Former president Joe Biden’s White House physician, Kevin O’Connor, refused to testify Wednesday in a closed-door interview for the House GOP’s investigation into Biden’s mental decline, citing physician-patient privilege and his Fifth Amendment rights.
“Earlier today, Dr. Kevin O’Connor asserted the physician-patient privilege, as well as his right under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in declining to answer questions from the staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform regarding his service as Physician to the President during the Biden Administration,” O’Connor’s lawyers said in a statement reported by The Hill.
“A source clarified that O’Connor did not plead the fifth due only to doctor-patient privilege, and invoked his Fifth Amendment rights for every answer, aside from stating his name, even questions that would not have implicated doctor-patient privilege,” The Hill reported.
O’Connor gave Biden clean bills of health throughout the former president’s term. In November 2021, O’Connor called Biden “a healthy, vigorous, 78-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the president.” O’Connor reaffirmed that assessment in February 2023, writing that Biden “remains fit for duty, and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations.”
In February 2024, O’Connor declared Biden “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.
O’Connor’s refusal to testify comes as reports 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 last June 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.
House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) last month subpoenaed O’Connor to appear for the deposition as part of the committee’s probe into whether Biden’s aides covered up his mental decline while in office and whether the former president knew that documents were signed with an autopen signature.
The Trump administration formally waived executive privilege for O’Connor and eight other former Biden aides, clearing the way for their testimony. O’Connor repeatedly sought to delay the deposition.
“I don’t believe that [O’Connor] can hide behind doctor-patient confidentiality,” Comer told reporters ahead of Wednesday’s deposition, “because this is the president of the United States, and people expect the White House physician to be truthful and transparent about the president of the United States’ health.”
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