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, an ardent defender of Biden who stayed 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 sign presidential actions, including clemency matters and pardons.
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, 82, did not review individual cases.
A New York Times report earlier this summer said 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, who was senior deputy press secretary, is 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.”
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 press secretary Karine 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.
