After reading the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Oct. 28 report on President Joe Biden's cognitive decline and his inner circle's dishonest, deliberate cover-up, I'm furious.

Chairman James Comer, R-Kentucky, said in a statement that the report, based on 14 depositions and transcribed interviews with key Biden aides, shows that some staff "colluded to mislead the public" and went to great lengths to "sustain the appearance of presidential authority as Biden’s capacity to function independently diminished."

Comer and the committee deemed executive actions that Biden's staff performed via the autopen "null and void." The committee's findings are so serious that he called on the U.S. Department of Justice to review Biden's executive actions and scrutinize a few members of staff they interviewed.

Like many Americans, I suspected that Biden was suffering from declining health and that his administration was covering it up, raising ethical and practical questions about who was actually running the White House. This report confirms that and then some: Biden's inner circle knew he was in poor health, but instead of helping him or relieving him of his presidential duties, they sought to maintain power at any cost.

The Democratic Party was – and remains – unfit to run America.

Who was running the White House during Biden's last year?

The committee report is so damning that it raises vital questions about who was really running the White House, particularly during the last year of Biden's presidency, when thousands of clemencies were granted.

The report found evidence that Biden experienced a mental and physical decline so significant that senior White House officials covered it up by restricting his access to the public or ensuring that any access to him was heavily controlled. Because of his decline, staff "facilitated executive actions without direct authorization from President Biden himself, including through misuse of the autopen and failures in documenting decision-making processes," the report's summary said.

The report says that vital decisions were executed without confirming the president's approval, particularly pardons and commutations toward the end of his presidency. I wrote previously that Biden bungled this responsibility anyway, because he reduced the sentences of people who committed horrible crimes.

He wound up granting 4,245 requests for clemency, more than any other president. To now discover that an unknown number of these were likely made without his express approval is unethical at best, corrupt at worst.

In damning video testimony, one of Biden’s top staffers, Mike Donilon, admitted that he was given $4 million to help with Biden's campaign and was told that if Biden won a second term, he would have received another $4 million. He squirmed and hesitated answering the question.

Receiving a cool $8 million to help a president stay in office and win reelection might explain the motive behind why Donilon, at least, didn't raise any red flags about Biden's decline.

Republicans were right about Biden the whole time

I wasn't surprised to read this report, even though I was angry at some of the new details.

Journalists and even former staff have written books detailing the last year or more of Biden's health issues and chaotic White House. The fact that the truth has trickled out via journalists who reported on the White House after Biden dropped out of the presidential race in 2024 and Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election didn't provide reassurance to voters; it raised further suspicions.

Investigations like these served to confirm what we knew all along: Biden's inner circle gaslit the American people about what was going on. This is unacceptable, and it will take some time for the Democratic Party to recover from this loss of trust.

I will say this: While it's true that the Democratic Party has shown its true colors with the Biden administration, I have not lost hope in America or the American people. For the most part, many people, particularly Republicans, saw through the charade.

Despite the verve of legacy news media pushing Biden's − and then Harris' − candidacy, over 77 million people either suspected something was off or just still thought that Donald Trump was a better candidate and the Republican Party would serve them better. But this doesn't let Biden's inner circle off the hook.

They were who we thought and worse.

Nicole Russell is a columnist at USA TODAY and a mother of four who lives in Texas. Contact her at nrussell@gannett.com and follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @russell_nm. Sign up for her weekly newsletter, The Right Track, here.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Don't ignore Congress' damning new report on Biden. Democrats lied to us. | Opinion

Reporting by Nicole Russell, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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