OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
1:55 PM – Saturday, September 13, 2025
Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre testified before the House Oversight Committee as part of an investigation into former President Joe Biden’s physical and cognitive fitness while in office.
Jean-Pierre did not speak to reporters before or after the five-hour interview on Capitol Hill.
She told the committee that “she did not see a change in Biden’s competency from 2009 to 2025,” according to a source familiar with the interview.
“She did acknowledge President Biden is not the same speaker he was when she met him,” the source noted. However, “she does not know why his speaking changed and never asked him.”
The former Biden press secretary publicly defended Biden’s June 2024 debate against President Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential election. During the debate, Trump famously responded to an incoherent comment from the then-president, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”
Jean-Pierre told reporters at a press briefing following the debate that Biden was “as sharp as ever.”
According to the anonymous source, Jean-Pierre said she was told by “senior staff that President Biden has a cold.”
During her two years working for the Biden administration, she also called online videos critical of Biden’s mental acuity “cheap fakes.”
Citing the “cheap fakes” comment at the interview, Jean-Pierre said that this talking point “appeared as a talking point in her binder, but she does not know specifically who added it.”
Jean-Pierre told investigators that “various advisors” added talking points into her press briefing binder, but talking points related specifically to Biden’s health and mental fitness “were handled exclusively at the senior level,” the source said.
Jean-Pierre’s tenure as White House press secretary began when she replaced former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki in 2022 and ended when Biden’s term came to a close in early 2025. She announced shortly after leaving her post that she would also be leaving the Democrat party to become an Independent. Around that time, she broke the news about her new book detailing her time working under the Biden administration.
“Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines” is set to be published on October 21, 2025. Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (D-Ky.) said that Jean-Pierre was intentionally one of the last people to be interviewed for the investigation due to the upcoming memoir.
“We believe that she’s written some things in the book that are gonna be of interest to our entire investigation,” Comer told reporters.
The investigation was initiated by the Trump administration after mounting evidence released by the Oversight Project suggested that the Biden White House used the autopen to grant clemency on Biden’s behalf, but without his approval.
Biden’s White House physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, had to be subpoenaed by the committee to appear for questioning. He invoked the Fifth Amendment to decline to comment on the state of the former president’s health.
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