WASHINGTON (TNND) — Congressional Republicans are ramping up efforts to investigate the Biden administration and what staffers knew about former President Joe Biden’s health and mental decline while he was in office after the announcement that he had been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.
Scrutiny about Biden’s health and mental state has ramped up since the cancer diagnosis along with the release of a book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson that included new revelations about the lengths the White House went to accommodate the 82-year-old president. Some of the questions include how Biden’s cancer was not detected sooner and whether it had been concealed from the public.
A group of House Republicans introduced legislation on Thursday to create a new select committee to probe whether the Biden administration covered up signs of the former president’s decline.
The effort, being led by Rep. Buddy Carter of Georgia, would establish a panel of investigators to dig into Biden’s health history. It also calls to investigate former Vice President Kamala Harris, former first lady Jill Biden and staff that were involved with keeping Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hurt from being released to the public.
“This is potentially the biggest political scandal of our lifetime, and the American people deserve to know the truth about who was really running the White House under Biden’s tenure as president. From using the autopen to pardon his own family members to likely concealing a cancer diagnosis, our government must restore trust with the public by fully investigating the former administration’s lies and getting to the bottom of one of the most consequential coverups in history,” Carter said in a statement.
It will also dig into whether the administration withheld the prostate diagnosis before it was announced last week. Biden has denied previous knowledge of the diagnosis ahead of the May 18 announcement.
Carter’s push for a select committee comes on top of other efforts from congressional investigators. The House Oversight Committee requested interviews with several top Biden aides and his physician last week as it reopened an investigation from last Congress.
“The cover-up of President Biden’s obvious mental decline is a historic scandal,” Rep. James Comer, the committee’s chairman, said in a statement. “The American people deserve to know when this decline began, how far it progressed, and who was making critical decisions on his behalf.”
The committee asked Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, along with aides to the president and first lady — Annie Tomasini, Anthony Bernal, and Ashley Williams — who they claim “ran interference” for the president. O’Connor has been under scrutiny about why Biden wasn’t receiving regular screening, though Biden was in office beyond the age where medical groups generally stop recommending blood tests that catch it due to false positives and overtreatment of low-risk forms of prostate cancer.
The Oversight Committee has also focused on Biden’s use of an “autopen” to sign legislation and executive orders. Republicans have suggested that Biden may not have been aware of what was being signed using the autopen during his final days in office and that his staffers could have been making decisions on Biden’s behalf.
President Donald Trump has charged that Biden’s use of an autopen to sign certain documents such as pre-emptive pardons for lawmakers that investigated the Jan. 6 riot and his family members could make them invalid. In an interview on Fox News on Wednesday, Comer said the committee believes the staffers called for interviews were responsible for using the autopen.
“We want to ask them ‘who gave you the authority to use Joe Biden’s signature?’” Comer said.
Sen. Ron Johnson, who chairs the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has also requested interviews with a ride range of Biden administration officials to ask about Biden’s mental and physical decline while in office and prior to when he dropped out of the race for reelection following a disastrous debate performance over the summer.
Johnson sent letters to Biden’s Cabinet members include former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Attorney General Merrick Garland and others. He also sought interviews with Harris and Biden’s chiefs of staff.
“The discrepancy between what Cabinet officials were telling the public about the former president’s health and what they were apparently witnessing and saying privately is astonishing, particularly considering that the former president was seeking reelection. After years of being lied to and kept in the dark, the public deserves full and complete transparency about what was known and when concerning President Biden’s health,” Johnson wrote.
Lawmakers have also pushed the Department of Justice to investigate the Biden White House over the issue. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, asked Attorney General Pam Bondi asking DOJ to probe whether the administration violated any federal laws over its representations of Biden’s health.
“As President, Biden had access to the most sophisticated and robust health care available in the world. Despite this, the American people have been asked to accept coincidence after coincidence,” he wrote. “This manipulation and dishonesty was unfair to the public and put the safety of the country in jeopardy. The continuity of government is essential to the core functioning of our republic. Those protocols must be effective and clear, and the executive’s leadership cannot be in doubt.”
