22-05-2025
Can we prevent the possibility of a cover up about the president's health?
The cover-up is worse than the crime. That's the main lesson drawn from the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. President Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign from office (rather than be impeached) when he and his White House aides attempted to conceal their involvement in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters.
Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), vice chair of the Senate Watergate Committee, put it succinctly: 'It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble.'
Political scandals and cover-ups in Washington are nothing new. The latest example is in the just published, 'Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.' Co-written by well-respected journalists Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, the book charts the president's rapid and tragic decline in his mental acuity and the concerted efforts of a tightly knit coterie of aides to keep it all from the public.
This is not the first time a president's declining health was concealed from the public. President Woodrow Wilson suffered a severe stroke in 1919, early in his second term, which left him incapacitated. His wife Edith and his personal physician kept his condition secret, and his wife performed most of his official duties for the remainder of his term through 1921.
I have no intention of reading the Tapper-Thompson book, so I will not pass judgment either on its factual basis or the alleged severity of the president's condition. However, judging from the descriptions of the book in a May 15 Washington Post news story and a style section book review the same day, I think the evidence deserves to be taken seriously. This is not a fly-by Washington rumor dropping.
The release of the Tapper-Thompson book this week coincides with the House Oversight and Accountability Committee's announcement over the weekend that its hearings into President Biden's increasing use of autopens to sign pardons and issue new regulations will include the alleged cover-up of Biden's diminished mental capacity as president.
The addition to its agenda was prompted by Axios's release Saturday of the audiotapes containing the full five-hour interview in October 2023 of Biden by Special Counsel Robert Hur. Hur was investigating Biden's retention of classified documents in his private residence after leaving vice presidency in 2017. The audio interviews purportedly reinforce evidence of the president's diminishing cognitive capacity as president.
Hur asserted in his final report that Biden 'willfully' kept the classified documents. But the special counsel did not press charges, suggesting that a jury would find Biden 'a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.'
Assuming it's true that President Joe Biden was cognitively dysfunctional for the better part of his last two years in office, what if anything could have been done to avert his decision to run for reelection; and, more importantly, to terminate or at least curtail his remaining time in office?
We know that impeachment is not a valid option, even if Congress had a clue. It only applies to high crimes and misdemeanors. The Constitution's 25th amendment was designed in part to fill that gap by providing for suspension of service due to incapacity, or removal by two-thirds of both houses if the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet first finds the president unfit to continue in office. A very high bar indeed.
The one opening in the 25th amendment is that Congress may designate by law another entity to substitute for a Cabinet majority. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) has proposed a commission appointed by Congress to play that latter role and to designate qualified physicians to conduct full medical and physical exams of the president, which the president may or may not agree to. Congress could only take into account a president's refusal to be examined.
Perhaps not surprisingly Raskin introduced his bill in the 115th and 116th congresses (2017-2020) when Donald J. Trump was president, but not in the 117th or 118th congresses (2021-2024) when Joe Biden was president.
I have concluded that the only realistic way to pierce the iron dome of silence imposed by close aides is for one or more of them to break loose, for the good of the country, and speak truth to power — to bluntly tell the president why he cannot remain in office. A small group of respected friends from Congress might perform the same function, as happened with Nixon. After allowing a decent interval for reflection, the truth tellers would go public about their intervention. Cover-ups are not a solution. They can become huge problems, though, if allowed to fester.
Don Wolfensberger is a 28-year congressional staff veteran culminating as chief-of-staff of the House Rules Committee in 1995. He is author of, 'Congress and the People: Deliberative Democracy on Trial' (2000), and, 'Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays' (2018).
