House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) heard new evidence Wednesday that former President Joe Biden may not have been aware of his use of the autopen to issue executive orders and other presidential actions while in office.
Republicans have questioned whether Biden was aware of the presidential actions he signed before leaving the White House, as new details have emerged about allies covering up his mental decline, along with the news that the former president has an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
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Comer is already working on holding transcribed interviews with Biden’s physician and White House aides as part of an investigation into the former president’s tenure, while the Justice Department is also investigating Biden’s autopen use.
BIDEN’S AWARENESS OF EIGHT CLIMATE EXECUTIVE ACTIONS IN QUESTION AT HOUSE OVERSIGHT HEARING
“We will be conducting transcribed interviews of a number of former White House officials to understand who was really making the decisions for President Biden,” Comer said during a Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee hearing, chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), on “NGOs gone wild.”
“And hopefully we’ll get the truth [to] the American people,” Comer later added.
In a new report, Power the Future accused Biden of issuing eight major climate policy changes while in office via autopen but not publicly speaking about any of those actions.
The group’s president, Daniel Turner, testified Wednesday about the report in response to questioning from Comer.
“Now, why is it important that the American people know the truth about whether President Biden knowingly signed these orders making significant and drastic shifts in our energy policy?” Comer asked Turner.
“We’re looking at this from the sense of deceit of the American people,” Turner responded. “This is impersonation of the president. Staffers, of course, have a lot of leniency in what they do working on behalf of the president, but these executive orders that we identified, there’s no evidence of Joe Biden in first person in his voice as president talking about them.”
The eight actions that Biden signed but allegedly did not speak about included an offshore drilling ban that covered 625 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf, a commitment for the entire federal government to reach “net-zero” emissions by 2050, a memorandum invoking the Defense Production Act to push solar panels and heat pumps, an arctic drilling ban, and a leasing requirement for artificial intelligence data centers to be powered using “clean energy.”
The other executive orders Biden signed but did not address included giving preferential federal hiring treatment to AmeriCorps alumni, creating a “Climate Change Support Office” within the federal bureaucracy, and requiring all federal agencies to assess climate-related financial risk.
“When you ban the export of liquid natural gas, and you never get asked about it in person, one has to wonder if Joe Biden did or if a staffer did it on his behalf,” Turner said of the arctic drilling ban.
Comer asked Turner to explain why the pause on liquefied natural gas permits was of importance to the group.
“There’s an anecdote from earlier this year where Speaker of the House [Mike] Johnson mentioned he was in conversation with President Biden and brought it up, and the president said: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’,” Turner responded.
“At the time, that was understood as, ‘Wow, maybe the president’s a little worse off than we realized,’ but maybe two things can be true,” Turner continued. “Maybe he really didn’t know what Speaker Johnson was talking about. Maybe he had no idea he passed this executive order. And if the president has never asked about it, and he hides from the press, and there’s no opportunity for him to get asked in public about it, how do we know he actually did it?”
“It is bizarre,” Comer said.
Turned claimed that “lives were destroyed” by the pause.
“When you ban the export of liquid natural gas, there are hundreds of thousands of men and women who work in the natural gas industry,” he said. “Lives are destroyed. People went bankrupt because of that, and we have no evidence that Joe Biden himself actually …”
COMER ASKS FIVE MORE EX-WHITE HOUSE AIDES TO TESTIFY ABOUT BIDEN’S HEALTH AND AUTOPEN USE
Comer interrupted to claim that “we haven’t found any evidence either.”
A Biden spokesperson did not respond to a Washington Examiner request for comment.
Haisten Willis contributed to this report.