House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) is sending interview requests to four more high-profile former Biden administration officials for his investigation into the concealment of former President Joe Biden’s mental decline.
Comer wrote letters Friday to three former White House spokespeople; former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, former senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates, and former special assistant to the president Ian Sams demanding testimony behind closed doors.
Comer is also seeking an interview with former White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, the second and final chief of staff of the Biden administration. He is requesting responses from the former Biden administration officials by July 4 in order to schedule the closed-door appearances for August and early September.
“President Biden’s inner circle repeatedly told the American people that he was ‘sharp as ever,’ dismissing any commentary about his obvious mental decline as ‘gratuitous,'” Comer said in a statement.
“They fed these false talking points to progressive allies and the media, who helped perpetuate that President Biden was fit to serve. As part of our aggressive investigation into the cover-up of his cognitive decline and potentially unauthorized executive actions, we must hear from the those who aided and abetted this farce.”
As White House press secretary, Jean-Pierre was the most prominent spokesperson for President Biden’s mental acuity and the administration’s entire agenda. She routinely defended Biden from critics who observed his mental lapses, infamously denouncing videos of Biden’s flops as “cheap fakes” in June 2024 after Biden appeared to freeze at a Hollywood fundraiser. She also dubiously claimed in a June 2022 interview that Biden had such stamina that she had a hard time keeping up with him.
“Oh, my gosh, he’s the President of the United States, you know, he – I can’t even keep up with him,” Jean-Pierre told CNN’s Don Lemon.
Jean-Pierre was White House press secretary from May 2022 to the end of the Biden administration in January and her performance was widely considered sub par. She was previously a longtime Democratic operative and commentator. Now, she is claiming to be an independent and releasing a memoir on her time in the administration.
Like Jean-Pierre, Bates was a high-profile defender of the president’s mental acuity. He infamously defended Biden’s foreign policy chops after the then-president gave a bumbling press conference at NATO’s 75th anniversary summit with his political career on the line last July. Bates worked for Biden dating back to his 2020 presidential campaign and previously worked in the Obama administration.
The bombshell book on the cover up of Biden’s mental decline, Original Sin by Axios reporter Alex Thompson and CNN host Jake Tapper, makes Bates out to be a Biden loyalist who rarely communicated with the president directly, instead going through senior officials.
For his part, Sams was the Biden administration’s point man for defending the president and his son Hunter during the House GOP’s impeachment inquiry over Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter’s foreign business dealings. Sams frequently dismissed the inquiry and the evidence it uncovered showing Hunter Biden and his associates received over $27 million from foreign sources during and after Joe Biden’s vice presidency. Comer was one of the Republican lawmakers who conducted the impeachment inquiry throughout the second half of Biden’s term.
In a similar fashion, Sams dismissed Special Counsel Robert Hur’s observations about Biden’s failing memory and worsening mental acuity. Hur’s February 2024 report on his investigation into whether Biden mishandled classified documents justified the decision not to charge Biden with a crime on the grounds that a jury would find Biden to be a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and would therefore refuse to convict him. Sams is another longtime Democratic operative who worked for former Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2020 and 2024 presidential campaigns.
Unlike the other Biden officials, Zients is not a career political operative. He was a businessman and government official who worked for Presidents Obama and Biden before running the Biden administration as chief of staff for nearly two years.
Comer is investigating the White House’s effort to coverup Biden’s worsening mental faculties and Biden officials’s usage of the presidential autopen to put the president’s signature on official documents without authorization. Biden himself has dismissed the possibility of unauthorized autopen usage towards the end of his administration.
“I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false,” Biden said.
Comer has already received testimony from former senior Biden aide Neera Tanden and requested testimony from several other top officials from the previous administration. Two of them, Annie Tomasini and Ashley Williams, are scheduled to testify next month. He previously requested testimony from Biden’s “politburo” of senior officials and were described in Original Sin as the ones calling the shots inside the White House.
Former first lady Jill Biden’s top advisor, Anthony Bernal, was supposed to testify Thursday but backed out at the last minute when the Trump administration waived executive privilege for Comer’s probe. Comer subpoenaed Bernal Thursday to compel his testimony following his decision to back out. He has also subpoenaed Biden’s longtime physician and friend Kevin O’Connor who controversially showered Biden with praise in his 2024 physical.