Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) on Wednesday accused former Biden Cabinet officials, Democratic members of Congress and the media of participating in a massive “cover-up” to hide what they claim was former President Biden’s obvious and alarming cognitive decline during his final two years in office.
“There was a conspiracy to hide the president’s true condition by his family, by his staff, by the media, and many elected officials. This was a constitutional crisis bigger than President Biden, bigger than any single election, and one that cannot be absolved by the collective apology of the press and an election where the president’s party lost,” Cornyn said in his opening statement of a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Cornyn and Schmitt rolled out their accusations against the former president and his inner circle to a mostly empty room after most Democrats on the panel boycotted the hearing.
Yet Cornyn argued that Congress has a responsibility to investigate who was in charge of the executive branch during the final months of Biden’s presidency, when Biden was having difficulty navigating the demands of his job and his reelection campaign, according to books that provided insider-sourced accounts of that time.
“We need to know who was in charge during the last months of the Biden administration. Was it his wife, his chief of staff, nameless others? None of these people were elected by the American people, nor were they authorized by the Constitution and laws of the United States to carry out the duties of the president of the United States,” Cornyn said at the hearing.
Schmitt declared that Biden was “mentally unfit to carry out the responsibilities of the most powerful office in the world.”
“Given his mental incapacity, the American people deserve to know who was running the country the last four years,” he said.
Schmitt called it “deeply disappointing” that most Democrats on the panel chose to “boycott” the meeting and decided not to call a single witness to testify.
Schmitt claimed that Biden’s decline “did not suddenly begin in June of 2024,” when he performed disastrously at the presidential debate against Trump.
“It was a persistent and obvious truth that was evident for years to anyone who was willing to see it,” he said.
Cornyn and Schmitt called on former Trump White House press secretary Sean Spicer to testify along with University of Virginia law professor John Harrison and Heritage Foundation fellow Theodore Wold.
The Republicans’ claims of a cover-up received pushback from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who provided some opening remarks before leaving the room.
Durbin dinged his GOP colleagues for not holding oversight hearings about the Trump administration or looking into the recent detainment of Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) at a press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem or Trump’s deployment of active-duty Marines during protests in Los Angeles.
“So far this year the Republican majority on this committee has not held a single oversight hearing, despite numerous critical challenges facing the nation that our under our jurisdiction,” he said.
Durbin accused his GOP colleagues of “armchair diagnosing” Biden instead of investigating issues he argued would be more deserving of congressional oversight.
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