Senate Republicans are gearing up for the first full-scale congressional hearing into the alleged cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.
Senators John Cornyn, R-Texas., and Eric Schmitt, R-Mo. will co-chair a Senate Judiciary Hearing Wednesday that delves into “what exactly went on” during Biden’s term and why the constitutional power to remove him from office wasn’t triggered.
Cornyn said on the Senate floor that one of the main goals of the hearing was to shine a light on what happened behind the scenes during landmark moments of Biden’s presidency, “from the Biden border crisis to the disastrous results from the withdrawal in Afghanistan.
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“And it’s now clear that for many months — no one knows exactly how long — the president was simply not up to the task,” he said. “Whoever happened to be making those decisions and carrying out the duties of the Office of President was not somebody who was authorized by the Constitution or by a vote of the American people.”
Cornyn and Schmitt’s hearing, first announced late last month, will be held after the release of the book “Original Sin” by CNN host Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, which alleges the Biden White House was trying to control the narrative about the former president’s health and that his allies worked to cover up his decline.
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The hearing, “Unfit to Serve: How the Biden Cover-Up Endangered America and Undermined the Constitution,” features a trio of witnesses called by the Senate Republican duo who served during President Donald Trump’s first term and during the Reagan and Bush years.
Among the Republicans’ witnesses are Theodore Wold, who formerly served as acting assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department and deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy during the Trump administration; Sean Spicer, former White House press secretary and communications director; and John Harrison, a legal scholar from the University of Virginia School of Law who previously served during former the Reagan and Bush administrations.
Wold and Harrison told Fox News Digital their testimony would focus on Biden’s alleged usage of an autopen, a device that is used to automatically mimic a person’s signature, typically used signing of numerous documents, and how the usage of the device may have acted as a smokescreen to prevent the triggering of the 25th Amendment.
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Biden has rejected assertions by lawmakers and Trump that he habitually used an autopen. Trump recently ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to open an investigation into whether the former president’s aides “abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline.”
Spicer’s testimony will focus on the media’s treatment of Trump compared to Biden during their respective first terms and how some media outlets were allegedly “silent” when it came to signs of the ex-president’s decline.
Democrats on the panel did not call any witnesses.
The top-ranking Democrat on the committee, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., contended that Cornyn and Schmitt were wasting the panel’s time with their endeavor.
“We have so many important topics to consider, and this is a totally political undertaking by several of my colleagues,” he said. “It is a waste of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s time.”
