On June 18, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the concealment of former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. This hearing will start to shed a congressional light on the apparent misuse of the presidential autopen. According to President Donald Trump’s June 4, memorandum, “This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history.”
The chief speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, Kenneth Khachigian, published an article on May 30 in The Wall Street Journal, which concludes that Americans have been “cynically hoodwinked,” so much so that “Mr. Biden’s using an autopen”—assuming he actually knew about it—“and Attorney General [Merrick] Garland’s declining to release the audio of the president’s interview with Robert Hur are small potatoes amid this vast whitewash of history.”
Small potatoes amid a vast whitewash of false narratives by “domestic enemies” need to be exposed to the public—because those small potatoes will lead to bigger potatoes of deceit.
As Khachigian aptly points out: “Each day that an investigation is delayed, staffers in the Biden White House and on the Biden and Harris Campaigns—along with members of Mr. Biden’s administration and Democratic Party operatives—might be destroying records, replacing cellphones and following Hillary Clinton’s example by wiping their email servers.”
The good news is Justice Department Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, according to one article, “is looking into the electronic signatures on the former president’s last-minute pardons ‘because the American people deserve answers.’”
The Senate Judiciary Committee and Martin need to shed a bright light on the truth for the American people. Any person who committed a crime in the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive impairment should be prosecuted.
One crime that needs to be investigated is who, by name, directed that Biden’s autopen signature be affixed to pardons without the president’s full knowledge. Whoever did that violated 18 U.S. Code §912, which makes it a crime whenever anyone “pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States.”
In any event, “We the People” deserve to know what happened in our White House during the Biden administration. We have a right to know who was running the country when Biden was so clearly not up to the task. We have a right to know who ruled in the president’s stead so that our elected leaders can take steps to prevent it from happening again.
Speaking of taking steps to prevent bad things from happening again, as we begin our yearlong celebration of the 250th birthday of our nation, July 4, 1776, it is fitting to acknowledge that 250 years ago this year, on July 6, 1775, our Continental Congress issued its lesser-known “Declaration on the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.”
That 1775 declaration concluded: “The arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard … employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live slaves.”
Five years ago, in an article titled “1775 Declaration Foreshadowed Current Need for Unity,” I explained how Thomas Jefferson and his co-authors of the 1775 declaration observed that “schemes have been formed to excite domestic enemies against us.” In that context, our forefathers declared: “We are reduced to the alternative of chusing an unconditional submission to the tyranny of irritated ministers, or resistance by force. — The latter is our choice. — We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery.”
In the past five years, we have witnessed unprecedented “schemes … to excite domestic enemies against us,” one of which Trump described on May 30, in connection with the Biden White House, which so obviously lacked a real leader: “There was a lot of dishonesty … I think the autopen is going to become one of the great scandals of all time.”
The autopen scandal was initially brought to light by a nonprofit team of professional truth-seekers, formerly part of The Heritage Foundation and now its own nonprofit entity known as “The Oversight Project: It’s Your Government.” In the interest of full disclosure, I am honored now to serve as a “distinguished constitutional fellow” for this team.
The Oversight Project also played a key role in forcing the recent release of the audiotapes of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur, the previously released transcript of which failed to disclose the extent of Biden’s cognitive inabilities. Hur’s transcript hardly tells the whole story, concluding only that the president was an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
In a world that has come to elevate “political narratives” above the truth, we desperately need private sector teams of professionals like those in The Oversight Project, committed to what the U.S. Army Inspector General School calls “the dogged pursuit of the truth.” Only the truth can restore the American people’s faith, trust, and confidence in their government.
We the people deserve to know the truth. In order to know and understand the truth, we need to know which “live bodies” were behind the autopen scandal, lurking in the shadows of the Biden White House.
After all, it’s our government.
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