One of former President Joe Biden’s top spokespeople dismissed the fallout from the former president’s disastrous June 2024 debate performance during a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee that lasted over five hours.
Andrew Bates, who served as White House senior deputy press secretary and worked in Biden’s communications shop for nearly his entire term, said reactions to Biden’s debate against then-candidate Donald Trump were ‘overblown,’ according to a source familiar with his interview.
Bates ‘ultimately agreed with President Biden’s decision to drop out’ after viewing polling data the week Biden made his choice to drop his re-election bid, the source said.
A source close to Bates, however, said after he had time to process the then-president’s decision and a turn in public polling during the final week of Biden’s candidacy, he agreed Biden had made the right decision to withdraw.
He dismissed concerns about Biden’s age as a ‘polling problem,’ however, and wrote off Americans’ concerns about his age and abilities as the product of mainstream media and right-wing critics, according to the first source – similar to previous Biden allies in their closed-door interviews.
The former spokesman also described relatively infrequent interactions with Biden and allegedly said Biden only met with his press team a few times in a year.
‘He would see President Biden in person a little over once a month, but this could be anything from travel, going with him to the Hill or just seeing him in the hallway,’ the first source said.
But a former Biden White House staffer argued that the press secretary and the communications director were the default representatives of the press and communications team for daily meetings with the president.
Bates also allegedly told investigators he supported the sweeping, and controversial, pardon granted to Hunter Biden toward the end of the president’s term.
The second source, however, said Bates told investigators that Biden conducted himself ‘honorably’ when asked whether any of his actions were done to benefit his son’s business dealings.
That pardon and the hundreds of other clemency orders signed by Biden are of particular interest to the House Oversight Committee.
Oversight Committee Republicans are investigating whether Biden’s top White House allies covered up signs of mental decline in the former president, and by extension, are looking into whether executive actions signed by autopen were executed with Biden’s full awareness and approval.
Biden himself told the New York Times recently that he made every clemency decision on his own.
His allies have also blasted the GOP-led probe as a partisan exercise.
During his opening statement, obtained by Fox News Digital, Bates defended Biden’s fitness for office while criticizing Trump’s own actions as president.
‘I was proud to support Joe Biden as President because we believe in the same values. In the White House, it was universally understood that Joe Biden was in charge. That is completely consistent with my personal experience with the President,’ Bates told House investigators, according to another source.
A House Oversight Committee spokesperson blasted Bates as ‘delusional’ and accused his opening statement of leaking to media before he read it in the room.
Fox News Digital reached out to Bates via his public relations firm Wolfpack Strategies, as well as his counsel, for further comment.