By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations:
For the subsequent 5 months, Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor will likely be probably the most highly effective individuals on this planet.
The White Home doctor is the chief medical arbiter of Joe Biden’s health to proceed as commander in chief in a war-torn world till the tip of his time period in January. Whilst the general public has lengthy expressed concern in regards to the 81-year-old president’s psychological capacities and Democratic Occasion leaders pressured Biden to drop his bid for a second time period, O’Connor has repeatedly given his boss a clear invoice of well being.
As Republicans demand that the president be faraway from workplace below the twenty fifth modification — and warn that adversaries corresponding to China or Iran may use the prolonged lame-duck interval to check Biden — O’Connor’s opinion looms as maybe their greatest impediment.
Dr. O’Connor insists Biden is in “wonderful” form to complete out his time period, and finds no cause to check him for cognitive functioning as many outstanding docs have advisable. “We don’t must. He’s right here daily,” he advised a reporter final month in an impromptu interview on the White Home, echoing Biden’s reasoning that the day by day efficiency of his duties is proof sufficient of his psychological acuity.
Rising numbers of persons are questioning his medical judgment as a result of O’Connor is rather more than a physician to the president. Information present that he’s additionally a longtime buddy, private adviser, political donor, former paid marketing campaign employee, and even a enterprise guide to the Biden household.
A former White Home doctor who attended to each Barack Obama and Donald Trump claims O’Connor has been making an attempt to “cowl up” Biden’s deteriorating situation to appease the primary household, with whom he’s fashioned a good bond over the previous 15 years.
“Kevin O’Connor was in that job on Day One of many Biden administration as a result of they knew they may belief Kevin to say and do something that wanted to be mentioned or accomplished, and canopy up no matter wanted to be coated up,” Dr. Ronny Jackson, now a Republican congressman, mentioned in a current interview. “He’s a part of the Biden household.”
Operating a White Home medical unit with a employees of roughly 60, O’Connor has been essentially the most reticent – some would say secretive – White Home doctor within the fashionable presidency. Even after treating Biden for COVID infections, he has averted talking to the press. He’s additionally declined to be interviewed by a medical reporter although such interviews are customary, to not point out crucial on condition that Biden is the nation’s oldest president – and one with a historical past of mind aneurysms. As an alternative, the physician runs all inquiries by means of White Home spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre, who typically speaks for him.
The place of White Home doctor is meant to be non-partisan. O’Connor insists he serves the workplace, not the politician occupying it, and stays neutral no matter politics. He claims to be “apolitical,” and suggests Biden doesn’t care to know which means he leans. “He’s by no means requested me if I’m a Republican or a Democrat,” in line with an interview printed within the alumni e-newsletter of O’Connor’s alma mater, New York Institute of Know-how, when he labored for Vice President Biden.
Nonetheless, federal and state election data reveal O’Connor has donated hundreds of {dollars} completely to Democratic politicians and causes – together with Joe Biden’s personal marketing campaign.
- In 2016, O’Connor gave $500 to the Democratic marketing campaign of Francis “Franny” Individual, Biden’s former driver who left the White Home in 2014 to enter enterprise with a Chinese language investor earlier than working for a congressional seat in South Carolina, in line with Federal Election Fee information. (Emails present Individual regularly communicated with Hunter Biden about Chinese language enterprise schemes; he even requested his Chinese language accomplice, Bo Zhang, to assist repay Hunter’s mounting money owed. In flip, Hunter solicited donations on behalf of Individual throughout his unsuccessful 2016 bid for Congress, whereas Joe Biden hosted fundraisers for him.)
- In 2019, O’Connor contributed $250 to Joe Biden, plus one other $473 to Biden For President by means of the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue, in virtually three dozen small funds, FEC data present.
- In 2020, O’Connor gave not less than $304 to Biden For President, in line with the FEC.
- In 2019-2020, the physician contributed a number of hundred {dollars} to varied Democratic candidates by means of ActBlue.
- In 2022, O’Connor gave $50 to Democrat Shawn Livingston, an area Maryland politician who campaigned on allocating funds from Biden’s Construct Again Higher initiatives.
O’Connor’s political exercise hasn’t stopped with donations. He additionally labored on Biden’s 2020 presidential marketing campaign and was paid not less than $4,330 by means of the Biden For President account for “journey” and “mileage,” FEC filings reveal. It’s not clear if O’Connor’s function within the marketing campaign was restricted to medical recommendation.
