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UPI
6 days ago
- Politics
- UPI
GOP's Comer subpoenas Jill Biden aide in panel's probe of Joe Biden's mental health
1 of 3 | Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., on Thursday issued a subpoena to a former Jill Biden aide in his panel's probe into Joe Biden's mental health. File Photo (2024) by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo June 26 (UPI) -- Republican House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer on Thursday issued a subpoena to a former Jill Biden aide in his panel's probe into Joe Biden's mental health. The subpoena targeted Anthony Bernal, a former assistant to the president and senior adviser to the former first lady, calling for him to appear for a deposition on July 16 as part of Comer's probe into what his press announcement called "the cover-up of President Joe Biden's mental decline and potentially unauthorized executive actions." Comer's announcement on the subpoena said Bernal was reportedly so close to the former first lady that he was referred to as her "work husband." A day earlier, Bernal had notified Comer's panel that he would not take part in its requested interview. Comer on Thursday said that Bernal previously had confirmed that he would appear "for a voluntary transcribed interview" on Thursday. However, Comer said, the White House Counsel's office informed Bernal that it was waiving executive privilege for the committee's investigation. At that, Bernal refused to appear. In a subpoena cover letter, Comer said, in part, to Bernal that "the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform requested that you -- because of your role as a senior aide to former President Joe Biden -- appear for a transcribed interview on June 11, 2025, broadly regarding 'the extent of your influence over the former President and your knowledge of whether the former President was personally discharging the duties of his office.' "Given your close connection with both former President Biden and former First Lady Jill Biden, the Committee sought to understand if you contributed to an effort to hide former President Biden's fitness to serve from the American people," the letter continued. "You have refused the Committee's request. However, to advance the Committee's oversight and legislative responsibilities and interests, your testimony is critical. Accordingly, please see the attached subpoena for testimony at a deposition on July 16, 2025." Bernal was one of the sources cited in Jake Tapper's book Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. That book also has been referenced by Comer in his panel's investigation into Joe Biden's mental health. In May, Comer announced his investigation, citing general concerns about Biden's age and mental capacity after the president's troubled performances and missteps on the campaign trail, which eventually resulted in Joe Biden withdrawing from his presidential run. Comer's investigation also launched as renewed interest in Biden's health erupted after the former president announced he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump ordered an investigation into Joe Biden's cognitive state, alleging that White House aides covered up his mental decline.
The Hill
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Hill
Comer subpoenas Jill Biden ‘work husband' for July testimony
House Republicans investigating former President Biden's mental fitness while in office are flexing their subpoena power to get testimony from Anthony Bernal, who was a top aide to former first lady Jill Biden. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) issued a subpoena on Thursday for a deposition from Bernal on July 16 after Bernal, who was reportedly so close to the former first lady that he was referred to as her 'work husband,' declined to take part in an interview that was scheduled Wednesday. President Trump's administration suspended legal protections for Biden officials testifying in the probe the day before Bernal was to take part in a transcribed interview with the committee. 'You have refused the Committee's request. However, to advance the Committee'soversight and legislative responsibilities and interests, your testimony is critical,' Comer wrote in a letter to Bernal on Thursday. Comer had blasted Bernal publicly Wednesday after he skipped their scheduled interview with him. 'Now that the White House has waived executive privilege, it's abundantly clear that Anthony Bernal — Jill Biden's so-called 'work husband '— never intended to be transparent about Joe Biden's cognitive decline and the ensuing cover-up,' Comer said in a statement. 'With no privilege left to hide behind, Mr. Bernal is now running scared, desperate to bury the truth.' 'The American people deserve answers and accountability, and the Oversight Committee will not tolerate this obstruction,' Comer added. 'To avoid any further delays, your appearance before the Committee is now compelled.' Bernal's influence in the Biden administration was detailed in the book 'Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again' by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios's Alex Thompson. 'He considered loyalty to be the defining virtue and would wield that word to elevate some and oust others – at times fairly and at times not. 'Are you a Biden person?' he would ask West Wing aides. 