Sens. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) announced Thursday they will hold a hearing next month on what they’re calling President Biden’s “cognitive decline while in office and the mainstream media’s subsequent coverup.”
It will be the first full congressional committee hearing on the topic.
“For four years, when the American people saw Joe Biden, they saw someone who was clearly not capable of making major decisions for the nation. Yet those closest to the president and the mainstream media did everything they could to hide this truth,” Schmitt said in a statement.
“It’s time to expose how a cadre of Biden aides and family members were the de-facto commander-in-chief, while President Biden was sidelined. I look forward to getting the American people the answers they deserve,” Schmitt added.
He and Cornyn will co-chair a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing June 18 about Biden’s mental and physical condition while serving in office.
“For this conspiracy between mainstream media, Joe Biden’s family, and his inner circle to have hidden the impairment of the president of the United States for years, and lied consistently to the American people about his capacity to make decisions, which are solely vested by the Constitution, is unacceptable,” Cornyn said in a statement.
The Texas senator said he and his colleagues would “use this hearing to uncover the facts.”
Biden and former first lady Jill Biden have pushed back on claims in a new book written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson that Biden’s condition was worse than publicly known.
They reported that Biden’s senior aides discussed whether the president would need a wheelchair for his second term. They also reported that Biden failed to recognize George Clooney, a Hollywood star and major Democratic donor, at a fundraiser for the president in June.
Biden this month insisted during an appearance on ABC’s “The View” that he merely had a “bad night” at his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in Atlanta.
“They are wrong,” he said of the allegations in the book.
“The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us. And they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day,” Jill Biden told the program.
“I was with Joe day and night. I saw him more than any other person. I woke up with him; I went to bed at night with him, so I saw him all throughout the day,” she said. “And I did not create a cocoon around him. I mean, you saw him in the Oval Office, you saw him making speeches. He wasn’t hiding somewhere.”
Separately, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chair of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has sent letters to 28 former Biden Cabinet officials asking them to answer questions about Biden’s “cognitive and health decline during his time in office and while running for re-election.”
Johnson wrote in those letters that “what Cabinet officials were telling the public about the former president’s health and what they were apparently witnessing and saying privately is astonishing, particularly considering that the former president was seeking re-election.”
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