The person Biden merely calls “Doc” first began working for him in 2009, and shortly turned deeply concerned in Biden household affairs. He grew notably near Jill Biden. “Kevin O’Connor is sort of a son to Jill Biden – she loves him,” mentioned Dr. Jackson, who left the White Home for Congress, the place he now represents Amarillo, Texas, as a Republican. “I consider he and Jill Biden have led the cover-up” of the president’s well being issues.
A White Home supply who works with the Secret Service, and spoke on the situation of anonymity, mentioned O’Connor sees the president each morning and spends a variety of time within the White Home residence. The physician, who flies with the president on Air Power One, additionally holidays with the Bidens in Nantucket each Thanksgiving, even happening procuring sprees with relations.
O’Connor has doubled as a political aide and media guide, advising Biden on what was “good press” and unhealthy press. When Biden was vp, the physician advisable he cancel a international journey to cover the actual fact “you appear like shit,” he mentioned, in line with a passage in Biden’s memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.” Biden was below the climate and O’Connor warned that his wan and bleary-eyed look would find yourself in an “embarrassing” YouTube video.
The president isn’t O’Connor’s solely affected person within the Biden household. He’s additionally handled Biden’s mom after she fell sick whereas recovering from hip surgical procedure. Catherine Finnegan died in 2010. Years later, he consulted with Biden’s niece, Caroline Biden, about a watch downside. As well as, O’Connor shadowed the late Beau Biden’s medical crew from his mind most cancers prognosis in 2013 to his demise in 2015.
After a tumor was detected, O’Connor obtained on the cellphone with consultants within the subject and researched the perfect place for therapy. “Doc was good with Beau,” Biden recalled in his e-book. He mentioned O’Connor reassured his son: “You’re good. Folks do survive this, and all of the individuals who do survive this appear like you. They’re younger. They’re match. They’re wholesome. We may have a plan.”
O’Connor left his White Home publish to journey with Beau to a hospital in Houston. As he was wheeled into surgical procedure on the medical heart there to take away the mass, Beau grabbed O’Connor’s hand and requested, “Doc, promise you’re going to maintain Pop. Severely, Doc. It doesn’t matter what occurs. Deal with Pop,” Biden recalled in his e-book. O’Connor then adopted Beau into the working room to assist calm him.
After Beau suffered a setback in 2015 and was hospitalized in Philadelphia, “Doc O’Connor agreed to be my eyes and ears on the hospital,” Biden recalled, leaving his medical publish on the White Home once more. The then-vice president had his White Home doctor not solely sit together with his son within the ICU room throughout visiting hours, but in addition off-hours, properly into the evening, utilizing his credentials to achieve entrance to Beau’s room. O’Connor phoned again to Washington with day by day experiences to the vp on his son’s situation. Biden was involved the calls for of his job prevented him from being there at his bedside. However the physician recommended the vp to not “dump” his busy schedule, that he would stick with Beau till he was discharged.
After the most cancers unfold, Beau was transferred to Walter Reed Nationwide Navy Medical Heart in Bethesda, Maryland, the place on Could 30, 2015, he succumbed to the illness. “Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Dad’s White Home physician, stepped ahead and solemnly introduced time of demise: ‘Seven thirty-four p.m.,’” Hunter Biden documented in his personal memoir.
Echoing his present rosy descriptions of the president’s well being, O’Connor repeatedly downplayed the severity of Beau’s situation.
In 2010, after Beau awakened one morning unable to talk and paralyzed on one facet of his physique, O’Connor suggested the Bidens that he in all probability suffered one thing known as Todd’s paralysis, which is a standard aftereffect of a mind seizure. Three years glided by earlier than Beau began experiencing different signs and determined to get a mind scan, which discovered a tumor — a glioblastoma, the fastest-growing sort of mind tumor. Within the intervening three years, the malignant tumor had grown to the dimensions of a golf ball.
Then in 2015, O’Connor advised the Bidens an experimental therapy was engaged on Beau when in truth it was not working. Months later, when Beau’s cerebral spinal fluid was failing to empty correctly, inflicting swelling on his mind, Biden’s White Home physician advised to him that “it is likely to be a buildup of lifeless most cancers cells that had sloughed and clogged the draining channel, like leaves in a gutter.” Nonetheless, this was not the case — O’Connor was once more mistaken.
