WASHINGTON — Former first lady Jill Biden should “speak up about what she saw” regarding her husband’s cognitive decline while in office, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday — suggesting that the Biden matriarch should be called to testify before Congress.
“Frankly, the former first lady should certainly speak up about what she saw in regards to her husband and when she saw it, and what she knew,” Leavitt told reporters at her regular press briefing.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has sought interviews with four ex-Biden aides as well as former White House physician Kevin O’Connor to discuss efforts to hide the 46th president’s mental and physical deterioration.
“Jill Biden was certainly complicit in that cover-up. There are documentation, video evidence of her clearly shielding her husband away from the camera,” Leavitt said.
“They were just on ‘The View’ [May 8]. She was saying everything is fine. She’s still lying to the American people.”
Biden’s mental decline made headlines last week with the publication of the new book “Original Sin,” which featured quotes from former White House aides admitting that they had concerns about Biden’s capability for years, but didn’t make their fears public.
“The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us. And they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day,” Jill Biden said on “The View” earlier this month, calling comparisons to Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth “very hurtful” and denying that she constructed a “cocoon” around her husband.
“I was with Joe day and night. I saw him more than any other person. I woke up with him, I went to bed at night with him, so I saw him all throughout the day,” the former first lady said at the time. “And I did not create a cocoon around him. I mean, you saw him in the Oval Office, you saw him making speeches. He wasn’t hiding somewhere, I didn’t have him sequestered in some place. I mean that’s ridiculous!”
“Original Sin” co-authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson write that Jill Biden “saw herself first and foremost as [Joe’s] defender … [she was] one of the chief supporters of the president’s decision to run for reelection, and one of the chief deniers of his deterioration.”
Lawyers for the former aides — Neera Tanden, Anthony Bernal, Annie Tomasini, Ashley Williams — as well as an attorney for O’Connor, have been in contact with the Oversight panel but subpoenas remain a possibility if they refuse to talk.
On May 18, Biden’s office announced the former president had been diagnosed with an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones, leading many to question how his doctor didn’t catch the disease earlier
A rep for the former president did not immediately respond to an inquiry from The Post.
