AP Images Joe Biden
Missouri AG to DOJ: Who Ran the Country During Biden’s Term? If Staffers, Orders Were “Null and Void”
GOP Attorney General Andrew Bailey of Missouri has asked the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate President Joe Biden’s “mental capacity” and find out who was running the country during the last four years.
In a letter to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Bailey wrote that the administration’s trek into the fever swamps of the Left suggest that Biden’s staffers could have used the elderly president’s “incapacity” to pursue their radical agenda.
If so, then Biden’s orders and pardons were “unconstitutional and legally void,” he wrote on X.
Bailey’s letter coincides with the release of documents signed by Biden. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project found only one with a live signature — his letter in which he quit the presidential race — with the rest being autopenned.
If true, then Bailey is right. Few if any of the orders were lawful.
Exploiting Incapacity
“It appears staffers and officers in the Biden administration may have exploited Biden’s incapacity so they could issue orders without an accountable President of sound mind approving them,” Bailey wrote:
That would explain why the Biden administration’s orders were aggressively much farther to the left than any previous President. If in fact Biden’s staffers were exploiting his mental decline, those orders are null and void.
Bailey explained that the states must know because “the Biden White House purported to vacate the death sentences of several convicted murderers who committed their crimes in Missouri.”
He also noted that Biden dropped out of the race “because of his obvious decline,” which showed so clearly in his calamitous debate with then GOP candidate Donald Trump. Indeed, that debate was a set-up to force Biden to quit the race.
Mike Johnson’s Assessment
As well, Bailey pointed to GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson’s assessment of Biden.
Speaking to Bari Weiss of The Free Press in January, Johnson said he learned firsthand that Biden wasn’t all there, and hadn’t been for some time.
“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 told Weiss.
The Journal had published a story that called Biden “diminished” and claimed “aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted.”
White House staffers kept Johnson away from Biden, and when the two finally met, Johnson was astonished.
Meeting with Biden privately, Johnson asked the elderly president 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.
“I didn’t do that,” a “stunned” Biden said.
“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.
“I said, no you’re not, sir,” Johnson remembered:
“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.”
Biden “genuinely did not know what he had signed,” he told Weiss.
Robert Hur & Lindy Li
Bailey also noted that special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Biden’s improperly storing classified documents at his home, said he couldn’t prosecute Biden because the jury would see him as “‘elderly man with a poor memory’ who could not even remember when he was Vice President or, even within several years, when his son passed away.”
Asked Bailey:
“If Biden could not even form a mens rea for allegedly criminal activity (a low bar), how can anyone have confidence he had the capacity to make decisions as the chief executive of the United States?”
Mens rea means “guilty mind,” or the “state of mind statutorily required in order to convict a particular defendant of a particular crime,” as the Cornell Law School website explains.
“There are profound reasons to suspect that Biden’s staff and political allies exploited his mental decline to issue purported presidential orders without his knowing approval,” Bailey wrote. “Those closest” to the frail president “appear to have worked to hide Biden’s decline so they could retain influence they would not otherwise have had.”
Democratic National Committee fundraiser Lindy Li said Biden wasn’t in charge, Bailey observed. “‘The people who ran our country for the last four years’ were his staff, his wife, and his son Hunter Biden.”
“Finally,” Bailey wrote, “there is the streak of extraordinarily far-left orders purportedly issued by Biden. Just the extraordinary orders since November include”:
- Vacating the death sentences of nearly all persons sentenced to the ultimate punishment,
- Granting his son Hunter Biden, a blanket pardon going back more than 10 years, despite previously promising he would not do so, and
- Endorsing the legally frivolous theory that the Equal Rights Amendment was timely ratified.
“Indeed, apparently in reliance on far-left groups, Biden pardoned or commuted the sentences of 2,500 individuals whom he described as “non-violent” — but he gave clemency to people like Adrian Peeler, who killed a mother and her 8-year-old child. This, plus an ocean of other far-left orders that Biden purportedly issued — but never supported before his mental decline — strongly suggest exploitation by staffers and officials who wanted to promulgate far-left policies without any accountability or democratic legitimacy.”
Bailey wrote that if a person signing a document “lacks mental capacity,” then that “document is void, ab initio,” or “from the beginning.”
“Who has been running the country for the last few years?” Bailey asked. “I fear that Mr. Biden, while he held the office of President, did so in name only and was a mere puppet for far-left, unelected staffers. The people deserve to know the truth.”
Oversight Project: Curious Signatures
Bailey’s inquiry leads to the Oversight Project’s findings.
The project collected every document it could find with Biden’s signature, and found that every one except his announcement that he had quit the presidential race, “used the same autopen signature.”
Pointing to Johnson’s story about his meeting with Biden, the project asked who signed the LNG order.
“For investigators to determine whether then-President Biden actually ordered the signature of relevant legal documents, or if he even had the mental capacity to, they must first determine who controlled the autopen and what checks there were in place,” the project observed.
Published with permission of thenewamerican.com