WASHINGTON — Former Biden White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted to House lawmakers Friday she saw no signs of diminished mental acuity from the 46th president — but acknowledged she got guidance on what to say about his condition from top White House officials.
Over nearly six hours of testimony, Jean-Pierre claimed — incredibly — that “she did not see a change in Biden’s competency from 2009 to 2025,” according to a source familiar with the interview by the House Oversight Committee.
While the ex-White House spokesperson acknowledged Biden, now 82, was”not the same speaker he was when she met him,” Jean-Pierre couldn’t attribute a reason for the “speaking change,” the source added.
Jean-Pierre — who has since departed the Democratic Party and is writing a tell-all book about the “broken” administration she served — infamously accused The Post and other outlets in June 2024 of promoting “cheap fakes” by reporting on video footage of Biden wandering away and looking confused during events with world leaders and former President Barack Obama.
The ex-press secretary told her interrogators Friday the “cheap fakes” line was added to the binder she used at every White House briefing — but she does not know who specifically put it in there, per the person familiar with the interview.
In addition, Jean-Pierre acknowledged that talking points were given to her by “various advisers, but those relating to President Biden’s health and mental acuity were handled exclusively at the senior level,” the source went on.
“We intentionally wanted Jean-Pierre to be one of the last people we bring in,” Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters ahead of the interview. “We believe that she’s written some things in the book that are gonna be of interest to our entire investigation.”
Jean-Pierre, who declined to answer reporter questions before the interview,”stated that she never spoke to anyone in the White House who was personally concerned about President Biden’s health,” the source familiar also said.
At the same time, Jean-Pierre did not specify any moments — either as president or vice president — when she had heard Biden stutter, the common excuse put forward by the Democrat’s allies for his repeated verbal slips.
During her tenure as press secretary, Jean-Pierre frequently lashed out at detractors and even members of the media who reported on the former president’s oral gaffes and physical stumbles, once memorably scolding the press during Biden’s final year in the Oval Office that he “doesn’t need a cognitive test.”
“That is not my assessment, that is the assessment of the president’s doctor, that is also the assessment of his neurologist,” Jean-Pierre told reporters in February 2024.
“He passes a cognitive test every day — every day — as he moves from one topic to another topic, understanding the granular level of these topics,” she added.
Biden’s personal physician Kevin O’Connor — who pled the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions that could be incriminating before the Oversight Committee in July — never took questions from reporters about the president’s health, opting instead to release brief, written reports on Biden’s annual physicals.
None of those tests included neuro-cognitive work.
The ex-president, now 82, also did not submit to the brief Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a two-minute screening comprising around 30 questions to test for signs of dementia.
Just days before the Democratic incumbent abandoned his 2024 re-election campaign, O’Connor insisted to The Post in his only interview with a media outlet to that point that the president’s mental fitness was “excellent.”
Ex-colleagues previously dished that fellow spokesman Andrew Bates was “used” by Jean-Pierre to “attack” journalists in the final months of Biden’s term and to kill stories about a publicist she used for self-promotion while still in the White House.
Reports on the relationship only broke after Jean-Pierre and others left the Biden White House.
New emails first reported by The Post revealed that the sweeping use of the presidential autopen to commute sentences for non-violent offenders caught senior officials at the Department of Justice and even the White House off guard — with Biden appearing to only orally approve some pardons before the autopen signature was affixed.
Comer told reporters before his sitdown with Jean-Pierre that the messages “suggest that there was a process that the Biden administration was using to use the autopen that was in direct conflict with the Merrick Garland Department of Justice.”
“There are inconsistencies with what people have testified to us in these depositions and what we are seeing from these emails as far as the process that the Biden administration used for the autopen,” he added.
https://nypost.com/2025/09/12/us-news/ex-white-house-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-arrives-for-grilling-on-biden-cognitive-decline-by-house-panel/
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