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WASHINGTON — Jill Biden’s “work husband” Anthony Bernal became the second former White House aide to take the Fifth Amendment when hauled before a congressional committee Wednesday to answer questions about the 46th president’s cognitive decline.
Bernal — who, like Joe Biden’s former personal physician Kevin O’Connor, appeared for a deposition — invoked his right against self-incrimination and departed without taking reporter questions.
Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said he only got to ask two questions of the Biden family confidant: “Was Joe Biden fit to exercise the duties of the president?” and “Did any unelected official or family member execute the duties of the presidency?”
“I think that the American people are concerned,” Comer added. “They’re concerned that there were people making decisions in the White House that were not only unelected but no one to this day knows who they were.”
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said Bernal’s hasty retreat implicates him in “corruption at the highest level.”
“If you cannot, say, answer a simple question about Joe Biden’s capabilities, then that further demonstrates that he was not in charge of his administration,” Donalds told reporters.
“And if he was not in charge of his administration, then every order, every bill that was signed, every memorandum, as far as I’m concerned, are null and void.”
Donalds, who is running for governor of Florida next year, added that Jill Biden herself should “come in here and answer questions” after her deputy declined to do so.
The Oversight chairman noted that his panel would continue with its transcribed interviews and depositions of key Biden White House aides to determine the scale of the purported cover-up of the president’s mental decline, as well as potential “illegal use of the autopen” to grant pardons.