'Is so-and-so a Biden person?' The regular interrogations led some colleagues to dub him the leader of the 'loyalty police,'' the reporters wrote. Comer has questioned who had authority to use the presidential autopen to sign off on White House actions while Biden was in office. The 'Original Sin' authors wrote that one source told them that 'five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.' 'The cover-up of President Biden's mental decline is one of the greatest scandals in our nation's history,' Comer said earlier this month in announcing the expansion of his investigation. 'These five former senior advisers were eyewitnesses to President Biden's condition and operations within the Biden White House.' He also has sought testimony from top Biden aides Michael Donilon, Anita Dunn, Ron Klain, Bruce Reed and Steve Ricchetti. The panel privately interviewed Neera Tanden, who was the former president's staff secretary, earlier this week. Comer said Tanden revealed 'she had minimal interaction with President Biden, despite wielding tremendous authority.' 'Her testimony raises serious questions about who was really calling the shots in the Biden White House amid the President's obvious decline,' the oversight chairman said. Comer's committee sought to subpoena Bernal last year after then-President Biden faltered in the presidential debate with Trump and ultimately dropped his reelection bid, but the Biden administration refused to waive executive privilege that shields White House staffers from divulging private conversations with presidents. Axios reported that a person familiar with Bernal's interactions with the House Oversight panel disputed Comer's characterization of Bernal's stance on testifying. 'Calling this a 'refusal' is misleading, when there was simply a request to reschedule the interview,' the person, who Axios did not name, told the outlet. The former president's official office didn't immediately respond to The Hill's request for comment.
San Francisco Chronicle
15-06-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Will Democrats finally stop defending protesters who turn to thuggery?
This weekend marks the next step in a likely long hot summer of protest and the latest opportunity for Gavin Newsom and other Democrats to stop reflexively defending the 'peaceful protests' that have been occurring in Los Angeles and elsewhere without acknowledging that the rest of the country doesn't see them as entirely peaceful. If Democrats don't acknowledge the full picture of what's going on, the crew with trust issues with voters and a 38% approval rating, 5 points lower than the GOP — stands little chance of checking Donald Trump's fascistic rise. 'This is anarchy and true chaos,' Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., posted on X above an image of a burning car in Los Angeles. 'My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement.' 'One of the great lessons of 2024,' Biden-Harris campaign strategist David Plouffe told the authors of the new bestselling book, 'Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again' is that 'never again can we as a party suggest to people that what they're seeing is not true.' (Even though Trump does that daily.) But Democrats risk doing it again if protest-adjacent vandalism continues unchecked over the critical next few months. And that will hurt Democrats' chances of rallying Americans outside their shrinking tent against Trump. Historian Heather Cox Richardson, author of the newsletter 'Letters from an American,' said this summer's protests will be a 'fight for public opinion' with the goal being to persuade 3.5% of Americans to oppose Trump's agenda. There is little margin for error — or for protest interlopers to hijack the message that Trump is dangerously grabbing the power of a king and using it to punish immigrants and further enrich the wealthy. 'People sometimes mistake the idea that protests are designed to fight back against the system, and the people in the system,' Richardson said in an online video. 'In fact, the minute that you start to demonstrate violence, you lose all those people you need on your team, because they were kind of apathetic to begin with, and they just don't want to have any part of it.' So Democrats can't tell America that, as Plouffe put it, 'what they're seeing is not true.' But still some persist. 'The reality is we see peaceful protests launching in Los Angeles,' Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., told NBC's 'Meet the Press' last week. 'And again, any violence against police officers should not be accepted.' 'Angelenos are standing up for their city in a peaceful way,' Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Los Angeles, told CNN last week, adding as an aside, 'There are some anarchists.' Said Cox Richardson: 'Nonviolence is important, because that brings (supporters) on board. The minute they see violence, they don't want any part of it. So the protests on our side to take back American democracy must be nonviolent.' During his nationally televised address last week calling out Trump's overreach in taking over the national guard, Newsom tried to broaden the tent saying, 'This is about all of us. This is about you. California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next.' For Americans in other states to resist Trump, Newsom and other Democrats will have to simultaneously support the peaceful grassroots protests and sideline the thugs. It's the only way the movement spreads beyond the blue state choir. