Who is Biden’s doctor protecting?

When Joe Biden’s personal physician, Kevin O’Connor, pleaded the Fifth Amendment yesterday during the ongoing Congressional hearings about Biden’s mental acuity while in office, it didn’t put suspicions to rest – it amplified them. Why would O’Connor refuse to testify if he had nothing to hide from Congress? He can claim doctor–patient confidentiality all he wants, but it’s not like Congress was asking to see X-rays or blood-test results.

What didn’t Biden know and when didn’t he know it? This is about more than just setting straight the historical record. It’s political bloodsport, the Democrats know it, and the whole things smells like a coverup. The Trump administration has made it very clear that they don’t consider orders and laws that Biden signed with his “Autopen” to be legitimate. They’re using the House Oversight Committee to do the dirty business laying the groundwork that will allow them to erase what remains of Biden’s already-fading legacy.

Committee chairman James Comer, from Kentucky, says they asked O’Connor two simple questions: “Were you ever told to lie about the president’s health?” and “Did you ever believe President Biden was unfit to execute his duties?”

The fact that O’Connor refused to answer likely means that someone, somewhere, told him not to. “Dr. O’Connor pleading the Fifth all but confirms he was a key player in the biggest coverup in presidential history and knew Joe Biden wasn’t fit to serve, and now he’s grasping for anything to protect himself,” Representative Ronny Jackson, of Texas, told the New York Post.

“Biggest coverup in presidential history” is a tall statement in a world where Watergate, Iran–Contra, and Saddam Hussein’s fake uranium stockpiles exist, but as with Watergate, the coverup is clearly the bigger issue than the crime itself. The world does deserve to know who was really running the United States during the Biden Presidency, what their agenda was, and why. If it wasn’t Biden – and only people who are extremely partisan or not paying attention really still believe that it was – then for a certain corner of the D.C. elite, the stakes are extremely high.

Alarmingly for Democrats, Biden’s primary defender on the committee is the absurd, partisan Representative Jasmine Crockett, from Texas, a former criminal defense attorney who said yesterday Biden “completely understood what was going on” when he was president. “There is nothing about Joe Biden and his stutter or him being older that caused any issues as it relates to potentially harming the American people,” she said.

That’s certainly true now. Biden is just a sick, elderly ex-President who his defenders and former staffers trot out occasionally to make speeches and save their reputations. But it might not be enough for Congress, which still has its gaze firmly on the rear-view. In the coming weeks, the Oversight Committee will receive visits from most of Biden’s top staffers. Annie Tomasini, Ron Klain, Steve Richetti, Mike Donilon, Bruce Reed and Anita Dunn, among others, will give testimony this summer. None of them are medical doctors. So if they invoke the Fifth, we’ll know for sure that the only privilege they’re trying to protect is their own.