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."
