From left: Former President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images; Aaron J. Thornton/Getty Images; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Fox News Digital has written extensively dating back to the 2020 presidential campaign about Biden's cognitive decline and his inner circle’s role in covering it up.
BIDEN’S CABINET OFFICIALS STAND BY STATEMENTS OF SUPPORT AS TERM DRAWS TO A CLOSE
Becerra's statement stood in marked contrast to the silence emanating from the rest of his former colleagues. Fox News Digital reached out to 26 Biden administration officials with cabinet-level positions — from former Vice President Kamala Harris to former Chief of Staff Jeff Zients — asking whether they still believe that Biden was fit to serve as president, or whether they've had a change of heart amid the cascade of damning evidence and anecdotes portraying a mental decline.
If a majority of those cabinet-level officials believed Biden to be unable to perform his duties, they could have attempted to remove him from office through the 25th Amendment. Instead, those officials repeatedly said at the time that Biden was competent and in command.
Biden's debate against Trump in 2024 opened the floodgates to criticisms over his mental acuity. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images; Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Concerns over Biden's mental acuity had simmered for years among conservatives, but it wasn't until the June 2024 presidential debate that traditional Democrat allies and media outlets began questioning Biden's health and openly called for him to drop out of the race.
Despite mounting concerns, members of Biden's cabinet vowed he was of sound health and mind.
Then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement in September 2024, for example, that he has "full confidence in President Biden’s ability to carry out his job."
BIDEN'S PRESIDENCY WILL BE REMEMBERED AS THE ‘MAN THAT WAS TOO OLD,’ SAYS BYRON YORK
"As I’ve said before, I come fully prepared for my meetings with President Biden, knowing his questions will be detail-oriented, probing, and exacting," he said. "In our exchanges, the President always draws upon our prior conversations and past events in analyzing the issues and reaching his conclusions."
Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo previously described former President Joe Biden as "one of the most accomplished presidents in American history." (Nathan Howard/Reuters)
Since Biden's exit from the White House in January, political journalists have published a handful of books arguing that, behind the scenes of the administration, staffers were concerned about Biden's health.
"Biden's physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn't do so until after the election," according to a new book written by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again."
"Given Biden's age, (his physician Kevin O'Connor) also privately said that if he had another bad fall, a wheelchair might be necessary for what could be a difficult recovery," the authors wrote.
Audio from then-President Joe Biden's interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur reveals that he, and not the special counsel, brought up Beau Biden's death. (Getty Images)
Hur led an investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents after Biden's departure as vice president during the Obama administration. The then-special counsel 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."
Hur came under fire from Biden, Harris and other Democrats in 2024 for suggesting in the report that Biden could not remember when his son Beau died. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015.
In February 2024, following the release of the report, Biden shot back at Hur: "There’s some attention paid to some language in the report about my recollection of events. There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that?"
BIDEN STRUGGLES WITH WORDS, KEY MEMORIES IN LEAKED AUDIO FROM SPECIAL COUNSEL HUR INTERVIEW
Harris called the report "gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate."
The recently released audio recordings show it was Biden who brought up his son and could not remember when Beau died.
"So, during this time when you were living at Chain Bridge Road and there were documents relating to the Penn Biden Center, or the Biden Institute, or the Cancer Moonshot or your book, where did you keep papers that related to those things that you were actively working on?" Hur asked Biden in the interview.
"Well, um … I, I, I, I, I don't know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?" Biden responded.
"Yes, sir," Hur said.
"Remember, in this timeframe, my son is either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the president," Biden continued. "I'm not — and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she (Hillary Clinton) had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn't, I hadn't, at this point — even though I'm at Penn, I hadn't walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I'd be running for president. And, and so what was happening, though — what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th."
Others present during the interview responded that Beau Biden died in 2015.
President Donald Trump has called an alleged cover-up of former President Joe Biden's health a "scandal" and has argued that White House staffers were controlling the administration through the use of an autopen. (Melina Mara/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump has called an alleged cover-up of Biden's health a "scandal" and has argued that White House staffers were controlling the administration through the use of an autopen.
WHAT IS AN AUTOPEN? THE SIGNING DEVICE AT THE HEART OF TRUMP'S ATTACKS ON BIDEN PARDONS
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 in 2025 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.
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"Whoever had control of the 'AUTOPEN' is looking to be a bigger and bigger scandal by the moment," Trump posted to Truth Social in May.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/lone-biden-official-breaks-silence-cognitive-decline-cabinet-stays-mute