Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, is writing letters to two dozen former senior Biden administration officials to appear before his committee to answer what they knew about former President Biden’s health problems in light of allegations that White House officials deliberately kept his cognitive and physical decline a secret.
“We’ve written letters to more than two dozen top administration officials and we’ve requested interviews with them,” he said. “It’s all the people you think, anybody who should have had frequent contact with the president.”
Johnson said his staff is sending letters requesting testimony to former Vice President Kamala Harris, Cabinet officials such as former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Biden’s former chief of staff Jeff Zients.
Johnson said he would consider issuing subpoenas if his invitations are ignored.
“We’ll first politely invite them,” he said. “Hopefully they’ll come in and do an interview.”
The Wisconsin senator is asking for former officials to answer some “basic questions.”
“This doesn’t have to be daylong type of interview or even half a day,” he said. “Give us an hour of your time, we have some basic questions we want to ask you.”
“They owe that to the American public,” he said.
Johnson said he’s not ruling out subpoenas if he gets stonewalled and noted that he does not need support from the top-raking Democrat on the subcommittee, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), to issue them.
Biden and former first lady Jill Biden have pushed back hard on reports that the former president’s inner circle covered up serious health problems during the second half of his four-year term.
Former President Biden told “The View” earlier this month he could have beaten Trump in November 2024 if he had stayed in the race.
He stepped aside after coming under tremendous pressure from Democratic lawmakers and donors not to run for a second term after turning in a disastrous debate performance against Trump in June.
Biden insisted he had “a bad, bad night” in the debate but that it didn’t reflect any serious cognitive or health issues.
“There is nothing to sustain that,” he said.
Jill Biden said on the program that “the people who wrote those books” alleging serious mental lapses by the former president “weren’t in the White House with us.”
“They didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day. He’d get up, he’d put in a full day and then at night, I’d be reading my book, and he was still on the phone, reading his briefings, working with staff,” she said.
Questions of a possible cover-up of the true extent of former President Biden’s health problems have been fueled this week by reporting in a new book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson that senior White House aides discussed the possibility that Biden would need a wheelchair if elected to a second term.
The book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and his Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” also reports that Biden failed to recognize Hollywood star and major Democratic donor George Clooney when he arrived at a June 2024 fundraiser for the president.
Tapper and Thompson wrote that Biden appeared “severely diminished, as if he’d aged a decade since Clooney last saw him in December 2022.”
