A former White House spokesperson who staunchly defended Joe Biden’s mental acuity—attacking a former federal prosecutor who raised questions about it—only met the 46th president twice in person, said House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer.
Comer, the Kentucky Republican who led most of the congressional probes of the Biden administration, noted that he spent more time with the former president than the official did. For that matter, so did the special prosecutor who interviewed Biden.
On Thursday, Ian Sams, the former spokesperson and senior adviser to the White House Counsel’s office, sat for a closed-door deposition with Comer’s House panel.
“Ian Sams frequently spoke publicly and with apparent authority about President Biden’s mental fitness and state of mind,” Comer said in a statement. “However, Mr. Sams admitted he had very limited interaction with the president—identifying only two in-person meetings, one virtual meeting, and one phone call. In fact, Special Counsel Robert Hur probably spent more time with President Biden than Mr. Sams did.”
Hur, the special counsel in looking into Biden storing classified documents at his home, issued a report in February 2024 that said he would not seek charges against Biden because a sympathetic jury would see him as an “elderly man with a poor memory” with “diminished faculties,” making it difficult to prove he intentionally violated the law.
After the report, Sams said the special counsel “spends time making gratuitous and inappropriate criticisms of President Biden.”
Sams also told reporters, “I dispute the characterizations about his memory are accurate because they are not.”
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is investigating Biden’s apparent mental decline while in office and if he was aware of major presidential actions taken with the use of the White House autopen.
While Sams was not part of the Biden inner circle, as was the case with past witnesses, Comer called the deposition the “most informative” of the investigation.
“Mr. Sams’ testimony raises serious questions about who [was] truly calling the shots in the White House,” Comer said.
Sams was the point person for the White House in answering media questions about allegations of the Biden family’s suspicious financial dealings as well as the investigation into Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.
“Rather than drawing conclusions from firsthand experience, Mr. Sams received much of his direction from the White House Counsel and Biden’s inner circle,” Comer added. “Mr. Sams repeatedly made broad public claims about the president’s cognitive condition, but he was not in a position to make these claims based on such limited contact.”
While the Hur report made many headlines at the time, it was not until the June 2024 presidential debate between Biden and his then-Republican opponent, Donald Trump, that Democrats pressured him to drop out of his race for reelection.