Watergate-style hearings for the Biden cover-up
A White House cadre, with media connivance, hoped to drag their puppet over the electoral line to win four additional years of power, dangerously undermining the institutional integrity of the presidency. Memorial Day has come and gone, and Washington’s elite is already enabling the machinery to which the Democratic left turns in the face of scandal — elevating sideshows such as insupportable claims that Republicans are destroying Medicaid or rants regarding President Trump’s dispute with Harvard, all to make this latest deceit disappear like April’s cherry blossoms.
Republicans will end up rewarding this duplicity if they elevate cheap talk over accountability. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is holding aggressive hearings on the cover-up, but they have been too narrowly aimed. Mr Biden’s using an autopen and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s declining to release the audio of the president’s interview with Robert Hur are small potatoes amid this vast whitewash of history.
If Congress takes seriously that it should act when Americans are cynically hoodwinked, it must begin an investigation into the cover-up that matches or exceeds the Senate Watergate Committee hearings.
Key names central to the cover-up — often referred to as the “Politburo” — have appeared in books and news articles. They include Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign manager; Mike Donilon, the adviser who wanted Mr Biden to run because “no one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter”; White House counsellor Steve Ricchetti; chief of staff Ron Klain; deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed; another deputy chief, Annie Tomasini; Anthony Bernal, Jill Biden’s chief of staff; communications aides T.J. Ducklo and Andrew Bates; and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who spewed repeated lies affirming Mr Biden’s good health.
In an interview with the Free Press, Speaker Mike Johnson recalled asking Mr Biden in January 2024 why he paused the approval of new permits to export American liquefied natural gas to European allies, thereby aiding Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. Mr Johnson said that a stunned Mr Biden insisted, “I didn’t do that.” Clearly, the president didn’t know what he had signed. Who made that decision? If other executive policy decisions had potentially catastrophic international consequences, did an enfeebled President Biden make them, or was it the “Politburo”?
Who signed off on the Afghanistan pullout, resulting in the deaths of 13 American service members? What role did Secretary of State Antony Blinken or national security adviser Jake Sullivan play in foreign-policy decisions without explicit presidential authority, especially during and after Hamas’s assault on Israel in October 2023? If Xi Jinping moved into the Taiwan Strait, would a provocative US counter-attack have been authorised by the elected leader of the free world or by unelected apparatchiks?
What we do know is that the masters of concealment stayed silent while a bobblehead president sunned himself on Delaware’s beaches with the nuclear football just a few feet away.
Even now, the focus seems less on Mr Biden’s staff, cabinet and senior Democrats and more on the narrative that media zealotry against Donald Trump’s election provided the president cover. Each day that an investigation is delayed, staffers in the Biden White House and on the Biden and Harris campaigns — along with members of Mr Biden’s administration and Democratic Party operatives — might be destroying records, replacing cellphones and following Hillary Clinton’s example by wiping their email servers.
Mr Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune should open an inquiry with more staff, investigators and lawyers who have broad subpoena powers. Messrs. Tapper and Thompson said they spoke to about 200 sources connected to the effort to hide Mr Biden’s diminished cognition. That’s an avalanche of witnesses who could confirm the cabalists’ disinformation plan. FBI Director Kash Patel should provide support as necessary. Anything short of an intense investigation with legal heft will leave Americans wondering how a few individuals could put the nation at risk without penalty.
Mr Biden himself is largely irrelevant. The witness list should include the capital schemers who sought to manipulate his limited mental capacity and participated in what these pages described as a cover-up that “will go down as one of the great scandals of modern politics.”
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t need to fly cross-country to lash out at contrived American “oligarchs”. Oligarchs are easy to find in the reeking sinkhole of their own backyard, personified by those in the White House, cabinet and Democratic Party command who secretly took it on themselves to exercise control of the executive branch. They would easily fit in a medium-size meeting room at the Watergate Hotel.
Kenneth L. Khachigian was an aide to Richard Nixon and chief speechwriter to Ronald Reagan and is author of the memoir “Behind Closed Doors: In the Room With Reagan and Nixon.”
Wall Street Journal
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The massive cover-up of Joe Biden’s mental decline has stimulated plenty of indignant commentary. Missing from the hand-wringing is a demand for accountability, which brings to mind the quip: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” This newspaper and recently published books have exposed the trickery and lies of Mr Biden’s minions and Democratic allies, who attempted to wield power in a leaderless vacuum. It was perfectly described in Tunku Varadarajan’s review of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book, “Original Sin,” as resembling “a hush-hush leftist capture of an infirm president.”