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is trying by framing the 8 p.m. curfew she implemented as remaining in effect 'to curb bad actors who do not support the immigrant community.' Demonstrations don't happen as often — or ever — in most of the U.S. Meanwhile, the Bay Area hosts demonstrations seven days a week. So for starters, the mere sight of thousands of people filling the streets is foreign, intimidating and a little bit scary to people who spent Saturday at Little League or cutting the grass in Kansas. As he assumes a larger profile on the national stage during this latest public tussle with Trump, Newsom needs to better explain the nuance of protests. Democrats to the left of Fetterman often call a protest 'peaceful' even if there are images of protesters lighting cars on fire and breaking windows and vandalizing businesses and property. Those acts are dismissed off-handedly as 'property damage' and not violence. (Tell that to the family businesses that have to replace their windows the next morning.) Yes, the vandals doing that damage constitute only a small fraction of the demonstrators, but they receive a disproportionate amount of air time — and that only helps Trump. Their actions need to be acknowledged more forcibly, called out as unlawful and very publicly prosecuted. Newsom understands this. 'If you incite violence — I want to be clear about this — if you incite violence or destroy our communities, you are going to be held to account. That kind of criminal behavior will not be tolerated. Full stop,' Newsom said in his nationally broadcast speech Tuesday, noting that 220 people had been arrested in Los Angeles and local law enforcement was reviewing video of the chaos 'to build additional cases and people will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.' His challenge is that parsing those differences between protesters is difficult and rarely done. I first wrote about those differences while covering dozens of Iraq War protests two decades ago. Many mass demonstrations in the Bay and L.A. often follow a similar arc: Thousands of people will peacefully and boisterously march in the streets for hours without incident. Chanting, waving signs, talking smack about the government (all protected under the First Amendment, as is waving a Mexican flag.) Then, in their wake, usually as the first wave of peaceful demonstrators is headed home, a 'breakaway' contingent of demonstrators unaffiliated with the main organizers will start breaking windows, tagging buildings with graffiti and engaging in other random acts of vandalism that have nothing to do with the theme of the demonstration other than being a different expression of rage. Often, they self-identify as anti-capitalist 'anarchists.' During the 2003 anti-war demonstrations, anarchists told me they were frustrated with conventional peace events and called for a breakaway march to 'bring some militancy' to the anti-war movement. 'What does (the main march) threaten? It can just be ignored like any other position people are taking,' said one anarchist, who asked not to be identified. Yet organizers of the main demonstrations rarely called out the thugs piggybacking on their protest. Some told me they were threatened when they did. So instead, when pressed, many often exonerated the splinter groups and their actions to me by saying, 'Let a thousand flowers bloom.' In other words, all kinds of protests are valid. There has long been a reluctance among activists to criticize fellow travelers, even those whose vandalism devalues the message the main demonstration is trying to send. Unless protest organizers do something to self-police these demonstration hijackers, their powerful, existential message — Trump is becoming a fascistic autocrat before our eyes — will be diluted. Or worse, ignored. It's time to pull the dandelions sprouting among the flowers. And while I'm hesitant to jump on the blame-the-media bandwagon, we own some responsibility here, too. Television coverage of these mass demonstrations, which provides most of the protest images consumed on all platforms, is rarely nuanced enough to draw the distinctions between the main marchers and the unaffiliated vandals gravy-training on their earnest intentions. TV reports invariably focus on the broken windows in the wake of an otherwise peaceful march rather than the message that the marchers were making about Trump's budding fascism. If it bleeds — or is broken — it leads on TV news. If Newsom and protest organizers don't mute the vandals this summer, then Trump wins the fight for public opinion. Those 'anarchists' will become Trump's best weapon as their behavior is contributing to the false narrative that American cities are out of control. Yeah, the anarchists are angry. A lot of us are angry. But burning and breaking stuff is damaging the common cause we share. We are right — and constitutionally endowed — to take to the street on behalf of law-abiding immigrants. But you're not helping if you're busting up stuff, or not calling out those who do. See something? Say something. And that starts with Newsom, who has to remember that he's now talking to the rest of America. Not just California.
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Have Presidents Grown Too Powerful To Be Removed From Office?
