide his true condition. We have provided Americans with transparency about the Biden Autopen Presidency, and now there must be accountability.”
Top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Robert Garcia (CA), called the report the result of a “sham investigation,” claiming that “every White House official testified President Biden fully executed his duties as President of the United States.”
A July report from The New York Times explained that Biden “did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people,” but instead “signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence.”
According to emails reviewed by The Times, an aide sent a draft of decisions to an assistant of Biden’s Chief of Staff, Jeffrey Zients. The chief of staff, copying those involved in the meeting, wrote in an email, “I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons.”
