Comer secures interviews with top Biden aides in probe into mental acuity

The House Oversight Committee has secured interviews with four former top aides to President Biden in its probe of his mental acuity.

Over August and September, the panel will hear from former Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, White House counsel office spokesperson Ian Sams, senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates, and chief of staff Jeff Zients.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) had requested meetings with the officials earlier this month. Biden has denied he struggled with mental fitness while in office.

“The scope of your responsibilities—both official and otherwise—and personal interactions within the Oval Office cannot go without investigation, given the mounting evidence that President Biden was incapacitated for much, if not all, of his single term,” Comer wrote in letters to both Sams and Bates requesting the interview.

“If White House staff carried out a strategy lasting months or even years to hide the chief executive’s condition—or to perform his duties—Congress may need to consider a legislative response.”

A Biden ally said the investigation was part of a broader attempt to use congressional power to both attack the former president and try to undermine decisions he made while in office.

Jean-Pierre was press secretary for Biden at the height of scrutiny about Biden’s mental fitness, especially in the wake of his disastrous debate performance last year and pressure for him to drop out of the 2024 race.

The former press secretary said in early June that she was leaving the Democratic Party and switched her political affiliation to independent. She plans to write a book about Biden’s decision to abandon his bid for a second term, which will detail her time in what she described as a “broken” White House.

Bates worked for Biden throughout his four years in office and was a leading spokesperson pushing back on reporting suggesting that the former president’s health had declined, including in December 2024 when The Wall Street Journal published an article about how Biden's aides managed his growing limitations.

Sams was the lead spokesperson responding to Comer’s calls to impeach Biden in 2023 and became the spokesperson for former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign once the former president dropped out of the race. 

Zients was Biden’s second chief of staff and was hired in January 2023 to replace Biden’s longtime aide and former chief of staff Ron Klain, who is set to sit with the panel later this month.

Comer has suggested aides wrongly used an autopen to sign things on Biden’s behalf – something the former president has directly denied.

“I made every decision,” BIden said in an interview with The New York Times, adding that an autopen was only used to approve grants of clemency because “we’re talking about a whole lot of people.”

“Everybody knows how vindictive he is, so we knew that they’d do what they’re doing now,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “I consciously made all those decisions.”

Biden said he did so to protect deserving figures, citing a preemptive pardon given to Gen. Mark Milley as an example.

“We know how vindictive Trump is and I’ve no doubt they would have gone after Mark for no good reason,” Mr. Biden said. “The general, you know. So they may read off his name — what’d I want? I told them I wanted to make sure he had a pardon because I knew exactly what Trump would do — without any merit, I might add.”

Alex Gangitano contributed.