Republicans Get Disgraced Doctor to Probe Biden’s Mental State
Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson said White House doctor Kevin O’Connor “would do or say anything to cover up and protect” former president Joe Biden.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Texas GOP Rep. Ronny Jackson said a House panel will probe whether former White House doctor Kevin O’Connor concealed former President Joe Biden’s mental decline.
Jackson, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee’s subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, told the New York Post in a story published Friday that the GOP “will look into whether or not we actually had a shadow presidency for a large part of [Biden’s] term” and that O’Connor “will absolutely, positively be implicated in the cover-up of this. He is a massive, massive part.”
“He was probably putting President Biden on lots of medications that we have no clue of—in efforts to try to treat his cognitive decline,” he alleged. The subcommittee has yet to formally announce any investigation.
Joe Biden with his physician Kevin O'Connor at the White House in August 2023.
Leah Millis/Reuters
Jackson is a physician who served in the White House Medical Unit under former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump before he was elected to Congress in 2020. In 2021, a report by the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General stated that Jackson had “engaged in inappropriate conduct involving the use of alcohol” on two presidential trips, and “made sexual and denigrating statements about one of his female medical subordinates to another of his subordinates.”
Jackson alleged O’Connor, whom he said he’s known for a long time, “would do or say anything to cover up and protect [the Biden family], regardless of what it meant professionally.”
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Biden, the oldest president in U.S. history when he left office at 82, faced growing questions about his fitness for office as his term wore on. O’Connor wrote in a February 2024 memo that the president “continues to be fit for duty and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations.”
By avoiding sit-down interviews and large press conferences, the president’s apparent mental decline only became apparent during his catastrophic performance in the televised debate with Trump last June. He relinquished the Democratic nomination to former Vice President Kamala Harris on July 21.
The move spurred Republicans to question whether his team had concealed signs of his supposed mental decline and were doing the president’s job for him.
In July, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for White House aides, including O’Connor, to discuss Biden’s cognitive state, but it is not clear whether he responded to the voluntary request.
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