A shocking new report claims that dozens of President Joe Biden’s executive actions ‘cannot all be deemed his own.’ According to insiders, his closest aides went to extraordinary lengths to prop up the 46th president as he faced serious physical and cognitive challenges in office.
A staff report from the House Oversight Committee, drawing on more than a dozen interviews with Biden aides, reveals how the president’s "inner circle" carefully orchestrated his public appearances, eased his private workload, and even kept lawmakers from speaking with him.
“These steps ranged from addressing President Biden’s makeup, clothing, schedule, the number of steps President Biden could walk or climb, the amount of time President Biden needed to read and to spend with his family,” the 91-page report states, “keeping cabinet meetings to a minimum, eliciting ‘direction’ from Hollywood on the State of the Union and other events, and using teleprompters even at small, intimate events.”
A bombshell House GOP report claims that Joe Biden’s closest advisers went to extraordinary lengths to support the president as he faced serious physical and cognitive decline in his final years in office. Getty Images
When President Biden granted his son Hunter a sweeping pardon covering tax and gun felonies—as well as any potential crimes over an 11-year span—he reportedly relied on a notecard packed with pre-approved talking points.
The investigation led by Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) also concluded that executive orders signed via autopen—including some presidential pardons—should be considered null and void, since they were issued without any "approval traceable to the president’s own consent."
Biden told The New York Times last July that an autopen was used to sign 25 pardon and commutation warrants in December 2024 and January 2025, including some that granted clemency to thousands. Hunter Biden’s pardon, however, was among the few the president personally signed by hand.
When asked directly if he even knew who operated the autopen, former White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients—who had approved last-minute pardons for first-family members on Jan. 19, 2025—gave a blunt answer in a committee interview: "I do not."
Anthony Bernal (left), Chief of Staff to First Lady Jill Biden, invoked the Fifth Amendment instead of answering questions before the House Oversight Committee. POOL/AFP via Getty Images
“There were good processes in place,” insisted Zients, who acknowledged that he didn’t attend discussions of who would receive last-day pardons from Biden and was only briefed on it by an aide. “[T]here were verbal authorizations of the president’s decision that would occur on occasion.”
Zients also admitted that Hunter Biden weighed in on some of those "family discussions" about pardons "towards the end, the very end of the administration."
“The authority to grant pardons is not provided to the president’s inner circle. Nor can it be delegated to particular staff when a president’s competency is in question,” the report notes. “Importantly, even if this authority could be delegated — which it cannot — it would have to be expressly delegated by President Biden himself.”
In a June statement, Biden maintained: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”
On Tuesday, the Oversight Committee sent a separate letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, demanding a full investigation into Biden’s executive actions and clemencies—as well as top aides "deeply involved in the cover-up" who may have broken the law.
Biden allies accused of helping 'facilitate' the cover-up include Deputy Chief of Staff Annie Tomasini, White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor, and Anthony Bernal, Chief of Staff to former First Lady Jill Biden.
All three invoked the Fifth Amendment when they were called before the Oversight Committee in recent months.
O’Connor invoked his right against self-incrimination when asked: “Were you ever told to lie about the president’s health?” and “Did you ever believe President Biden was unfit to execute his duties?”
The report described Dr. O’Connor—a key figure in the cover-up who has cared for Biden for at least 15 years—as propping up the president with grossly misleading medical assessments.
“His refusal to answer questions about the execution of his duties as physician to the president — combined with testimony indicating that Dr. O’Connor may have succumbed to political pressure from the inner circle, influencing his medical decisions and aiding in the cover-up — legitimizes the public’s concerns that Dr. O’Connor was not forthright in carrying out his ultimate duties to the country.”
David Schertler and Mark MacDougall, who represented O’Connor during the deposition, said at the time that "physician patient privilege and the physician’s ethical duty of confidentiality require that Dr. O’Connor refuse to testify about any aspect of his care and treatment of President Biden." However, other medical professionals, including former Obama White House doctor Jeffrey Kuhlman, argued that the questions posed would not have violated doctor-patient privilege.
While Trump and House Oversight Republicans insist that Biden’s autopen-signed actions should be considered "void," DOJ memos have long suggested that the president is not required to hand-sign every act of clemency—a power that remains absolute and has never been limited by courts or Congress.
“Very telling that they would prefer to mischaracterize than produce the actual evidence,” one Biden ally also said of the Oversight panel’s report. “They’re still sitting on the actual transcripts which allows them to continue to push their baseless claims.”
Comer declared that the so-called "Biden Autopen Presidency will go down as one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history."
Biden underwent some neurological exams during his annual physicals—but the results were never made public, and he did not undergo any cognitive testing. WSFA
Each year, O’Connor would summarize Biden’s tests in a brief letter to White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, claiming to have ruled out serious conditions like Parkinson’s disease. He never took questions from the media.
Notably, Jean-Pierre—who drew attention in February 2024 by claiming that Biden 'passes a cognitive test every day'—refused to answer the committee’s questions about a White House meeting the president held with a Parkinson’s expert that January.
After Biden’s troubled June 27, 2024, debate with Trump—where he mumbled non-sequiturs such as "We finally beat Medicare" and spoke with a raspy, halting voice that aides chalked up to a cold—Zients and others pushed for a "full workup" on the president.
