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Neera Tanden, a prominent fixture in the Democratic establishment who served as director of the Biden White House Domestic Policy Council, appeared before the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday for hours-long, closed-door testimony concerning Biden's cognitive decline while in office, its cover-up, and its alleged exploitation behind the scenes.
Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, Tanden, a former Hillary Clinton aide, stuck with the narrative that Biden was mentally fit during his tenure, her opening statement showed. She also suggested that the controversial use of the autopen — a machine used to affix Biden's signature to a myriad of documents, which critics suspect was abused by unelected individuals to advance radical agendas and to circumvent the will of the American people — was above-board.
Tanden's spin notwithstanding, congressional investigators appear to have made headway on Tuesday thanks in part to some poetic justice.
Shield withdrawn
Despite protest from President Donald Trump and warnings from numerous critics about setting an undesirable precedent, Biden waived executive privilege in October 2021 and directed the National Archives to furnish congressional partisans with Trump-era White House records pertaining to the Jan. 6 protest at the U.S. Capitol.
Biden's counsel noted in a letter that asserting executive privilege was "not in the best interests of the United States."
University of Virginia School of Law professor Saikrishna Prakash, among the legal scholars at the time who understood this move could come back to bite Biden and his advisers, told the Associated Press, "Every time a president does something controversial, it becomes a building block for future presidents."
Trump stacked on this building block this week in the interest of helping along the Oversight Committee's investigation into the autopen scandal.
RELATED: Oversight Project over target: Dems seethe as facade of autopen presidency comes crashing down
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Gary Lawkowski, deputy counsel to Trump, noted in a letter Tuesday — which echoed the letter previously penned by Biden's counsel in 2021 — that in light of the "unique and extraordinary nature of the matters under investigation, President Trump has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the national interest, and therefore is not justified, with respect to particular subjects within the purview of the House Oversight Committee."
After highlighting Tanden's assessment of Biden's mental fitness and her knowledge of who exercised executive powers during his tenure, Lawkowski stressed:
The extraordinary events in this matter constitute exceptional circumstances warranting an accommodation to Congress. Evidence that aides to former President Biden concealed information regarding his fitness to exercise the powers of the President — and may have unconstitutionally exercised those powers themselves to aid in their concealment — implicates both Congress' constitutional and legislative powers.
Blaze News reached out to the White House for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Deprived of the shield of executive privilege and thus required to provide lawmakers with "unrestricted testimony," Tanden headed into what she later referred to as a "thorough process."
Tanden's admission
The Oversight Project, a government watchdog, revealed in early March that Biden's signature on numerous pardons, executive orders, and other documents of national consequence was likely machine-generated.
The watchdog group also highlighted possible evidence that the autopen was used on some of these documents without Biden's knowledge and while he was absent.
Around the time of the Oversight Project's initial reporting on the autopen, former White House stenographer Mike McCormick told Blaze News that he felt Tanden was a person who could have potentially taken advantage of her position in the White House with regard to the autopen.
RELATED: Don’t let the Biden autopen scandal become just another lame hearing
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McCormick, who neither worked in the White House with Biden after 2017 nor personally met Tanden, said she was often praised by the former president as a "super aggressive, very progressive" operative.
"She would be the person," the stenographer continued. "If she came into his White House knowing that [Biden] was debilitated, would she be the kind of person who would take advantage of that? I think she would."
While it remains unclear whether Tanden misused the autopen, McCormick was right on the money regarding her use of it.
After noting that she did not believe that the committee's investigation was a "worthy subject of oversight," Tanden told lawmakers in her opening statement that when serving as Biden's staff secretary, she was "responsible for handling the flow of documents to and from the president" and was "authorized to direct that autopen signatures be affixed to certain categories of documents."
McCormick was contacted for comment after news of the White House counsel's letter to Tanden broke. McCormick explained that Tanden's placement in the White House by Ron Klain, Biden's chief of staff from 2021 to 2023, was a grave mistake.
"[Klain's] decision to put Neera Tanden, an operative's operative, in charge the staff secretary's office is an extraordinary red flag that must be thoroughly investigated," McCormick told Blaze News.
'I think the American people want to know.'
When Ed Martin, the Department of Justice pardon attorney and director of the DOJ's Weaponization Working Group, announced his investigation last month into the questionable "autopen" pardons issued in the final days of the Biden White House, he indicated that a whistleblower had identified three people who controlled access to the autopen.
"They were making money off of it," Martin said.
Martin did not name the three suspects outright and made no reference to Tanden. He did, however, identify several "gatekeepers" who were "dominant characters in the White House," one of whom was Klain, whose office repeatedly hosted George Soros' son Alexander Soros and who returned to the fold last year amid Biden's debate preparation.
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Tanden told congressional investigators on Tuesday that as of May 2023, she no longer had "any responsibilities in connection with the use of the autopen."
Tanden further suggested that she had "no experience in the White House that would provide any reason to question [Biden's] command as president," adding that "he was in charge."
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the Oversight Committee, told the Washington Examiner that Tanden was "very forthcoming" and that the committee now has "a lot better understanding of how things worked in the Biden administration."
Next steps
Prior to the transcribed interview on Tuesday, Comer told reporters that Tanden's was the "first of many interviews with people that we believe were involved in the autopen scandal in the Biden administration. We have a lot of questions to ask each witness."
The transcripts will be released once all of the interviews are completed.
"I think the American people want to know. I think there is a huge level of curiosity in the press corps with respect to who was actually calling the shots in the Biden administration," said Comer.
Former deputy assistant to President Donald Trump and former Idaho Solicitor General Theodore Wold underscored the gravity of the matter in his testimony last week before the the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, noting that the "U.S. Constitution vests the executive power in a single person: the president."
Whether signing an executive order, issuing a pardon, or taking any other action permitted him by the Constitution, "the president's signature is itself the protection of democratic principles. When the president signs, he communicates his assent and endorsement of the action he takes," said Wold.
Wold noted that in numerous instances where the autopen was used, there was no indication "that anyone other than staff were making these decisions."
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