By Noah Rothman
Thursday, October 30, 2025
The House Oversight Committee’s blockbuster report
exposing the extent to which President Joe Biden’s infirmity led his
administration’s staffers to assume presidential powers in his stead — “The Biden Autopen Presidency” — is enraging. At times, it
veers into comedy.
The report details the shocking degree to which covering
up the president’s declining mental acuity was a whole-of-administration effort
prior to Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate — an event the report confirms was
at least partially designed to neutralize the allegations of infirmity in
special counsel Robert Hur’s report. The gambit failed, and most of Biden’s
handlers knew it. Most, but not all.
“President Biden had pretty good answers,” said Biden
adviser Mike Donilon, a figure who has been accused of concealing from the president polls that showed
how unlikely his reelection had become.
Bruce Reed, the deputy chief of staff for policy in the
Biden White House, concurred with Donilon’s blinkered assessment. Reed told the
committee’s investigators that he was one of perhaps a handful of Democrats who
were unfazed when Biden stumbled his way through an incoherent response to a
question about the growing national debt — a ramble that culminated in Biden’s
declaration that “we finally beat Medicare.”
“I’ve heard him say that phrase hundreds of times,” Reed
said of Biden’s botch. That is hardly a comfort to those who allege that the
president’s infirmities were observably apparent to his inner circle long
before the June 27 debate.
The rest of the report is, however, bereft of this comic
relief.
The document authored by the committee headed by
Representative James Comer establishes just how lax the advisers were in
observing the proper protocols for documenting the president’s consent to the
use of his signature on executive initiatives. Everything from the military
vaccine mandate to the pardons of his family members was governed by a loose,
informal process, in which the president himself may or may not have played a
large role.
The most damning revelation in the report pertains to
just how much the president and his staff were aware — or should have been
aware — that Biden was lying to the American people when his White House
claimed to have set a record by issuing the largest-ever blanket pardon for nonviolent
offenders.
Documents reviewed by the Oversight Committee show that
Bradley Weinsheimer, a senior ethics attorney with the Justice Department,
admonished the administration’s principals.
“I think you should stop saying that because it is untrue
or at least misleading,” Weinsheimer wrote in a January 17, 2025, memo. “Even
in that number, we identified violent offenders, including those who committed
acts of violence during the offense of conviction, or who otherwise have a
history of violence such that it is misleading to suggest that they are
non-violent drug offenders.”
Weinsheimer complained that, “despite repeated requests
and warnings,” Justice Department officials were “not afforded a reasonable
opportunity to vet and provide input on those you were considering.” In a
pointed warning that doubles as exculpation for his role in the debacle,
Weinsheimer noted that he could not assess whether Biden himself was “aware of
these backgrounds when making clemency decisions,” and he was quick to
establish for the record that the DOJ “was largely excluded from the process, which
we otherwise opposed.”
Weinsheimer’s bombshell memo was publicly
reported in September by Axios’s Alex Thompson, but the committee’s investigation couldn’t
find any senior administration officials who were aware of it. White House
Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, for example, told investigators that he had no
“specific recollection” of what was clearly an effort to create a paper trail
indemnifying the Justice Department ahead of a congressional investigation into
its role in the pardon scandal.
In a similar episode, Isa Qasim, deputy associate counsel
in the Biden White House, circulated an internal communiqué in which he
insisted that “the Vice President’s approval had been sufficient to obtain
approval” for clemencies and pardons. After all, it might take “days or weeks
for the president to review and approve” the record-setting “clemency package,”
and presumably Kamala Harris had more time on her hands.
Senior Biden White House staff dismissed the memo as
something they had “never seen” before and argued that its author was too
“junior” to know that the pardon power flows from the president and no one
else.
Biden’s blanket pardon of so-called nonviolent offenders
released a number of violent criminals back into American society. They were
considered nonviolent only by virtue of plea agreements that scrubbed
accusations of violence from their respective records. As our own Audrey
Fahlberg reported on Wednesday, one recipient of Biden’s beneficence is back in
custody today after he allegedly participated in a shooting in Nebraska.
It’s been nearly a year, and Biden’s pardons scandal is
not going away. Indeed, the president’s nakedly corrupt pardons of his own
family members — a disgrace in which Hunter Biden himself participated,
according to Comer’s report — may be the least politically damaging for
Democrats. Joe Biden’s political career is over. By contrast, the talent that
staffed his White House will have second lives in other offices, other
Democratic administrations. When they resurface, their involvement in this
scandal will find them.
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