Nonetheless, Biden hailed O’Connor within the acknowledgments of his e-book: “Thanks for all this … to Kevin O’Connor.”
The Americore Affair
The great physician did different, unstated, favors for the Bidens. As an illustration, emails and different data reveal he helped Biden’s youthful brother James, often known as “Jimmy,” perform one in all his questionable enterprise schemes.
In 2017, Jimmy Biden enlisted O’Connor to assist get the U.S. Division of Veterans Affairs (VA) to refer PTSD sufferers to personal hospitals run by Americore, which, data present, had employed Jimmy primarily based on his entry to his highly effective brother. He had no expertise within the medical trade. Jimmy and the physician met over lunch in Alexandria, Virginia, to debate the possibly profitable plan, which centered on federally backed contracts, in line with a congressional deposition of Jimmy taken this yr. “I noticed that as an enormous market as a result of the VA was closely populated by former veterans with this illness [PTSD] they usually weren’t getting any assist,” Jimmy pitched to O’Connor, a retired U.S. Military colonel, in line with his testimony. And “as a result of these rural hospitals have been very giant [and] there was a variety of empty area [to treat the VA patients].”
O’Connor, in flip, launched Jimmy to a crew of individuals concerned in treating PTSD on navy bases and even helped pitch hospitals on “our imaginative and prescient.” For instance, Jimmy and Biden’s physician met with the director of a Pennsylvania hospital that Americore was buying. Following their assembly, O’Connor emailed the hospital administrator: “You and your crew clearly share our imaginative and prescient. And I sit up for seeing you once more in coming months.” Jimmy’s spouse Sara, their son Jamie, and Hunter Biden have been additionally concerned within the deal, which quickly soured when Americore collapsed, forcing the Pennsylvania hospital out of business. The FBI raided the hospital as a part of a probe into unpaid payments and uncared for sufferers.
Regardless of the failure, Jimmy walked away with $600,000 from Americore, $200,000 of which ended up in Joe Biden’s private checking account, subpoenaed financial institution data reveal. (The memo line from his brother’s canceled verify states, mysteriously, that it was “For mortgage reimbursement.”)
Now the Home Oversight Committee is investigating O’Connor’s function within the Americore debacle.
“Dr. O’Connor was concerned with the Biden household’s influence-peddling schemes,” panel chairman James Comer mentioned in a current press launch. In a five-page letter to O’Connor, Comer demanded he flip over “all paperwork and communications in your possession relating to Americore and James Biden [and] make your self accessible for a transcribed interview.”
Comer defined that the committee is “involved your medical assessments [of President Biden] have been influenced by your non-public enterprise endeavors with the Biden household.”
A spokesman for the Oversight committee advised RealClearInvestigations that although O’Connor missed a July 14 deadline to show over paperwork, the panel is “in communication with the White Home and dealing to finalize a date for Dr. O’Connor to look for a transcribed interview.”
Whereas it’s not clear if O’Connor additionally obtained Americore-related funds, Jimmy Biden’s attorneys insist the physician was not compensated for his hospital consultations.
Resisting a Cognitive Take a look at
The query that has arisen is that this primary: Are O’Connor’s private and emotional ties to the president clouding his judgment in regards to the president’s capacities? In a six-page report he launched in February, O’Connor said flatly that “President Biden is a wholesome, lively, strong 81-year-old male, who stays match to efficiently execute the duties of the presidency, to incorporate these as chief govt, head of state and commander in chief,” much like the boilerplate language he utilized in a 2019 report when Biden was working for president.
Former White Home medical colleagues have discovered it curious that O’Connor has refused to conduct a easy check to measure Biden’s cognitive capacity, often known as the Montreal Cognitive Evaluation, which Trump mentioned he took in 2018 and handed with an ideal rating. The MoCA, because it’s known as, is often used as a preliminary screening instrument for Alzheimer’s illness, dementia, and different neurological issues.
Biden confirmed in a current ABC Information interview that O’Connor has not carried out any neurological exams to measure his cognitive capabilities – together with reminiscence, consideration, language and problem-solving – and the president insists he doesn’t want such testing.
