When a spate of books detailing former President Joe Biden’s age-related struggles in office and alleging his frailties were concealed from the public was released, his team retained one last line of defense.

“There is nothing in this book that shows Joe Biden failed to do his job, as the authors have alleged, nor did they prove their allegation that there was a cover up or conspiracy,” a Biden spokesperson said in response to the publicant of the most revealing of these books, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, written by the journalists Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios. “Nowhere do they show that our national security was threatened or where the President wasn’t otherwise engaged in the important matters of the Presidency.”

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The congressional investigation into the Biden White House’s autopen use could chip away at that defense. Biden was three layers removed from the autopen operator on some of the clemency actions, for example, according to his own team’s account.

Over time, we have seen a steady erosion of other defenses of Biden: that junior staffers had difficulty keeping up with him, that he had never been better, that he was prepared to maul his predecessor-turned-successor in their only presidential debate, that videos purporting to show him slowing down were misleading “cheap fakes,” if not quite deliberately altered deepfakes.

Now, the top Biden spokeswoman who defended his energy and mental acuity has written her own book that refers to a “broken White House” right in the subtitle. Journalists who once said it was “lying” to suggest that Biden was somehow diminished now write, “Biden was in no position to keep doing his job given his condition, which had been evident for years to most people paying even casual attention.” Participants in the fundraiser at which footage of Biden being led off stage was said to be a “cheap fake” now say he was out of it.

Virtually no one who wasn’t on Biden’s campaign payroll or related to him by blood or marriage would defend his debate performance. Indeed, the former president himself doesn’t defend it.

It has since been reported that there were discussions of having Biden use a wheelchair after the election. He has also been portrayed as unable to successfully execute basic campaign videos. A top communications adviser to former Vice President Kamala Harris was said to have developed an elaborate strategy to bolster her legitimacy if Biden died unexpectedly and she needed to assume the presidency all of a sudden. That last bit of preparation is part of the vice president’s job, of course, but the details don’t suggest much confidence in Biden’s ability to serve until his second term would have ended at 86.

Biden’s top advisers have been described as “the politburo,” helping the first octogenarian president navigate the office and insulating him from public scrutiny to the best of their ability within the confines of a 24/7 news cycle. “Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board,” Tapper and Thompson report they were told.

What hasn’t been proven is that Biden didn’t make presidential decisions himself or that he was unavailable when an important decision needed to be made, though the former has been alleged. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has said Biden did not appear to understand his own administration’s liquefied natural gas policy after the Louisianan was finally able to secure a one-on-one meeting with the then-president. Donald Trump repeatedly argued as far back as the 2020 campaign that Biden would not be the one calling the shots if elected. Trump has claimed vindication on this score since returning to the Oval Office.

Maybe it will never be proven. Biden’s tight-knit operation may be impenetrable to outside investigators. Maybe it is simply not true. Maybe, as Democrats insisted when Biden ended his reelection bid but remained in office, he had deteriorated as a campaigner but could still handle the rigors of governing.

“While Biden on a day-in, day-out basis could certainly make decisions and assert wisdom and act as President, there were several significant issues that complicated his Presidency: a limit to the hours in which he could reliably function and an increasing number of moments when he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades,” Thompson and Tapper write. “Not to mention impairments to his ability to communicate — ones unrelated to his lifelong stutter.”

BIDEN AUTOPEN USE IN DC WAS MORE WIDESPREAD THAN PREVIOUSLY KNOWN

But even if we accept that Biden had good days and bad days, it raises the questions: How were decisions made, and how was the president handled during the bad days? How long were the bad days? What was the ratio of bad to good? Did this affect how the vast federal bureaucracy was supervised? Most importantly, was presidential power ever exercised by someone other than the president, even if they believed they were acting in accordance with his wishes?

Those are the answers autopen investigators will seek, despite efforts to muddy the waters, knowing how poorly some past defenses of Biden have fared under closer inspection.