Johnson: Here’s When I Knew Biden Wasn’t Running Anything

Good to know, but it prompts a big question. And Mike Johnson has no good answer for it.

As the House Speaker tells Bari Weiss in a live interview for The Free Press, Johnson considers Joe Biden the worst president in US history. It’s not just the policies or the actions that drive that assessment, Johnson explains, but the fact that Biden clearly had no idea what was going on in his own administration — or even what Biden’s own executive orders said and did. 

Almost exactly a year ago in January 2024, Johnson met with Biden for an Oval Office meeting on national security, but Johnson wanted to discuss a recent EO that cut off liquified natural gas to Europe. Here’s what happened next:

Mike Johnson tells a wild story about how Biden had no idea he paused LNG exports to Europe.

“He obviously has not been in charge for some time.”

(Via @TheFP) pic.twitter.com/gERM1aIhzc

— The Maine Wire (@TheMaineWire) January 18, 2025

“Can I ask you a question? I cannot answer this from my constituents in Louisiana,” Johnson recalled telling Biden. “Sir, why did you pause LNG exports to Europe? Liquefied natural gas is in great demand by our allies. Why would you do that? Cause you understand we just talked about Ukraine, you understand you are fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine, because they gotta get their gas from him.”

Biden, according to Johnson, was stunned. “I didn’t do that,” Biden said. Johnson responded, “Mr. President, yes you did. It was an executive order like three weeks ago.” Biden continued to deny that he paused the LNG exports. At that point, Johnson suggested that the president ask the president’s secretary to print out the executive order, so the two could read it together.

Biden then recalled that he had signed an executive order, but it only called for a study on the effects of LNG. Johnson was firm. “Sir, you paused it, I know. I have the export terminals in my state. I talked to those people in my state, I’ve talked to those people this morning, this is doing massive damage to our economy, national security.”

In this exchange, Johnson said he realized that Biden was not lying to him. “He genuinely did not know what he had signed,” Johnson said. “And I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, “We are in serious trouble—who is running the country?” Like, I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know.”

So who did write the EO? And as good as that question is, it’s still not the biggest question left unanswered.

The FP has a longer version of this exchange in a video clip at the top of their article, but this gets the gist of the story. As they note, this is not the first time this story has been made public.  the Wall Street Journal reported it in June 2024, roughly six months after it happened, in a piece that presciently warned that “Biden shows signs of slipping.” The WSJ article appeared 23 days before Biden’s humiliating performance at CNN’s presidential debate, a debate that Biden demanded:

When President Biden met with congressional leaders in the West Wing in January to negotiate a Ukraine funding deal, he spoke so softly at times that some participants struggled to hear him, according to five people familiar with the meeting. He read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.

In a February one-on-one chat in the Oval Office with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the president said a recent policy change by his administration that jeopardizes some big energy projects was just a study, according to six people told at the time about what Johnson said had happened. Johnson worried the president’s memory had slipped about the details of his own policy.

In one sense, it’s good to see Johnson speak publicly about this. If one reads the WSJ report from June carefully, this anecdote and others came through anonymous sources. At one point, reporters note that they spoke with “more than 45 people over several months,” but those sources who warned that Biden had become functionally incompetent remained anonymous. The only person of note to go on the record about Biden’s cognitive decline was Kevin McCarthy, who’d been removed as Speaker and had already left Congress, and had no way to press the issue other than talking to the press. 

Johnson, however, was and is Speaker of the House, and someone in position to take action if a president seems to be incapacitated or manipulated by others. And that’s the biggest question this raises: why didn’t Johnson take action? As Speaker, Johnson could have alerted the House to this potential incapacitation, formed a select committee to investigate it, and force White House aides and Cabinet officials to testify under oath to their interactions with Biden.

We have argued for most of Biden’s term that the signs of senility/dementia were recognizable, if not painfully obvious. The April 2022 Easter Bunny incident alone should have prompted the mainstream media to demand these answers and for Democrats to come clean about what we now know they knew at that time. The timing and extent of Biden’s infirmity needs a full investigation, as well as answers as to who issued directives under Biden’s name by taking advantage of that situation.

But we didn’t need to wait until Tuesday to start that process. Perhaps Johnson didn’t want to create a constitutional crisis by forcing the issue, but defending the Constitution is Johnson’s primary duty. If Johnson knew that Biden wasn’t issuing the orders in the White House — in a literal sense with this EO and others — then Johnson had a duty to investigate that and force the question into the open. 

And this is why we probably will never get a full accounting of the Biden fraud and cover-up. Too many people participated in it, explicitly or implicitly, to the extent that full exposure will burn everyone. It will be a replay of Murder On the Orient Express. 

And while Joe Biden may very well be the worst president in history (save for James Buchanan, because come on), the current political class in Washington DC may be the worst in its history since the Civil War too. The 17th Amendment and the rise of the bureaucratic state have warped constitutional self-governance badly enough to turn Washington into nothing more than a swamp, where Congress abdicates its responsibilities and puppets dance stiffly in the Oval Office with no consequences for those holding the strings. 

Let’s see if we can change that, starting on Monday.