Andrew Bates, one of former President Joe Biden’s top communications aides, arrived on Capitol Hill Friday morning for a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee related to whether senior White House staff shielded the then-president’s mental decline from public scrutiny and usurped his constitutional powers during his final year in office.
Bates, Biden’s senior deputy press secretary who remained in the administration until it ended in January, declined to answer reporters’ questions as he entered the interview room shortly before 10 a.m. His testimony marks the latest turn in a sweeping investigation that has already ensnared 10 other former Biden officials and exposed a pattern of executive decision-making by proxy.
In an opening statement prepared ahead of his arrival, Bates told the Washington Examiner that “in the White House, it was universally understood that Joe Biden was in charge. That is completely consistent with my personal experience with the President.”
He chastised the committee, led by Chairman James Comer (R-KY), for “spending taxpayer dollars investigating Joe Biden” and blasted President Donald Trump, accusing the sitting president of “illegally trying to take over the Federal Reserve” and citing Trump’s acceptance of a $400 million jet from Qatar.
Despite Bates’s fixation on the current president, his arrival for the committee’s investigation came just hours after a Just The News report unveiled memos from Biden’s administration showing the former president’s aides in 2021 believed he had an obligation to physically sign presidential actions himself, including clemency matters and pardons.
Bates says he had infrequent interactions with Biden
Oversight Committee staff asked Bates, 38, about the frequency of his interactions with Biden over his four years in office.
“He would see President Biden in person a little over once a month, but this could be anything from travel, going with him to the Hill, or just seeing him in the hallway,” a person familiar with the interview said. “He also stated that President Biden met with the press team a couple of times a year.”
Bates’s meetings with Biden were also “not frequent,” according to the source.
The former aide also maintained his belief that Biden would have won re-election had he not dropped out of the race following a tumultuous early debate with Trump last summer. He claimed that Biden’s age, 82, was a “polling problem” but dismissed concerns about his cognitive abilities.
A committee spokesperson told multiple outlets that Bates was “part of the Biden cognitive decline cover-up” after the Washington Examiner published his opening remarks during his more than 4 hours of closed-door interviewing.
“He’s delusional,” a representative for the GOP majority on the committee told the New York Post. “His so-called opening statement — leaked in the middle of his transcribed interview and not even read at the time it was leaked — peddled the same fantasy he’s been trying to sell the American people.”
Bates was often placed in damage-control situations by then-press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre when Biden would cause a public stir, a trait that Bates exhibited Thursday during the hours of interviewing by committee staffers.
According to a source familiar with the matter, he was grilled about whether Biden used his influence to help Hunter Biden’s business ventures with the Ukrainian energy exploration and production company, Burisma, where the former first son was paid $1 million per year beginning in the spring of 2014 after he was elevated to the board of directors. Bates responded that the president “conducted himself honorably,” according to the source.
What is the committee looking for in its investigation?
At the center of the Oversight Committee’s inquiry is the Biden White House’s reliance on the autopen, a mechanical device that replicates the president’s signature. While the tool has traditionally been used for routine paperwork, Republicans say it was used to authorize mass clemency decisions affecting more than 2,500 federal inmates, even though Biden did not review individual cases.
A New York Times report earlier this summer revealed Biden instead approved a broad set of criteria for commutations, effectively outsourcing the final decisions to staff. Comer and other Republicans say that amounts to an unprecedented handoff of Article II powers — with no legal guarantee that Biden was fully aware of who he was pardoning.
Additionally, internal Justice Department emails from former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s tenure, obtained by the conservative Oversight Project and reviewed by the Washington Examiner, revealed that senior DOJ official Bradley Weinsheimer warned the White House that its public claims about the pardons were misleading. He flagged that vague clemency language could lead to the release of violent felons, directly contradicting Biden’s narrative that only nonviolent drug offenders were affected.
Bates was the 11th former official to be interviewed and the ninth to do so voluntarily. In a June letter, Comer wrote that Bates had acted as “a first line of defense” for Biden and was one of the most prominent figures publicly dismissing concerns about the president’s health and cognitive function.
“You were one of the most prominent public-facing defenders of former President Biden’s mental acuity,” Comer wrote. “The scope of your responsibilities — both official and otherwise — and personal interactions within the Oval Office cannot go without investigation.”
While most former aides have remained silent entering and exiting the committee’s meeting room, Bates said on the way out: “I want to know why Ghislaine Maxwell is in minimum security,” referring to the convicted sex trafficker’s recent move from a facility in Tallahassee to the Bryan Federal Prison Camp in Texas.
The Trump administration has not explained the reason for the transfer, though it occurred on Aug. 1, days after Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche engaged in two days of interviews with her in response to outrage from the lack of additional Jeffrey Epstein-related file releases from the Justice Department. Comer is also leading an investigation into Epstein and Maxwell, which released additional Epstein-related materials earlier this week that were given to the committee by the DOJ.
The Bates interview follows a lengthy transcribed interview with Ian Sams, another former Biden spokesman who admitted to meeting Biden in person only twice during his two-year tenure. Comer has framed such sparse contact as evidence of the former president’s insulation, pointing to what he describes as a “wall of staff” between Biden and major executive decisions.
Biden, who was most recently seen with a forehead bandage after he had cancer lesions removed this week, has forcefully denied claims of diminished involvement, telling the New York Times earlier this summer, “I made every decision.” He acknowledged hand-signing just one clemency order, a pardon for his son Hunter Biden, and defended the use of the autopen as a time-saving tool given the high volume of warrants.
Still ahead are transcribed interviews with former chief of staff Jeff Zients and Jean-Pierre, as House investigators continue to piece together what Comer calls “a coordinated effort to preserve power without presidential oversight.”
EX-BIDEN OFFICIALS SIT FOR SENATE INTERVIEWS ON APPARENT MENTAL DECLINE
The House inquiry parallels a similar effort by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who has privately interviewed more than a half-dozen Cabinet members as part of the Senate’s investigation. Johnson has said the findings so far include “nothing unexpected” but suggested more names may be added to the witness list as new records emerge.
Comer has said he plans to release a report detailing the findings from his slate of interviews once they are complete, though he has not ruled out calling in additional figures in the former president’s orbit.
