Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) revealed Thursday he sought congressional testimony from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson for a hearing later this month on former President Joe Biden’s mental acuity while in office.
The pair are authors of Original Sin, a recently published book with revelations about the former president’s alleged cognitive decline in the White House and the effort by those in Biden’s orbit to orchestrate a “cover-up.”
“We reached out to Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, and they were otherwise occupied,” Cornyn told reporters.
Neither reporter responded to a request for comment.
Cornyn said the witness list for the hearing, which he is holding on June 18 through the Senate Judiciary Committee with fellow panel member Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), is a “work in progress.”
“Amazingly enough, some people don’t want to testify,” he added. “We’re going to be more focused on some of the oversight and constitutional issues.”
TRUMP ORDERS VAST INVESTIGATION INTO BIDEN HEALTH COVER-UP AND WHO RAN THE WHITE HOUSE
The hearing’s organizers say it’s to examine who was “running the country” amid GOP allegations Biden was only loosely in charge during his final months in office. Cornyn said he’ll seek to answer questions like who ran the presidency “when the president’s mentally incompetent” and “in terms of continuity of government, who’s got the nuclear codes?”
The hearing will set the stage for several other Biden-focused investigations already in motion by Republicans, including those organized by the House Oversight Committee, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), and the Department of Justice. The latter investigation was initiated Wednesday by an executive order from President Donald Trump.