The cover-up of President Joe Biden's cognitive decline is a scandal "maybe worse than Watergate," CNN's Jake Tapper opined recently. In this case, the key question is: "What didn't the president know and when didn't he know it?" Last week the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ramped up its efforts to answer these questions. Citing Tapper and Alex Thompson's book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, The committee's chairman, Rep. James Comer (R–Tenn.), issued demand letters to five senior Biden aides and subpoenaed the White House doctor who certified that the president was fit for duty. He clearly wasn't. Even in 2020, Biden struggled to feign lucidity in tightly scripted Zoom town halls. "He couldn't follow the conversation at all," said top Democrats who saw the raw footage; it "was like watching Grandpa who shouldn't be driving." The four Cabinet members who spoke with Tapper and Thompson described equally scripted Cabinet meetings with a president incapable of answering pre-screened questions without the aid of a teleprompter. One recounted being "shocked by how the president was acting" at a 2024 meeting: "'disoriented' and 'out of it,' his mouth agape." One campaign adviser asked himself after a post-debate conversation with Biden: "What are we doing here? This guy can't form a fucking sentence." Put more politely, the president was "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office"—just cause for removal. "This is why we have the 25th Amendment," Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) said recently, "it's clear now that it probably should have been invoked from the beginning." That key players instead propped up a semiconscious figurehead, hoping to gaslight their way to reelection, isn't just a scandal—it's a constitutional failure. That failure reveals an uncomfortable truth: As the presidency has grown ever more powerful, even manifestly unfit presidents have become nearly impossible to remove. Ratified in 1967, the 25th Amendment provides two ways the vice president can get the keys from a nonfunctioning president. Under Section 3, the president hands them over voluntarily; under Section 4, the VP can take them away when he or she and a majority of the Cabinet determine that the president is incapacitated. Section 4 was meant to cover cases of "mental debility," as one of the amendment's architects, Rep. Richard Poff (R–Va.), explained, where the president "is unable or unwilling to make any rational decision…particularly the decision to stand aside." Top of mind was avoiding a replay of the Woodrow Wilson debacle. Leveled by a pair of strokes in 1919, the 28th president spent the remainder of his term bedridden and incommunicado while first lady Edith Wilson essentially ran the executive branch of the government. "We dare not let that happen again," Rep. Emanuel Celler (D–N.Y.) warned during the House debate over the 25th amendment. Yet it arguably just did. In the six-decade life of the amendment, Biden's presidency is as close as we've come to the paradigmatic Woodrow Wilson case, complete with a latter-day Edith Wilson—Jill Biden—and a clique of advisers the Biden staff dubbed "the Politburo." An inert president may sound like a libertarian dream. Alas, it's not as if nothing gets done while he's checked out. The New York Times calls concerns about heavy use of the autopen a "conspiracy theory." But if reports from the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project are accurate, it's at least interesting that, from mid-July 2022 on, most executive orders issued by the administration were signed remotely, even when Biden was in Washington. Despite the Politburo's efforts to conceal the president's decline, the Cabinet knew. At any point, the vice president and eight Cabinet-level "principal officers" could have moved to replace him via Section 4. Why didn't they? For one thing, the 25th Amendment's "eject button" is almost impossible to trigger: Even broaching the possibility risks crashing the plane. Any single Cabinet member who disagrees could "short-circuit the process by informing the President, potentially triggering a cascade of firings." (Something similar happened in 1920, when Wilson's secretary of state, Robert Lansing, was forced out for suggesting a transfer of power to Vice President Thomas Marshall.) Another problem is that even with the support of the Cabinet, it was unclear whether Vice President Harris could garner enough GOP votes in Congress to ratify the switch. Without a supermajority of both Houses, Biden would come back from time-out and the firing frenzy would begin. According to Tapper and Thompson, the 25th Amendment solution was never even considered. Instead, the Politburo's reigning calculus was that Biden "just had to win and then he could disappear for four years—he'd only have to show proof of life every once in a while." Meanwhile, the same people hoping to defraud the electorate subjected the rest of us to lectures about threats to "our democracy." Worse still, it isn't just the 25th Amendment that's broken. The Constitution provides another method for ejecting an unfit president before his term is up: the impeachment process. In the last five years, we've pressure-tested both failsafe mechanisms. Neither one worked. In his first term, President Donald Trump was impeached