Alex Berenson Warns of Constitutional Crisis Due to Biden’s Cognitive Decline
Author and former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson argues that the American public must confront the Biden administration’s cover-up of the former president’s severe cognitive decline. Berenson highlights the leaked audio from Biden’s 2023 interview with Robert Hur, the federal prosecutor who investigated him for classified documents, which reveals Biden’s inability to recall basic facts, including election dates and the death of his son Beau. The interview underscores the administration’s failure to address the issue, despite the risks posed by an incapacitated leader holding nuclear codes.
Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., was even more demented than previously known, according to Berenson. The leaked excerpts from Biden’s October 2023 interview with Robert Hur, the federal prosecutor who investigated him for possessing classified documents, show a man in severe cognitive decline. These excerpts, which the author describes as ‘awful,’ demonstrate Biden’s inability to recall even basic facts, such as when elections are held. Biden, who had lusted for the presidency his entire life, thought Donald Trump had won in November 2017, not 2016. It wasn’t a verbal slip; he didn’t know. An aide had to correct him.
Biden repeatedly said ‘I don’t remember’ regarding classified documents in the newly released Hur interview audio. Even this summary doesn’t capture the full extent of Biden’s struggles. His voice is weak and whispery, he goes silent for stretches, loses his train of thought, and offers oddly emotional asides about his son Beau, though he could not remember when Beau died. He seems not to remember being vice president; he speaks of being a senator and then jumps to running for president.
In the end, the classified documents investigation went nowhere, like the similar case involving Donald Trump. But along the way, Hur discovered proof of Biden’s incapacity. The Hur interview is so crucial because Biden and his handlers went to such lengths to protect him from press or public scrutiny even before the 2020 election. Biden used teleprompters for his speeches, had rare and scripted press conferences, and his few unscripted interactions were limited to his walks to Marine One.
Hur’s interview with Biden was likely the only time during Biden’s entire presidency when he faced lengthy questioning he could not control. It shows why Biden and his handlers tried so hard to avoid similar situations. Hur’s report on the investigation, which the Justice Department released in February 2024, described Biden as a ‘sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’ The audio suggests that description was kind. You wouldn’t trust the guy in this interview to drive to the grocery store. Biden had the nuclear codes.
Still worse, Hur interviewed Biden in 2023. If Biden and the people around him had had their way, he would have been president through January 2029. The interview suggests he’ll be nearly vegetative by then—if he lives that long. When the Justice Department released Hur’s report on his investigation, the legacy media immediately downplayed its importance and attacked Hur’s motives. The New Yorker wrote that the inclusions in the report were ‘gratuitous,’ and the Washington Post claimed Hur had a ‘five-hour face-off’ with Biden and described his demeanor as ‘a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,’ which Biden’s aides saw as sharply at odds with what occurred.
Berenson argues that the media’s dereliction of duty in covering Biden’s decline, both before and after the Hur report, continued until his disastrous June 27 debate in Atlanta. The Hur report made clear that Biden’s cognitive impairment was severe, and the White House was covering it up. That scheme should have been the story of the 2024 campaign from the moment the report became public. Berenson warns that this is not 20/20 hindsight, as he wrote on Feb. 9, 2024, that it might be worse for Biden than an actual indictment.
Berenson criticizes the legacy media for looking the other way as Biden’s flubs and lapses visibly worsened in the spring of 2024 despite the protective cocoon around him. He acknowledges that the media is only the second-most important villain here. It was Biden and the people around him, most notably his wife Jill and son Hunter, who insisted that he was fit to serve and would continue to be until he was 86. Both Jill and Hunt had their reasons—Jill’s lust for the trappings of power would be almost comic in its nakedness if it weren’t so dangerous; Hunter has champagne taste and a beer budget (or, more accurately in his case, cocaine taste and a meth budget).
But, of course, all of them, including Biden, knew the truth. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have gone to such great lengths to hide it. Berenson imagines a scenario where Biden had won and somehow found his way through his debates with Trump, then gone back to the presidential cocoon. He warns that if the media had insisted through Election Day that the videos showing his decline were merely ‘cheap fakes,’ as it did throughout the spring, we’d be approaching a Constitutional crisis. Our system, he argues, is not parliamentary; it has no way to replace an unfit President quickly or easily. And in running for a second term when he did not have to, Biden showed that he would not give up power unless forced to do so.
Robert Hur spoke truth to power. He’s a hero.