Anthony Bernal refused to answer when asked ‘Was Joe Biden fit to exercise the duties of the president?’
Former first lady Jill Biden’s “work husband” and former chief of staff, Anthony Bernal, refused to testify during a Wednesday interview for the House GOP’s probe into former president Joe Biden’s mental decline, making him the second ex-White House aide to plead the Fifth in the investigation.
House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) said he asked Bernal two questions, both of which the former aide refused to answer: “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?”
Bernal was a particularly close aide to the Bidens, with the former first lady describing their relationship as a “work marriage,” New York Times reporter Katie Rogers wrote in her February 2024 book, American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden. He also traveled with the first family on vacations and remained a trusted adviser, even after the 46th president’s disastrous June 2024 debate with President Donald Trump. That proximity gave him “untouchable” status, a former White House official told the New York Post last year.
Bernal’s refusal to testify solidifies a pattern in the GOP probe: The former president’s White House doctor, Kevin O’Connor, also invoked his Fifth Amendment right as well as physician-patient privilege during a closed-door July 9 interview.
O’Connor gave Biden clean bills of health throughout his term, calling him “a healthy, vigorous, 78-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the president” in November 2021. Four months before Biden’s debate with Trump, O’Connor declared the then-president “fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency,” even though he had not administered “a cognitive test because he ‘did not believe the science required him to,'” according to Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book Original Sin.
Bernal and O’Connor’s refusal to testify follows numerous reports that have shed light on Biden’s mental and physical decline.
Biden appeared “extremely exhausted” and “unaware of what was happening in his own campaign” ahead of his debate with Trump, longtime Biden aide Ron Klain said, according to Chris Whipple’s recent book Uncharted. Klain had to cut short the two mock debates he had organized for Biden and was “struck by how out of touch with American politics” the then-president was.
“At one point … Biden wanders out in the middle of the session, he wanders out to the pool, collapses into a lounge chair, and falls sound asleep,” Whipple told Fox News host Jesse Watters.
Comer subpoenaed Bernal and O’Connor last month after the Trump administration waived their executive privilege, along with seven other Biden aides.
“It’s no surprise that Anthony Bernal is pleading the Fifth Amendment to shield himself from criminal liability,” Comer said Wednesday in a statement. “I believe the American people are concerned. 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.”
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