Different consultants disagreed. Following Biden’s usually incoherent debate efficiency in opposition to Trump on June 27, Dr. Lawrence Ok. Altman, a former medical reporter for the New York Times who’s an adjunct professor of medication at New York College, wrote in STAT News that “It will have been smart for Biden to have taken such a check in February [when O’Connor conducted his last physical], and that he ought to accomplish that now, if for no different cause than to guarantee the general public of his psychological health.”
Altman famous in his July 3 article {that a} “feeble” Biden has proven “indicators of growing older over the course of his presidency,” together with “psychological lapses, rambling, mid-sentence stumbles, obvious lack of focus, open-mouth gaping and flat facial features.”
Based on his final bodily, Biden additionally suffers from excessive ldl cholesterol, blood-clotting, allergic reactions and acid reflux disease, and presently takes a number of medicines, together with Eliquis, Crestor, Dymista, Allegra, Pepcid, and Nexium, to cope with the varied maladies. He additionally has been recognized with sleep apnea, and sleeps with a C-PAP machine which delivers steady airflow by means of his mouth and nostril utilizing a masks and head gear.
“He will likely be president till January 2025,” Altman wrote. “His well being is just too essential a problem for him and the nation to not contemplate in search of a medical clarification for his efficiency in the course of the CNN debate.”
CNN’s medical professional, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, agreed, writing on July 5 that Biden “needs to be inspired to bear detailed cognitive- and movement-disorder testing, and people outcomes needs to be made accessible to the general public.”
Efforts to contact O’Connor by means of the White Home and George Washington College, the place he’s listed as an affiliate professor, have been unsuccessful. The White Home has not made him accessible to temporary the press throughout Biden’s virtually 4 years in workplace – although earlier presidential physicians have taken questions from reporters. Former White Home Correspondents’ Affiliation president George Condon, a Pulitzer Prize winner who has interviewed 10 presidents, described O’Connor’s failure to reply questions instantly in regards to the president’s well being as “the least transparency of any White Home in 50 years.”
O’Connor hasn’t snubbed all people. He lately gave an interview to a medical commerce journal by which he acknowledged turning into emotionally connected to the Biden household. “We turned shut through the years, and I ended up being concerned in a variety of essential household issues,” he told “The D.O.,” a publication of the American Osteopathic Affiliation, in March.
A White Home supply, a profession worker who works with the Secret Service on safety points, questioned O’Connor’s objectivity and warned of doable harmful penalties if Biden stays in workplace.
“This can be a severe challenge of medical ethics,” he mentioned. “The physician’s clearly within the tank for the Biden household and too conflicted to conduct an unbiased evaluation [of his mental acuity]. And we’d like a sober evaluation. God forbid a serious disaster breaks out earlier than the subsequent inauguration.”
The White Home supply mentioned he fears Biden may fumble the nuclear codes in a DefCon-1 occasion, corresponding to a nuclear disaster with China. He mentioned in a retaliatory nuclear strike, Biden’s thoughts must be sharp sufficient to not solely acknowledge the present authentication codes – that are modified commonly – from quite a lot of decoys, but in addition relay the proper code to the Pentagon utilizing the navy phonetic alphabet (“Alfa, Bravo … Zulu”). Then he has to select from varied launch choices in a Black Ebook carried by a navy aide in a briefcase often known as the “nuclear soccer.”
Biden has mentioned he operates by what he calls the “70%” rule for making important selections, which doesn’t precisely allay issues about his capacity to deal with a disaster. He explains in his memoir that with regards to formulating actions to soak up a disaster that calls for fast pondering, a president can by no means count on to get greater than “about 70%” of the knowledge wanted; and due to this fact, he should belief his personal instincts to reach at a call. Absent the requisite info, information, and intelligence, “you need to be prepared to depend on your intestine,” Biden wrote. And that was in 2017, when he was a number of years youthful and way more lucid.
Requested Sunday by a CBS Information reporter about issues he doesn’t have the stamina to complete his time period, Biden mentioned, “All I can say is, ‘Watch,’” including, “I’ve no significant issue.”
NEW: Secrecy of the President’s Household ‘Doc’ Raises the Query: Are We Getting the Full Story on Biden’s Cognitive Well being?https://t.co/9OaeYOpf7Z
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) August 13, 2024
This RealClearInvestigations article was republished by The Gateway Pundit with permission.
Paul Sperry is the previous D.C. bureau chief for Investor’s Enterprise Day by day, Hoover Establishment media fellow, writer of a number of books, together with bestseller INFILTRATION
