House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said that testimony from former Vice President Kamala Harris would be “helpful” in his panel’s probe of former President Biden’s mental acuity and his White House’s use of autopen during his term.
“I think that it would be helpful to hear from Kamala Harris. We haven’t decided whether or not we’re going to issue the subpoena or not, but certainly she’s welcome to come to the committee,” Comer told reporters on Thursday.
“If I were her and wanted to have a political future, I would want to set the record straight on a lot of this stuff, because it’s going to haunt her her entire political career, because nobody thinks that Joe Biden was calling the shots in the end,” Comer said.
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), another member of the Oversight Committee, had previously suggested that the panel subpoena Harris. Comer had told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham in July that with Harris having more time after opting against a run for governor, the odds of her getting a subpoena were “very high.”
Harris has repeatedly defended Biden’s fitness for office.
Comer’s panel has hauled in a number of high-profile former Biden aides for interviews about Biden’s fitness for office and use of autopen — subpoenaing some of them to compel testimony.
His comments about Harris on Thursday came after a closer-door, voluntary transcribed interview with Ian Sams, former special assistant to the president and senior advisor in the White House Counsel’s Office, who forcefully defended Biden from House GOP impeachment investigations and other allegations.
Comer, who had traded public insults and barbs with Sams through 2023 and 2024 as his panel probed the Biden family’s business dealings, said that Sams gave “probably the most informative transcribed interview-slash-deposition we’ve had thus far.”
Comer emphasized that Sams said he had communicated with Biden just twice, even as he issued daily press statements about the president.
“He communicated with Joe Biden two times. He communicated with Joe Biden two times,” Comer told reporters after the interview, repeating the point for emphasis. “He saw Joe Biden, talked to Joe Biden two times the entire stint as White House spokesperson. But yet, he would every day tweet and issue statements from the podium of the White House, combating everything that we were doing in the Oversight Committee.”
Comer said that Sams told the committee that Biden was mentally sharp in those two interactions, but said that “he had to” describe Biden as sharp given his previous public statements about Biden.
Sams did not respond to questions from reporters heading into or leaving the deposition.
Comer said that despite his previous public clashes with Sams, the two were “cordial” in the interview.
Some of the former Biden aides who have been subpoenaed invoked their Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer the committee’s questions in recent depositions: Anthony Bernal, former chief of staff to first lady Jill Biden; deputy director of Oval Office operations Annie Tomasini; and Biden’s former White House doctor Kevin O’Connor.
Others, though, have appeared voluntarily and answered the panel’s questions, including former White House chief of staff Ron Klain and former Biden aides Ashley Williams and Neera Tanden.
