When the White House included a gilt-framed image of an autopen in the new Presidential Walk of Fame installed outside the West Wing last month, it was more than just another epic troll by President Trump of his predecessor.
The stark image on the wall among presidential portraits from George Washington to Donald Trump encapsulates Joe Biden’s failed presidency.
It wasn’t just the opportunity cost of a commander in chief who was asleep at the wheel but the sum total of catastrophic judgments over four years of a man whose manifest flaws were only magnified by his cognitive decline.
Even though everyone on the planet saw Biden’s deterioration with our own eyes and knew what it meant, having it laid out forensically in a 100-page report by the House Oversight Committee is still shocking, especially with the accompanying video interviews of various members of Biden’s inner circle.
Historic document
“The Biden Autopen Presidency: Decline, Delusion, and Deception in the White House,” released Tuesday, is a valuable historic document, even if Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer doesn’t get all the ambit claims on his wish list, such as declaring Biden’s thousands of late-term pardons and dozens of executive actions “null and void.”
“As President Biden’s health declined, Biden White House staffers usurped presidential authority by executing decisions without the president’s awareness — including misusing the autopen and bypassing proper documentation of decision-making processes,” says the report.
It paints a grim picture of a president cocooned by his wife, Jill Biden, son Hunter Biden and three Svengali-style aides — Anthony Bernal, Jill’s chief of staff whom she reportedly called her “work husband,” Annie Tomasini and Dr. Kevin O’Connor, the White House doctor who gaslit the American public with “grossly misleading” medical assessments and “recklessly never conducted a cognitive exam” of Joe.
All three invoked the Fifth Amendment when called to testify to the committee.
Comer has submitted the report to the Department of Justice to conduct a review of “every executive action issued during the Biden presidency” and referred O’Connor to the District of Columbia Board of Medicine to review “any potential wrongdoing in the medical care of the former president.”
When you watch the videos of their congressional testimony, it’s striking how slow-witted and unimpressive Joe Biden’s brain trust was.
Their testimony is almost as bad as the vacuous word salad served up by Kamala Harris and Karine Jean-Pierre on their dueling book tours.
But as he did when he selected Harris and Jean-Pierre for DEI window dressing, Joe chose his inner sanctum precisely because they were unimpressive.
He was so insecure that he never wanted to be around anyone smarter or who would challenge him in any way.
The Biden White House was an anti-meritocracy of grifters.
These were people willing to endure his tall tales and join in his delusions of grandeur as the price they paid for the power, influence and wealth that spun off his orbit.
So when Joe’s decline paralyzed the administration, there was nobody capable of doing anything but cover it up, by design.
In this way, Joe was the malevolent architect of his failed presidency, and history should not let him off the hook as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” as special counsel Robert Hur did.
Aides ran the show
“The inner circle’s loyalty to the Bidens created an ecosystem that concealed the former president’s cognitive deterioration and allowed the aides to run the White House while President Biden did not have the capacity to do so,” says the report.
Under instructions from the then-first lady, Bernal and Tomasini, Joe’s deputy chief of staff, would use “Hollywood tricks,” makeup and “relaxed schedules” to hide the true state of his decline.
They were the only staffers allowed to move to Wilmington, Del., to tend to the family’s daily needs when Joe was hidden away during the 2020 campaign in his Delaware basement using the COVID pandemic as an excuse.
Comer has named Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed and Anita Dunn — and both chiefs of staff, Ron Klain and Jeff Zients — as the central members of what has been called the “American Politburo” that controlled the former president.
“Their proximity to, and influence over, President Biden gave them great political power, status and influence.”
As well, some White House senior advisers, several who had been with Joe for decades and owed their careers and wealth to him, had financial incentives to keep flogging a dead horse, regardless of the damage to the country.
Donilon, Joe’s long-time “counselor” and campaign strategist, who had been with him for more than four decades, told the committee he stood to make a total of $8 million by keeping Joe in the 2024 presidential race, with a bonus if he was re-elected.
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“This significant financial motivation for Donilon to keep Biden in the race regardless of the president’s cognitive difficulties and Democrats’ calls for him to step down worked. Despite pressure to drop out of the race from congressional leaders, Democratic Party donors and prominent political operatives, Donilon and [Ricchetti] hid certain dismal polling results from President Biden.”
Dr. O’Connor also “established financial ties with the Biden family [and] introduced James Biden, Joe Biden’s younger brother, to medical leaders and executives to support James Biden’s business relationship with Americore Health LLC.”
Concealment
“Dr. O’Connor’s financial and personal ties to the Biden family demonstrate the incentives he had to conceal President Biden’s deterioration from the American people,” the report says.
In the dying days of his presidency, after Joe already had been usurped by Harris and was sulking at his beach house, Hunter appeared to take over.
Zients testified that Hunter “participated in meetings and decisions about pardons [including] the meeting to discuss the pardons of five Biden family members, Dr. Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley, and the members of Congress [such as Liz Cheney] who served on the Select Subcommittee to Investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol, and their staff.”
Joe Biden and his American Politburo almost took down the country.
The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the open border, the reckless spending that drove raging inflation, or corrupt ulterior motives and diplomatic clumsiness abroad, were all just the tip of the iceberg of incompetence in a rudderless presidency.
Ultimately, Joe’s failures led to the capture of the Democratic Party by a furious cohort of young left-wingers who rightly concluded that the old guard didn’t know what the hell it was doing.
Zohran Mamdani is Joe Biden’s parting gift to his party.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
