Much like the media talking heads and elected Democrats who waited until former President Joe Biden was well clear of political risk before they admitted he was not in top form, a number of those in his inner circle kept mum on the subject until President Donald Trump had returned to the White House.
In closed door testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, more than a dozen former Biden aides fielded the usual questions that follow any political scandal or cover-up: Who knew what? And when did they know it?
The Oversight Committee released a report on Tuesday on Biden’s “autopen presidency’ — which sought to determine what decisions were made directly by President Biden and how many times might the autopen have been used to sign his name without his understanding of the issue or his knowledge that it was even happening. In pursuit of that information, they heard from 14 former Biden aides — some of whom took the fifth, and some of whom revealed the concerns they had previously left unspoken.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, a few revealed that despite making the rounds on the cable news shows in Biden’s defense, they had rarely spoken to the president, much less seen him in person.
Biden’s White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients told Oversight that the president increasingly forgot names — even names of people he saw regularly, as his presidency progressed. He also recalled working to “reduce the number of steps” Biden would take in order to decrease the risk that he might fall.
Months prior to Biden’s exit from the presidential race, in early 2024, Zients had referred to Biden as “energized” and voiced his confidence in a successful reelection campaign.
Senior Communications Advisor Anita Dunn defended Biden even after his disastrous debate appearance on CNN, telling MSNBC that “it wasn’t his greatest debate,” but insisting that Biden “has been a great president, and that is the case he is going to take to the American people.”
But behind closed doors — and after Biden had stepped away from the public eye — Dunn told members of the committee, “I thought his voice was softer and that his childhood stutter reappeared.”
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Biden’s former Chief of Staff Ron Klain revealed the exact moment during the CNN debate that he’d exclaimed, “We’re f***ed!”: Biden had given a lengthy and nonsensical answer to a question, and had ended his ramble with the phrase, “We beat Medicare.”
Klain also noted that the debate prep sessions had concerned him, but had not alarmed him in the same way that the final performance had.
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Just a few months earlier, Klain had been on MSNBC and had insisted that Biden continued to be “great in meetings in the White House.”
Mike Donilon, a senior campaign strategist, admitted to Oversight that he had been part of the White House’s and the campaign’s efforts to limit Biden’s travel and activities, saying at one point that it was “a lot to ask” to have the president fly from Europe to Los Angeles.
But at an event at Harvard in February of 2025 — even after Biden had left the White House — Donilon continued to defend him. “I don’t know how much time any of those people spent with him—I know how much time I spent with him,” Donilon said at the time. “I know what I saw. What I can tell you is every time I saw Biden overseas, especially in Ukraine and NATO, he was the voice in the room.”
Former Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has remained entirely consistent, saying even in interviews promoting her new book that she never saw anything to make her believe that Biden was not at the top of his game. When the Oversight Committee spoke with her, she stood firm in that position and repeatedly referred them to the memo provided by Biden’s official physician, Kevin O’Connor. O’Connor, when questioned, repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.
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