President Donald Trump has not directed his administration to declassify documents related to former President Joe Biden’s health and an alleged ‘cover-up’ of the 46th president’s slipping mental acuity while commander in chief, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday.
‘The president can declassify anything that he wants. Has he looked to see if there are any records here that would contradict what we’ve been told about Joe Biden’s decline?’ Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked Leavitt during a press briefing Thursday.
‘He has not directed anyone, to my knowledge, to look into that,’ Leavitt responded. ‘But, surely, I can ask him if he intends to.’
Biden’s health is back in the national spotlight after audio recordings of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur were released Friday. The recordings showed the former president tripping over his words, slurring sentences, taking long pauses between answers and struggling to remember key moments in his life, including the year his son Beau Biden died of cancer.
Hur led an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents after Biden’s departure as vice president during the Obama administration. Hur announced in February 2024 he would not recommend criminal charges against Biden for possessing classified materials after his vice presidency, saying Biden is ‘a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’
Biden’s office revealed Sunday the former president was battling an ‘aggressive’ prostate cancer that had metastasized.
After the election cycle, a handful of books documenting the 2024 election cycle and Biden’s apparent health decline have hit store shelves claiming that Biden staffers were aware of and fretted about the president’s mental decline, but publicly promoted him as physically and mentally fit to serve as president. Fox News Digital has extensively covered concerns about Biden’s mental acuity and health dating back to the 2020 election cycle.
‘I think the president has spoken on this pretty extensively,’ Leavitt added at the news conference. ‘And I have spoken about it extensively from this podium as well, how it was truly one of the worst political scandals this country has ever seen, that the previous administration covered up the decline in the former president’s mental and physical ability. And it’s now all coming out. But the American people knew the truth, and that’s one of the many reasons why President Trump won the election on Nov. 5.’
Doocy asked Leavitt specifically about the Biden administration’s use of an autopen, which Trump has argued was used by Biden staffers to sign official White House documents without Biden’s approval.
‘Specifically, (Trump) talks about the autopen. He thinks that staffers were using this autopen. Is there some kind of, like a badge, that you have to swipe to use an autopen? Is there a record of that?’ Doocy asked.
‘I can tell you here at this White House, the president signs any document that has legal implications,’ Leavitt responded. ‘The president signs every executive order. He signs every proclamation. He signs pretty much every document that is needed for the president’s signature, with the exception of maybe some letters to children. From what we have heard and seen, that was not the case in the previous administration. And the president is raising good questions that are worth looking into.’
Autopen signatures are automatically produced by a machine, as opposed to an authentic, handwritten signature.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project first investigated the Biden administration’s use of an autopen earlier this year and found that the same signature was on a bevvy of executive orders and other official documents, while Biden’s signature on the document announcing his departure from the 2024 race varied from the apparent machine-produced signature.