After Biden’s June 27, 2024, debate with Trump, where he spoke incoherently, former White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients pushed for a "full workup" on the president. Getty Images
“I do recall the communications team brought forward, led by [Biden senior adviser] Anita [Dunn], the question of whether the President should have a cognitive test when he did his physical — which [Dr. O’Connor] had not done, and there had been some coverage around that,” Zients said in a Sept. 18 transcribed interview with the Oversight panel.
“There was discussion of, would doing the test help on this perception [of Biden’s age] issue, would it actually hurt because people would say, ‘Well, that’s a very simple test,’” he added.
Bruce Reed, Biden’s former deputy chief of staff for policy, told the committee that he “heard Doc O’Connor say [cognitive exams] are meaningless.”
“The senior advisers decided that no matter how many tests he took, it would never really quiet the people who were attacking him in an election year on these issues,” Dunn told Oversight staff.
“The senior advisers decided that no matter how many tests he took, it would never really quiet the people who were attacking him in an election year on these issues,” senior adviser Dunn told Oversight staff. Jim LoScalzo – Pool via CNP
“We did not have any concern about his ability to pass those tests,” she added. “We did not think it would help politically.”
Zients also mentioned that in March 2024, the Biden White House tried to silence rumors about the president’s physical and mental health by enlisting Hollywood heavyweights—producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg—to prep him for the State of the Union.
Special counsel Robert Hur had found the month before that Biden “willfully” kept classified information at his private residence after leaving the Obama White House — but declined to bring federal charges, in part because a jury would view him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
According to Dunn, that was one reason Biden chose not to sit for a traditional Super Bowl interview with CBS News.
The Oversight Committee reported that O’Connor, Dunn, and senior adviser Mike Donilon stood to profit from keeping Biden in the 2024 race, with Donilon expected to pocket at least $8 million if the president won a second term.
Reed recalled that Biden occasionally showed the vitality of a much younger man—such as on a return flight from a NATO summit in Brussels, when he joined senior staff in a cabin on Air Force One, and aides had to take "turns staying awake to listen to his stories" as he spoke nonstop across the Atlantic.
But none of the aides interviewed by Oversight staff could confirm Hunter Biden’s claim that his father’s disastrous debate was due to taking Ambien sleeping pills—and only Ron Klain, Biden’s first White House chief of staff, admitted that the president’s performance had been poor.
“We’re f–ked,” Klain recalled thinking of his response, when testifying to the Oversight panel. “I certainly knew that we had a big political problem as a result of [the debate].”
“Not one of the Committee’s 14 witnesses was willing to admit that they ever had a concern about President Biden being in cognitive decline,” the report also notes. “In fact, numerous witnesses could not recall having a single conversation about President Biden’s cognitive health with anyone inside or outside of the White House.”
The report concluded: “It is unclear whether these Biden aides were attempting to be deceptively euphemistic about President Biden’s cognitive decline, or whether they had so deceived themselves that they actually believed there to be a meaningful distinction that the American people were simply worried that President Biden was old, not that he was in cognitive decline.”
“This investigation into baseless claims has confirmed what has been clear from the start: President Biden made the decisions of his presidency,” a spokesperson for Biden said in a statement. “There was no conspiracy, no cover-up, and no wrongdoing. Congressional Republicans should stop focusing on political retribution and instead work to end the government shutdown.”
An Oct. 28 letter from Comer to Attorney General Pam Bondi alleges that the cover-up 'was facilitated by extremely loyal senior staff,' including Bernal (pictured). AFP via Getty Images
Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, blasted Republicans for a "sham investigation," denying that Biden had failed to authorize any executive order, pardon, or autopen use.
“While House Republicans obsess about President Biden’s health, they are ripping away healthcare from 17 million Americans and spiking premiums,” Garcia (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “It’s clear the only person’s health that Republicans care about is Joe Biden’s.”
Attorneys for O’Connor, Bernal, and Tomasini did not immediately respond to requests for comment. At the time of their depositions, attorney Jonathan Su, who represented Bernal and Tomasini, stated: "Any suggestion that such an invocation is itself evidence of wrongdoing would be highly irresponsible and flatly wrong, particularly from those elected to represent the people and uphold the Constitution."
“There is no actual evidence of wrongdoing by Ms. Tomasini, and President Biden has already confirmed that he made all decisions concerning the grants of clemency at the end of his term,” Su said.
But none of the aides interviewed by Oversight staff could confirm Hunter Biden’s claim that his father’s disastrous debate was caused by taking Ambien sleeping pills. Getty Images
“It is well known that there is an ongoing federal criminal investigation into this matter by the Department of Justice, ordered by the current White House,” Su added in his statement. “This past week, the Chairman suggested that it is ‘very possible’ the investigation could generate criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. Under these circumstances, any reasonable person would seriously consider an invocation of their Fifth Amendment rights.”
In a separate statement, Schertler and MacDougall referenced the same federal investigation as their client invoked the Fifth: "The totality of the circumstances surrounding this Committee’s investigation leave Dr. O’Connor no choice but to decline to answer questions."
The Post reached out to DOJ officials for comment—and is still waiting for a response.
