Ron Klain, who served as White House Chief of Staff during the first two years of the Biden administration, testified for more than five hours before staff members of the House Oversight Committee on Thursday. The committee, as we know, is trying to determine who was truly making key decisions as President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline raised serious questions about his capacity to govern.
Unlike Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, and former close advisers Annie Tomasini and Anthony Bernal — all of whom invoked their Fifth Amendment rights when questioned by the committee — Klain was said to have fully cooperated with lawmakers.
A source familiar with Klain’s testimony told Fox News that months before Biden dropped out of the race, both Hillary Clinton and then-National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan “approached Ron Klain stating they believed Joe Biden was not politically viable.”
The source did not specify when Clinton and Sullivan spoke to Klain or if they did so together or separately. [Note: Sullivan served as Clinton’s senior policy advisor during her 2016 campaign.]
Fox reported, “Klain told House investigators that Hillary Clinton approached him with concerns about the octogenarian leader’s political viability ‘by 2024.'” [So, it’s possible she spoke to Klain even earlier.]
According to the source, Sullivan told Klain that Biden “was less effective in 2024 compared to 2022.”
However, when Fox News reached out to Sullivan for comment, his representative, Adrienne Watson, denied that any such conversation took place. She responded with a brief statement: “Jake did not have a conversation with Ron about Joe Biden running for president before the debate.”
Later, she followed up with an amended statement: “We don’t think this is what Ron said. Your sources are wrong.”
Klain himself “believed Biden was mentally sharp enough to serve as president, and was not too old to run,” the source said. The former chief of staff also defended Biden’s “acuity to govern.”
“Mr. Klain stated that President Biden often confused names and proper nouns, and it got worse over time,” the source added. And he admitted that Biden had become “less energetic and more forgetful.”
Finally, Klain reportedly told lawmakers “there was no reason to doubt Trump’s own mental fitness.”
To his credit, Klain showed up for the deposition and actually answered questions. However, when compared to what he told author Chris Whipple during an interview about his experience preparing Biden for the June 2024 debate, it’s unclear just how forthright his testimony truly was.
Ahead of the April release of Whipple’s book, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, The Washington Free Beacon’s Matthew Xiao wrote:
Klain, the White House chief of staff from 2021 to 2023, was “startled” by Biden’s declining mental and physical state when he went back to work for the octogenarian president in June 2024, according to excerpts from Chris Whipple’s upcoming book Uncharted published in the Guardian.
Klain had “never seen [Biden] so exhausted and out of it,” Whipple writes. “Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.”
Klain had to cut short the two mock debates he had organized for Biden.
“The first was scheduled to last 90 minutes but Klain called it off after 45. The president’s voice was shot and so was his grasp of the subject,” Whipple writes. Less than 30 minutes into the second mock debate, Biden went off to bed, saying he was “just too tired to continue,” according to Whipple.
So, Klain thought Biden had the “acuity to govern,” yet he couldn’t make it through an afternoon of debate prep.
Let’s be honest: no one was fooled about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. The signs were obvious to anyone willing to see them back in 2019 when he launched his presidential campaign. By 2023, as he announced his bid for reelection, those signs were flashing red. Yet despite the whispers, the warnings, and the glaring evidence, no one in Biden’s inner circle had the courage to step in and end the farce. And even as her husband struggled daily through the demands of the presidency, Jill Biden was unwilling to relinquish the spotlight or to give up the power and the perks of her role as first lady and do the right thing.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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