THE MAN WHO STOOD TO MAKE MILLIONS IF BIDEN WON IN 2024. The House Oversight Committee has just released a report on its investigation into “the circumstances surrounding President Joe Biden’s diminishing mental and physical capabilities and the implications of that decline.” In the report, Chairman James Comer (R-KY) focuses not just on the Biden White House’s unusually extensive use of the autopen — the document is titled, “The Biden Autopen Presidency: Decline, Delusion, and Deception in the White House” — but on all the other effects of Joe Biden’s senescence on his presidency.
“The committee’s investigation revealed that Biden officials — at the behest of the inner circle — went to great lengths to prop up the former president as he began losing the ability to independently function in office,” the report says. “These steps ranged from addressing President Biden’s makeup, clothing, schedule, the number of steps President Biden could walk or climb, the amount of time President Biden needed to read and spend time with his family, working to ‘meticulously stage-manage’ President Biden, limiting the number of events he participated in, lightening the president’s workload, making it difficult even for senior Democrats to access the president, keeping cabinet meetings to a minimum, eliciting ‘direction’ from Hollywood on the State of the Union and other events, and using teleprompters even at small, intimate events.”
And, of course, the autopen. Citing the autopen has become shorthand for referring to Biden’s infirmity and the accusation that he wasn’t really in charge in his own White House. The Oversight Committee’s report makes clear that the Biden White House used the autopen in a way that differed from earlier White Houses — far more often and for more important documents. “As President Biden declined, his staff abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy to effect executive actions that lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized,” the report notes.
At the White House today, President Donald Trump has installed a long portrait gallery of his predecessors along the West Wing colonnade. They’re all there — except the picture of Biden is not of Biden but of an autopen.
That’s all been frequently discussed. But there’s another really striking issue discussed in the House report, and that is the financial incentive that the man closest to Biden had as he tried to keep a clearly faltering Biden in the White House for a second term.
Mike Donilon is a campaign consultant who has been with Biden for nearly 45 years. A 2021 Washington Post article, done in the first months of the Biden administration, said people close to Biden see Donilon “as [Biden’s] conscience, alter ego and shared brain. One longtime Biden adviser estimated that no fewer than 10,000 times in their working relationship has the president turned to Donilon and asked, ‘Mike, what do you think?’”
Donilon was Biden’s chief campaign strategist during the 2020 presidential race and again in 2024. In the summer of 2024, he advocated that Biden stay in the race, even after the president’s disastrous performance in the June 27 debate with Trump. In fact, Donilon advocated Biden staying in the race until Biden himself finally gave up on July 21.
House investigators discovered a powerful inducement for Donilon to advise Biden to stay the course: Donilon was paid nearly $4 million for working on the 2024 campaign and would be paid another $4 million in the event of a Biden victory. This is from the transcript of the committee’s interview with Donilon, conducted just three months ago, on July 31, 2025:
Q: How much were you paid for your role in the campaign in 2024?
A: I was paid just a little bit short of $4 million…
Q: Was that all guaranteed upfront, or was it … paid out throughout the campaign? How does that work?
A: Well, in this situation, it was paid out in monthly payments in the campaign…
Q: Were there any circumstances in which you would have received a bonus?
A: Yes, it was.
Q: What were those circumstances?
A: That Joe Biden would have been reelected President of the United States.
Q: What would the bonus have been?
A: I believe it would have been $4 million.
Q: In addition to the $4 million that you were already paid?
A: Yes.
Donilon said he thought the pay represented a “fair agreement” with the Biden campaign. And he said he did not believe that, given his long history with Biden, a possible $8 million payday was “a factor in my advice to the president.”
But still. It was clear for more than a year, even to Biden loyalists, that the president was not equipped to serve a second term. If Biden had already paid you $4 million, and if you stood to collect another $4 million if he won, would you advise him to quit? That’s a pretty powerful incentive to tell the candidate to keep fighting, as Donilon did long after the catastrophic debate with Trump.
Many Democrats will read this and say it’s ancient history, that there is so much happening these days that House investigators, among the many things they look into, should not be going back to probe the Biden White House. But just last year, this was the most important issue in the country. It’s worth knowing what happened.