A newly released report from the U.S. House’s Oversight Committee reveals the lengths to which White House aides who knew about President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline kept it a secret, repeatedly denied the president was suffering any such decline, then used the autopen to sign major presidential decisions that Biden might have known nothing about or understood.
The shocking report contains video testimony from top Biden aides. They included White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and the White House physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor. O’Connor refused to answer committee investigators’ questions about Biden’s cognitive abilities.
While denying that Biden was rowing around with one oar, top White House aides “undertook coordinated efforts to mislead the public regarding his cognitive state, using scripted messaging, restricted access, and tightly controlled appearances,” the report summary says.
O’Connor Takes the Fifth
The 100-page report comprises five sections:
- The medical coverup of Biden’s mental acuity;
- Who was running the White House while the coverup continued;
- The delusion of Biden’s inner circle;
- The coverup during the 2024 presidential campaign, notably Biden’s debate debacle; and
- Finally, how aides used the autopen to sign presidential pardons and other documents.
One of the shocking revelations in the report is O’Connor’s refusal to answer questions about Biden’ cognitive decline. “O’Connor refused to speak voluntarily with Congress,” the report observes, and “when subpoenaed to testify, he refused to answer the Committee’s questions.”
Asked whether he was “ever told to lie about the president’s health,” O’Connor replied thusly:
On the advice of counsel, I must respectfully decline to answer based upon physician patient privilege and in reliance on my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. I am not a lawyer, and I must follow my lawyer’s advice in this matter.
He offered the same answer to this question: “Dr. O’Connor, did you ever believe the President was unfit to execute his duties as President?”
The report notes that physician-patient privilege is no excuse for refusing to answer questions.
O’Connor took an oath “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and the report says:
He had an obligation to report the president not being able to serve or fulfill his duties to protect Americans due to physical or mental incapacitation to the vice president, a cabinet official, or a member of congress (or someone who could notify one of these individuals). Yet, Dr. O’Connor chose to participate in the cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline.
White House aides such as Zients and senior communications advisor Anita Dunn confessed to the committee that they interfered with giving Biden a possible cognitive exam. O’Connor called the exam “meaningless,” the report reveals. Still, to his credit, Zients told the committee that he told O’Connor that Biden needed a “full workup” after his disastrous debate with Trump.
Instead, O’Connor protected Biden with “grossly misleading” assessments of his health, the committee avers.
A key finding in that section of report harpoons O’Connor:
Dr. O’Connor is complicit in a medical cover-up of President Biden’s mental and cognitive deterioration. He facilitated this concealment by presenting incomplete annual exams, neglecting to conduct the cognitive exam warranted (and required by Medicare), and refusing to communicate transparently about his medical care of the president and the role President Biden’s political advisors played in it. …
O’Connor’s annual medical assessments of President Biden are incomplete and misleading as they do not include cognitive examinations or mention a neurologist visiting the executive mansion eight times in eight months between 2023 and 2024 during the Biden presidency.
That neurologist was a Parkinson’s disease specialist.
Hiding Behind the Fifth Amendment
Much of the report (until details on the autopen) explains how top aides tried to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline, including White House “spin” of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur. Hur interviewed Biden during his probe of the president’s illegal storage of classified documents at his home and elsewhere. Notably, Hur refused to charge Biden because the jury would see an “elderly man with a poor memory” who didn’t recall when he was vice president or when his son died.
And O’Connor wasn’t the only White House aide to take the Fifth. So also did Annie Tomasini when asked the same question as O’Connor:
Did Joe Biden, a member of his family, or anyone at the White House ever instruct you to lie regarding his health at any time, including but not limited to in your testimony to Congress today?
On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer the question pursuant to my Fifth Amendment rights under the Constitution.
Another aide who refused to answer questions was Anthony Bernal, First Lady “Dr.” Jill Biden’s chief of staff. After asking Bernal whether Biden was fit to be president, the committee asked him:
Did any unelected official or family member of President Joe Biden execute the duties of the Presidency?
As did O’Connor and Tomasini, Bernal ducked behind the Fifth.
Autopen Presidency
The final 23 pages of the report cover the autopen scandal and detail the loosy-goosy manner in which staff members handled presidential decisions.
Particularly shocking is the report’s description of the way presidential pardons were made, including the remarkable admission that Zients — the president’s chief of staff — didn’t know who was authorized to use the machine.
“Recently uncovered documents and witness testimony indicate that even when a verbal decision was ‘memorialized’ in an email, it does not prove that President Biden had made the decision himself,” the report reveals:
Zients confirmed that, in at least one instance, his staff sent an email from his email account under his name to the staff secretary’s office authorizing the use of the autopen to sign multiple presidential pardons.
That email, from aide Rosa Po, says, “I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons. JZ.”
Yet Zients confessed that he didn’t “attend the meeting — either physically or virtually — during which the president allegedly verbally provided his authorization for the pardons.” Po didn’t attend the meeting either. The affair was a “game of telephone,” the report avers.
After a meeting with Biden on January 19, 2025 to discuss pardons, one or another of the attendees “conveyed the details of the president’s decision to Rosa Po,” who called “Zients at home and conveyed to him the details she had been told of the president’s apparent decision.”
Then, without speaking with anyone in the meeting, “Zients authorized Po” to send the email with his initials.
The Pardons
Among those pardoned during the telephone game were Biden family members such as First Son Hunter; General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Anthony Fauci, who lied to the Senate about illegal gain-of-function subsidies to China from his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which possible created the China Virus; and the members of Congress who served on the committee that investigated the mostly peaceful protest at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Zients also confessed that President Biden included Hunter in pardon discussions.
GOP Oversight Committee chief James Comer of Kentucky has asked U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to review all of Biden’s executive decisions to ensure that Biden made them, and to investigate Bernal, O’Connor, and Tomasini for possible crimes.
Comer has also asked Dr. Andrea Anderson, chief of Washington, D.C.’s medical board, to investigate O’Connor’s concealing Biden’s cognitive decline, and if “evidence permits,” hit the former White House physician with sanctions.
