An exhaustive House Oversight Committee report on the coverup of former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and his staff’s use of the autopen was released Tuesday, revealing the extent to which the Biden White House attempted to hide the president’s progressing dementia and use the presidential signature without Biden’s explicit approval.
“The Committee has investigated whether senior Biden White House officials possibly exercised the authority of the former president or intentionally concealed President Biden’s rapidly worsening mental and physical state,” the 100-page report noted at the outset. “The Committee has found evidence to indicate they did both.”
As the report goes on to recount, a June 2024 CBS News/YouGov national poll found that almost three-quarters of Americans “d[id] not believe Biden ha[d] the mental or cognitive health to serve as president, as well as nearly half of his own party.” The survey was taken shortly after Biden’s catastrophic debate performance with Donald Trump, in which Biden appeared confused, lost his train of thought, and gave nonsensical answers on multiple occasions.
But as the report notes, signs of Biden’s mental deterioration were evident well before the June debate, including his “slurring of words, mistaking of names, visible disorientation, confusion and dependence on aides for basic direction — all of which the public witnessed live.” Even so, the president’s inner circle repeatedly derided and dismissed any question about Biden’s fitness for office, labeling the questions as “disgusting smear tactics,” “conspiracy theories,” “offensive,” and “gratuitous.” But after the June debate, even Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients recommended “full workup” of a cognitive fitness test, which was never conducted.
The report noted that despite ongoing concerns, Biden’s longtime physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor “recklessly never conducted a cognitive exam of the president,” but instead “propped up the president through grossly misleading medical assessments.” It was later discovered that O’Connor “had business dealings with and financial connections to President Biden’s family,” which provided a financial incentive to cover up cognitive issues.
Perhaps even more alarming was how Biden’s inner circle relied on copies of the president’s signature — the “autopen” — in order to enact the commander in chief’s approval of official acts, as the report details. “The Biden Autopen Presidency ranks among the greatest scandals in U.S. history,” it declared. “As President Biden declined, his staff abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy to effect executive actions that lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized.”
Nowhere was this more blatantly used than in the slate of pardons allegedly issued by Biden, which included 1,500 federal convicts, including a woman who murdered three former lovers in order to obtain $163,000 in insurance settlements. As noted by The Free Press, “There is no contemporaneous record that proves the president verbally authorized the pardons. And they were not signed by the president’s hand, but rather an autopen.” The House report’s findings confirm that “Vast swaths of convict-applicants were granted commutations or pardons on the basis of crude search parameters and blunt filtering, not case-by-case examination,” as noted by the editors at National Review.
The House Oversight report concluded by recommending that “the Department of Justice investigate all of former President Biden’s executive actions, particularly clemency actions, to assess whether legal action must be taken to void any action that the former president did not, in fact, take himself.”
Lawmakers like Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) say that the Oversight Committee’s findings are deeply concerning.
“[M]any people are wondering who [was] really running the White House,” he observed during Wednesday’s “Washington Watch.” “What we found out is the staff was doing quite a bit of the work, even when it came to signing pieces of legislation or executive orders or signing pardons. This is very troubling, especially when you find out that staff members were approving the use of the autopen. You even had Biden’s DOJ saying this is probably not a good idea to be using the autopen machine on things that have any sort of legal merit to it. … [W]hen it comes to things that have legal consequences, the president needs to be involved, certainly needs to know about it, and actually be the one signing it.”
