Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is calling on the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate whether former President Joe Biden’s staff took advantage of his cognitive decline to push far-left policies, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. In the letter sent Tuesday to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Bailey argued that Biden’s executive actions—including last-minute clemency grants for violent criminals and sentence commutations for death row inmates—are “legally void” if Biden did not knowingly approve them.
“By now, Biden’s mental decline is famous,” Bailey wrote. “Under the 25th Amendment, his inability to make decisions should have meant a succession of power. Instead, it appears staffers and officers in the Biden administration may have exploited Biden’s incapacity so they could issue orders without an accountable President of sound mind approving them.” There are “profound reasons to suspect that Biden’s staff and political allies exploited his mental decline,” which was evident before he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race, Bailey noted.
Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents characterized him as “an elderly man with a poor memory.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson revealed in a January interview with The Free Press that Biden was unaware he had signed a moratorium on energy exports to Europe when Johnson questioned him about the decision. According to a December report by The Wall Street Journal, Biden’s aides carefully managed his schedule and took on some of his responsibilities as his cognitive decline became more apparent.
“I thus ask you to launch an investigation, or refer my request to another investigative body, to determine which of Biden’s purported orders were knowingly issued by a competent President and which were not,” Bailey wrote. In his final days in office, Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, along with several family members. In the hours before Trump’s inauguration, he also issued preemptive pardons to Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, and members of the Jan. 6 committee.
Biden’s list of 2,500 individuals whose sentences he commuted—describing them as “non-violent” drug offenders—included two men whose crimes resulted in the death of a police officer and another who murdered an eight-year-old boy and his mother. According to an internal DOJ email reported by the WSJ in February, Biden ignored recommendations from his own Justice Department when granting clemency to some of these violent criminals.
As he was leaving, Biden asserted that the Equal Rights Amendment is part of the Constitution, although the National Archives clearly indicates otherwise. “Who has been running the country for the last few years?” Bailey wrote. “I fear that Mr. Biden, while he held the office of President, did so in name only and was a mere puppet for far-left, unelected staffers. The people deserve to know the truth.”