Summary
- Ian Sams met President Biden twice in over two years.
- Sams served as White House spokesman.
- Information revealed by Rep. James Comer Thursday.
- Meetings described as face-to-face encounters.
- Highlights limited direct contact in administration.
The two exchanges, which the chairman later
called “very limited,” came in addition to a phone conversation with
Biden and a virtual meeting Sams participated in with the 46th president.
“This was a huge interview today, and I think it
contradicts everything that the former Biden people are saying with respect to
the president’s mental fitness,”
argued Comer, describing Sams’ appearance as
“one of the most shocking” sit-downs yet.
Sams, who spent just over three hours sitting with committee officials before
leaving without responding to questions from reporters, had called the Hur
report “false” and including “inappropriate personal
comments.”
“In fact, [former special counsel] Robert Hur
spent more time with Joe Biden than Ian Sams,”
added Comer, in reference to the
prosecutor’s two-day interview with the president while investigating whether
Biden “willfully” kept national security documents.
Hur concluded that the 82-year-old Biden
purposefully kept private documents from his time as vice president and
senator, but he chose not to pursue charges, partly because he thought the
president would be perceived by jurors as an “older man with a poor memory.”
Sams had virtually no access to Biden, according
to a Biden White House colleague who worked with him during his tenure there.
He pointed out that Sams’ office was located in the Eisenhower Executive Office
Building next door, not the West Wing, and that he usually dealt with White
House counsels Staurt Delery and Ed Siskel as well as communications chief
Anita Dunn.
Sams seemed to receive his “marching
orders” from Dunn, according to another Biden alum, and the two in-person
meetings Sams testified to were “more than I thought.”
“It raises serious concerns and serious
questions about who was calling shots at the White House,”
Comer alleged.
“If the White House spokesperson was being
shielded from the president of the United States, who was operating the Oval
Office?”
Co-authors of “Original Sin” claimed
that those aides, which included first lady Jill Biden, first son Hunter Biden,
senior adviser Mike Donilon, president Steve Ricchetti’s counselor, and deputy
White House chief of staff Bruce Reed, formed a kind of “politburo”
for making important decisions.
According to Thompson and Tapper, the inner
group occasionally included former White House chief of staff Ron Klain and
former senior adviser to the president Annie Tomasini.
The 11th interview with a former Biden aide,
conducted Thursday, focused on the alleged cover-up of the decline of the 46th
president, which Republican investigators suspect may have involved
inappropriate use of executive authority.
“There were very few people around Joe Biden,
especially at the end,”
Comer said,
“and that’s when the majority of the
pardons and executive orders were signed with that autopen.”
Senior Department of Justice officials chastised
Zients in a July interview for approving several late pardons that Biden was
not fully aware of.
The Post examined other correspondence and
discovered that the DOJ was aware of almost a dozen people charged with violent
crimes, despite the fact that roughly 2,500 allegedly “nonviolent”
drug offenders had their sentences shortened.
According to Comer, Sams expressed his surprise
to Oversight panel members and advisers that Joe Biden had granted preemptive
clemency to Biden family members and their spouses who were not indicted, as
well as pardoned Hunter after his conviction for tax and weapons offenses.
A request for comment was not immediately
answered by Biden’s representatives.
How credible are Sams’ claims given his limited
contact with Biden?
Sams was one of Biden’s most vocal defenders
during critical investigations but was not in a position to have firsthand
knowledge of the president’s mental or physical condition due to minimal direct
interaction.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer
highlighted that Sams derived most of his information and direction from
Biden’s inner circle and the White House Counsel’s Office, rather than from
Biden himself.
Comparatively, special counsel Robert Hur spent
more time with Biden and offered a nuanced assessment that Biden is an elderly
man with memory challenges, contrasting Sams’ public denials of any cognitive
issues.
