U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) confirmed on Friday what anyone who has watched President Joe Biden since before he became president knows, and what most Americans have surely suspected for some time.
The man who took the oath of office on January 20, 2021 hasn’t been running the country.
Instead, a handful of aides have done so, most likely led by First Lady “Dr.” Jill Biden and White House Chief of Staff Jeffrey Zients.
Johnson’s revelation came in a story about a private meeting with Biden, during which the elderly president repeatedly claimed he did not sign an executive order that he did, in fact, sign.
National Security Concerns
During an interview, Bari Weiss of The Free Press asked Johnson why he considered Biden the worst president ever, “worse even than James Buchanan.”
Johnson explained that he feels sorry for Biden in some way because he’s in his “twilight years” and he “obviously has not been in charge for some time.”
And Johnson didn’t hear that truth secondhand. He saw it up close and personal during a meeting.
“I know this by personal observation, and now the whole world knows it, and it’s been very … concerning to me over the last, you know, year and a half since I’ve had this position. … It’s public now because The Wall Street Journal got it, and put it on the front page,” he continued.
In December, a Journal headline put it this way: “How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge: Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.”
Aides kept Biden away from important meetings with top officials which “were infrequent or grew less frequent.” At times, aides stood in for Biden.
Johnson explained that he had great trouble meeting with the president when he became speaker. He recounted an instance from the third week of January 2024.
“There were all sorts of big national security concerns … and I started requesting a meeting with the president because, you know, I’m kind of old school, I’m a constitutional law guy,” Johnson said. “The speaker of the house should be able to talk to the president, especially in times of great national interest and … calamity.”
But Biden’s aides tried to block Johnson from meeting Biden.
“They wouldn’t let me meet with him, and his staff kept giving me excuses. This went on for like eight or nine weeks,” Johnson said.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Speaker,” aides told Johnson. “He doesn’t have time.”
“What are you talking about?” Johnson told Weiss. “I’m second in line of the presidency. He has time. I need to talk to him.”
The stonewalling pushed Johnson into a corner, and so he told the Capitol Hill press corps that Biden “is not being allowed to meet with the speaker.”
“So [the press] started putting pressure on [the aides]. Long story short, they finally relented [and] invited me to the White House,” Johnson continued:
I show up and I realize it’s actually an ambush, because it’s not just me and the president. It’s also Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem [Jeffries] … the CIA director, everybody. … So I walked into the Oval [Office] and, ah, I know what this is, … they’re going to hot-box the speaker on Ukraine funding.
But Biden turned the tables on the praetorian guard. He grabbed Johnson’s arm and told aides that he and Johnson “need a couple of minutes together.”
“Will y’all just leave us alone?” Biden asked. Johnson continued, “and I looked up on the faces of some of the staff standing around the wall and they’re like, ‘No, he did it.’”
At that, aides left the room, and “he and I are standing awkwardly in the middle of the Oval Office.”
Johnson told Biden that he had some important national security matters to discuss. But first he asked Biden why he paused liquid natural gas exports to Europe, a major concern for Johnson’s constituents. LNG is a major export from Louisiana and the Gulf Coast.
Johnson told Biden that American allies greatly demand LNG, and “you’re fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine because they got to get their gas from him.”
“I didn’t do that,” a “stunned” Biden said.
Continued Johnson:
I said, Mr. President, yes you did. It was an executive order, like you know, three weeks ago. And he goes, “No I didn’t do that.” He’s arguing with me. I said, Mr. President, respectfully, could I go out here and ask your secretary to print it out and we’ll read it together? You definitely did that.
Biden told Johnson that he signed an order to study the effects of LNG. However, Johnson told Weiss:
I said, no you’re not, sir. You paused it. I know. I have the terminal, the export terminal, in my state,. I talked to those people this morning. This is doing massive damage to our economy, national security.
It dawned on Johnson that Biden wasn’t lying, but instead “genuinely did not know what he had signed.”
“I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, we’re in serious trouble,” Johnson said:
Who is running the country? Like, I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know.
“Dr.” Jill Biden and a “group of people” are probably in charge, Johnson concluded.
Out of It for Four Years
Johnson’s account comports not only with the Journal’s detailed account, but also with those in The New York Times and a secretly recorded video of a top Biden aide.
Robert P. Silvers, under secretary of policy at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, told a reporter from O’Keefe Media Group (OMG) that Biden had “degraded mental faculties.”
In some meetings, he said, Biden is “on it,” but in others “it’s a blank. I think his body has deteriorated faster than his mind,” Silvers said:
There’s something going on. Like, he’s not the guy he was when he took office four years ago.
A National Security Council staff member told an OMG reporter that Biden “can’t say a sentence.”
In July, former NBC talker Chuck Todd revealed that a Cabinet official told him two years ago that Biden couldn’t run again “like this.”