The White House has waived executive privilege for nine aides to Joe Biden, opening them up to questioning as part of a congressional probe into the former president’s mental fitness.
President Donald Trump, 79, ordered an investigation earlier this month into claims that Biden’s aides covered up “mental decline” on the part of their boss and secretly ran the country on his behalf.
That brought the total to four Republican investigations into Biden, 82, who remains the GOP’s top scapegoat nearly six months after leaving office.
The former president for his part has blasted Republicans’ claims that he wasn’t the one making decisions in the Oval Office as “ridiculous and false,” calling the investigations a “distraction” from Trump’s deeply unpopular budget bill.
The White House has now decided to allow the GOP-led House Oversight Committee to interview nine former aides, Axios reported. A Biden spokesperson declined to comment on the decision.
Normally the aides’ private conversations with Biden would be protected under the doctrine of executive privilege, which gives the president authority to withhold certain information from Congress and the courts so that presidents and their advisers can discuss issues and express opinions freely.
Now that the White House has waived executive privilege, the aides must either answer questions about those conversations or challenge the waiver in court, Axios reported.
Most White Houses continue to assert executive privilege on behalf of their predecessors, regardless of political party, to protect the integrity of the executive branch, according to Axios.
But in late 2021, the Biden White House waived executive privilege for former Trump aides who were being investigated by Congress for their roles in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Trump’s deputy White House counsel has now sent one of Biden’s former advisers, Neera Tanden, a letter informing her that “President Trump has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the national interest,” Axios reported.
The letter cited “practice established under the Biden administration” when it comes to executive privilege and used language that closely mirrored the justifications given by the Biden White House in 2021.
“Could it be more than a little vindictive?” Mark J. Rozell, dean of George Mason University’s school of policy and government and an expert on executive privilege, told Axios.
A White House spokesperson accused the Biden administration of “intimidation and retribution” against Trump.
“The president is committed to providing the American people with answers about who exactly was running our country, and those responsible for this cover-up will have to answer for their actions,” spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement.
Four ex-staffers, including Tanden, had already agreed to testify under oath in closed-door interviews with the House Oversight Committee.