twice, the second time for provoking a riot while trying to intimidate Congress and his own vice president into overturning the results of an election he lost. Even that enormity didn't earn him conviction and disqualification in the Senate trial. The fact that we've never managed to eject a sitting president via the impeachment process suggests that the framers set the bar for removal—conviction by two-thirds of the Senate—too high. For Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, which requires a supermajority of both houses, the bar is even higher. Lowering the bar to an impeachment conviction—say, to 60 votes—would better protect the public from an abusive president. It would also provide security against a future Biden/Wilson scenario. Though impeachment aims primarily at abuse of power, it was designed as a remedy for presidential unfitness generally: "defending the community against the incapacity, negligence, or perfidy of the Chief Magistrate," as James Madison put it. Properly understood, that covers cases of "mental debility." Of course, that reform faces a dauntingly high bar of its own: It would take a constitutional amendment, the prospects for which are dim. But making presidents easier to fire is only one way to tackle our fundamental problem; the other is to shrink the job. "Incapacity, negligence, and perfidy" in the presidency are bigger threats than ever, because presidents now have the power to reshape vast swaths of American life. They enjoy broad authority to decide what kind of car you can drive, who gets to use which locker room, who is allowed to come to the United States, and whether or not we have a trade war with China—or a hot war with Iran. That's more power than any one fallible human being should have. Making the presidency safe for democracy will require a reform effort on the scale of the post-Watergate Congresses: reining in emergency powers, war powers, the president's authority over international trade, and his ability to make law with the stroke of a pen. It's a heavy lift, but worth the effort. If we're worried about the damage unfit presidents can do, we should give them fewer things to break. The post Have Presidents Grown Too Powerful To Be Removed From Office? appeared first on
Newsweek
10-06-2025
- Health
- Newsweek
Four Senior Biden Officials to Testify in Probe on His Health: Report
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Four senior officials in former President Joe Biden's administration are set to testify in a House probe into Biden's health while in office. Newsweek reached out to Jill and Joe Biden's office via online form Tuesday for comment. Why It Matters Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race in late July following a disastrous debate performance against then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Biden repeatedly stared at Trump and made halting statements where he appeared to lose his train of thought. Biden later said he had "a bad, bad night." Questions swirled about his mental acuity and possible decline as the White House and then Vice President Kamala Harris fielded questions about his cognitive ability in the final months of his presidency. Biden also faced harsh feedback as excerpts from CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson's book Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again were published. What To Know According to Politico, citing a House Oversight Committee aid, former deputy chief of staff Annie Tomasini, former deputy director of Oval Office operations Ashley Williams, former director of the Domestic Policy Council Neera Tanden, and Anthony Bernal, former senior adviser to the then first lady, are all set to testify in either June or July. Committee Chair James Comer requested their cooperation with the probe in May and also sent Biden's physician, Kevin O'Connor, a subpoena last week, Politico reports. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Comer said that he requested O'Connor appear for a deposition on June 27, 2025. Trump has pushed White House lawyers to look into whether Biden's aides covered up his alleged health decline, Reuters reports. Biden also revealed last month that he had been diagnosed with an "aggressive" form of prostate cancer that had metastasized to the bone. Former President Joe Biden can be seen posing at the opening night of "Othello" on Broadway at The Barrymore Theatre on March 23, 2025, in New York City. (Photo by Bruce Glikas/WireImage) Former President Joe Biden can be seen posing at the opening night of "Othello" on Broadway at The Barrymore Theatre on March 23, 2025, in New York City. (Photo by Bruce Glikas/WireImage) What People Are Saying House Oversight Committee on X over the weekend: "Even Obama's doctor admits the truth. This is precisely why Chairman @RepJamesComer subpoenaed Dr. Kevin O'Connor, Biden's physician. This is a scandal of historical proportions, and we will investigate it thoroughly!" Trump on Truth Social in May after Biden's diagnosis: "Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden's recent medical diagnosis. We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery." Biden in a statement last week: "Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn't is ridiculous and false," Biden said. "This is nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations."
