By In a move that shows turnabout is fair play, President Donald Trump’s legal team has waived executive privilege for Neera Tanden, a former top Biden White House official, as she prepares to testify before the House Oversight Committee in its intensifying inquiry into President Joe Biden’s mental condition.
The letter, delivered earlier in the week and signed by Trump’s White House counsel, authorized Tanden to provide “unrestricted testimony” to congressional investigators. She served as a senior adviser to Biden from 2021 to 2023. Early on, Biden nominated her to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but she lacked the votes needed because of a party defection by former Senator Joe Manchin, who cited her mean social-media posts, among other concerns, explained The New York Post.
The decision signals a strategic pivot. Whereas the Biden administration denied similar privilege waivers for Trump aides during the 2022 House investigation into the January 6 riot, Trump’s team was betting that full cooperation in this case will deepen public concern over Biden’s fitness to serve and amplify scrutiny of what House Republicans have described as a deliberate concealment of the president’s condition.
It didn’t disappoint, wrote Fox News, even if it left more questions than answers.
During Tanden’s interview before Congress, which lasted more than five hours, she told lawmakers that, in her role as staff secretary and senior advisor to the former president between 2021 and 2023, she was authorized to direct autopen signatures on behalf of Biden, an Oversight Committee official told Fox News. The system of approval used, according to Tanden’s testimony relayed to Fox News, was inherited from previous administrations.
But Tanden, who said she had limited interactions with Biden, described an approval process that left her in the dark about who specifically was giving final approval on the decisions to use the automatic signature tool, sources told Fox News.
Tanden testified that to get approval for the use of autopen signatures she would send decision memos to members of Biden’s inner circle. However, she added that she was not aware of what actions or approvals took place between the time she sent the decision memo and the time she received it back with the necessary approval.
When Tanden was asked whether she ever discussed Biden’s health or his fitness to serve as president during her time as a top aide, including during the period of the former president’s widely criticized debate performance last summer, Tanden said she did not. Lawmakers laid out a list of names of officials she could have potentially discussed it with, and Tanden said “no” to each name, according to a source familiar with her closed-door testimony.
The Oversight Committee’s investigation has gained traction following Biden’s faltering 2024 debate performance and rising public doubts about his stamina and decision-making and went into overdrive when it was revealed that many of Joe Biden’s pardons were allegedly signed by autopen. Since then, Republican leaders have pointed to internal White House protocols, lapses in public appearances, and staff efforts to shield the president from unscripted moments as evidence of a broader cover-up.
Trump has asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate what was going on with President Biden and his advisers.
“It has become increasingly apparent that former President Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority,” the memo said. “This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history. The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.”
“For years, President Biden suffered from serious cognitive decline. The Department of Justice, for example, concluded that, despite clear evidence that Biden had broken the law, he should not stand trial owing to his incompetent mental state,” the memo continues. “Biden’s cognitive issues and apparent mental decline during his Presidency were even ‘worse’ in private, and those closest to him ‘tried to hide it’ from the public. To do so, Biden’s advisors during his years in office severely restricted his news conferences and media appearances, and they scripted his conversations with lawmakers, government officials, and donors, all to cover up his inability to discharge his duties.”
The memo explained that the “vast majority” of executive actions from the Biden administration “were signed using a mechanical signature pen,” or autopen. The Biden White House issued 1,200 presidential documents and oversaw the appointments of 235 federal judges (including one Supreme Court justice).
The Federalist noted that “Biden also signed the most pardons and commutations of any president in history, including the pardon of his own son, Hunter. He issued preemptive pardons for his brothers James and Frank and his sister Valerie, along with his siblings’ respective spouses, as well as for corrupt people like Mark Milley, Liz Cheney, and Anthony Fauci.”
As of now, it’s still unclear who exactly was in charge during the Biden years.
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