WASHINGTON — Jill Biden’s “work husband” Anthony Bernal became the second former White House aide to take the Fifth Amendment when hauled before a congressional committee Wednesday to answer questions about the 46th president’s cognitive decline.
Bernal, like Joe Biden’s former personal physician Kevin O’Connor, invoked his right against self-incrimination and departed without taking reporter questions.
Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said he only got to ask two questions of the Biden family confidant: “Was Joe Biden fit to exercise the duties of the president?” and “Did any unelected official or family member execute the duties of the presidency?”
“I think that the American people are concerned,” Comer added. “They’re concerned that there were people making decisions in the White House that were not only unelected but no one to this day knows who they were.”
“This is a historic scandal and Americans demand transparency and accountability,” the chairman said in a subsequent statement.
O’Connor, who served as Biden’s doctor during his vice presidency and presidency, took the Fifth last Friday when asked if he was ever told to “lie about the president’s health” or believed the president was “unfit to execute his duties.”
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), a member of the Oversight panel, has maintained that Biden “completely understood what was going on” and “may get fumbled up by words, but that’s not anything new and it’s not anything that came with age.”
But Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said Bernal’s hasty retreat implicates him in “corruption at the highest level.”
“If you cannot, say, answer a simple question about Joe Biden’s capabilities, then that further demonstrates that he was not in charge of his administration,” Donalds told reporters.
“And if he was not in charge of his administration, then every order, every bill that was signed, every memorandum, as far as I’m concerned, are null and void.”
Donalds, who is running for governor of Florida next year, added that Jill Biden herself should “come in here and answer questions” after her deputy declined to do so.
“I think [former Vice President] Kamala Harris [also] needs to come in and tell us what she knew and when she knew it,” the congressman also threatened.
Comer noted that his panel would continue with transcribed interviews and depositions of key Biden White House aides to determine the scale of the purported cover-up of the president’s mental decline, as well as potential “illegal use of the autopen” to grant pardons.
Biden’s deputy chief of staff, Annie Tomasini, requested through her lawyer to be handed a subpoena in order to testify this Friday, making her the fifth aide to face questioning from lawmakers and staff.
Neera Tanden, a senior adviser who became director of the Domestic Policy Counsel, and Ashley Williams, deputy director of Oval Office operations, sat for transcribed interviews without taking the Fifth before the brief depositions with Brenal and O’Connor.
Asked whether there was an effort in the White House to cover up Biden’s cognitive decline, Tanden told reporters after her June 24 interview: “Absolutely not.”
Biden “admitted he didn’t know everything, he didn’t sign off on every individual pardon,” Comer added, referencing the ex-commander in chief’s recent interview with The New York Times.
“I think the possibility is very good that we’ll be asking members of the family to come in.”
The retired president told The Times that he “made every decision” regarding executive clemencies issued during his term — but emails showed White House chief of staff Jeff Zients wielded the autopen to approve 25 warrants for pardons and commutations between last December and January.
“We’re talking about a lot of people,” said Biden in defense of his actions. Two of the warrants had commuted sentences for thousands of convicts.
Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other members of the Biden family received preemptive pardons on Jan. 20, authorized with the autopen because the president worried his successor would pursue “vindictive” prosecutions.
The autopen has been used by presidents at least as far back as Harry S. Truman, but the Biden White House’s sweeping use of the mechanical device amid public concerns about his diminishing cognitive acuity have drawn scrutiny from lawmakers and journalists alike.
President Trump’s Justice Department is also probing the autopen controversy to see whether any aides “abused the power of Presidential signatures.”
In some cases, staff secretary Stefanie Feldman used only written accounts of the president’s approval before putting documents into the autopen for signatures, The Times reported, even when the assistants who drafted the “blurbs” weren’t in the room with Biden.
“That’s a crime to do that to the country,” Trump charged on The Post’s “Pod Force One” podcast when asked about the alleged autopen abuse.
“I don’t think he knew he was doing it. I think that people took over the autopen, they got things signed that shouldn’t have been signed.”
