EXCLUSIVE – Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the chairman of a Senate investigative subcommittee, will seek thousands of emails sent in the final days of the Biden administration as part of his widening investigation into the former president’s alleged cognitive decline.
In an interview, Johnson told the Washington Examiner he will send a letter to the National Archives requesting the emails, which document how President Joe Biden‘s inner circle handled pardons and other grants of clemency before he left office.
The National Archives has apparently turned over those emails to the Justice Department as part of an inquiry opened at the request of President Donald Trump, who alleges that staffers covered up Biden’s mental decline and illegitimately signed documents for him with the use of an autopen device.
“If they’re turning them over to somebody, they should turn them over to us as well,” Johnson said of the emails, partially detailed in a Sunday article in the New York Times. “So yeah, we’ll definitely get in on that production.”
The letter will mark an expansion of the inquiry that Johnson, who leads the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee’s investigative arm, launched in May. At the time, he requested interviews with 28 former Cabinet members who could shine light on Biden’s mental acuity.
So far, just one — former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack — has sat for an interview. Johnson said the conversation took place about two weeks ago and that his staff is in touch with lawyers for the others.
His investigation is being run in parallel with efforts on the House Oversight Committee, which has met with three former Biden aides, including ex-White House physician Kevin O’Connor.
Of the three, O’Connor was the only one to plead the Fifth throughout his deposition. Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the Oversight chairman, has several more interviews scheduled for the remainder of the summer, including a sit-down with Ron Klain, the former chief of staff who helped orchestrate reduced sentences for thousands of federal convicts.
The Biden White House also preemptively issued controversial pardons to protect family members and senior administration officials from possible prosecution by Trump.
Comer has resorted to subpoenas to ensure compliance with some of his interview requests, but Johnson prefers to take a voluntary approach, viewing the transcribed interviews as a way to create a “historical record of what people saw and what they did.”
“I’m not looking for a quick result here,” Johnson said, blaming summer scheduling conflicts for the slower pace of Senate interviews.
Johnson is joined by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who held a hearing on Biden’s mental fitness in June.
Biden, 82, insists that he “made every single one” of the decisions over clemency and that Republicans are lying with their accusations of a White House cover-up, as detailed in a bombshell book released by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in May.
But congressional Republicans are interested in how closely Biden managed the process himself, as clemency lists were revised and changed in meetings where the president often gave oral instructions.
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Those instructions were at times relayed to staffers second-hand, according to the New York Times, through Zients and other senior officials meeting with Biden.
A former senior official told the Washington Examiner that Biden had created an “authority structure” for the clemency requests, but claimed that even lesser items needed his express approval.
Christian Datoc contributed to this report.