WASHINGTON — Former Biden White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who vociferously defended her boss against accusations of diminished mental acuity, arrived Friday on Capitol Hill to answer questions about the purported cover-up of the 46th president’s cognitive decline.
Jean-Pierre — who has since departed the Democratic Party and is writing a tell-all book about the “broken” administration she served — was hauled in for testimony before the House Oversight Committee.
“We intentionally wanted Jean-Pierre to be one of the last people we bring in,” Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters. “We believe that she’s written some things in the book that are gonna be of interest to our entire investigation.”
The Republican also said he planned to ask about former Vice President Kamala Harris’ claims in her forthcoming book that it was “reckless” for Biden to seek a second term.
Other lines of inquiry will focus on the alleged abuse of the executive autopen for signing thousands of pardons — including some for members of the Biden family — hours before the president left the White House in January.
Jean-Pierre, who declined to answer reporter questions before the interview, tamped down speculation about the oldest-ever president’s health, insisting at one point that videos of Biden wandering off during a high-profile summit with world leaders were “cheap fakes” despite alarm from members of his own party.
The White House spokeswoman lashed out at detractors and even members of the media who reported on the former president’s verbal gaffes and physical stumbles, once memorably scolding the press during Biden’s final year in the Oval Office that he “doesn’t need a cognitive test.”
“That is not my assessment, that is the assessment of the president’s doctor, that is also the assessment of his neurologist,” Jean-Pierre told reporters in February 2024.
“He passes a cognitive test every day — every day — as he moves from one topic to another topic, understanding the granular level of these topics. You saw him talking about fighting crime today, tomorrow’s he’s going to the border,” she added.
Biden’s personal physician Kevin O’Connor — who pled the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions that could be incriminating before the Oversight Committee in July — never took questions from reporters about the president’s health, opting instead to release brief, written reports on Biden’s annual physicals.
None of those tests included neuro-cognitive work.
The ex-president, now 82, also did not submit to the brief Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a two-minute screening comprising around 30 questions to test for signs of dementia.
Just days before the Democratic incumbent abandoned his 2024 re-election campaign, O’Connor insisted to The Post in his only interview with a media outlet to that point that the president’s mental fitness was “excellent.”
Ex-colleagues previously dished that fellow spokesman Andrew Bates was “used” by Jean-Pierre to “attack” journalists in the final months of Biden’s term to try to kill stories about a publicist she used for self-promotion while still in the White House.
Reports on the relationship only broke after Jean-Pierre and others left the Biden White House.
New emails first reported by The Post revealed that the sweeping use of the presidential autopen to commute sentences for non-violent offenders caught senior officials at the Department of Justice and even the White House off guard — with Biden appearing to only orally approve some pardons before the autopen signature was affixed.
Comer told reporters before his sitdown with Jean-Pierre that the messages “suggest that there was a process that the Biden administration was using to use the autopen that was in direct conflict with the Merrick Garland Department of Justice.”
“There are inconsistencies with what people have testified to us in these depositions and what we are seeing from these emails as far as the the process that the Biden administration used for the autopen,” he added.
