Missouri AG Requests Formal Federal Probe Into Biden’s Incapacity

Better late than never? Maybe.

Yesterday, Missouri AG Andrew Bailey announced that he had petitioned the Inspector General at the Department of Justice for a very unusual investigation. Bailey insists that several orders directed at his state may well be invalid, because they came from staffers covering up the invalid president who purportedly signed them. House Speaker Mike Johnson told the Free Press that Joe Biden couldn’t remember signing a moratorium on LNG energy exports to Europe in January 2024. 

If so, then how can the state of Missouri rely on his more recent orders to vacate death sentences in their state? Via Twitchy’s Aaron Walker:

🚨BREAKING: I am demanding the DOJ investigated whether President Biden’s cognitive decline allowed unelected staff to push through radical policy without his knowing approval.

If true, these executive orders, pardons, and all other actions are unconstitutional and legally void. pic.twitter.com/pOhATRfw2j

— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) March 5, 2025

Bailey doesn’t just rely on Johnson’s word, however. He also cites Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report from February 2024 that Biden was too incapacitated to stand trial for the same charges that Donald Trump faced in hoarding classified material in his homes:

In addition, last February, Special Counsel Robert K. Hur released his report on his investigation into wrongdoing by Biden. In what was described as “[t]he loudest public alarm about Joe Biden’s mental acuity,” Special Counsel Hur described Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory” who could not even remember when he was Vice President or, even within several years, when his son passed away. If Biden could not even form a mens rea for alleged criminal activity (a low bar), how can anyone have confidence he had the capacity to make decisions as the chief executive of the United States?

Johnson’s recollection is testimony from someone with a political bias in play. Hur made his conclusions as an officer of the DoJ. That has some real weight, or at least should, within the DoJ and the IG’s office.

Bailey wants more than just a forensic exploration of Biden’s competency and decline over the last four years. He wants IG Michael Horowitz — who exposed wrongdoing at the FBI during the Russia-collusion hoax — to investigate all of the people around Biden to find out who really made those decisions. “There are profound reasons to suspect,” Bailey writes, “that Biden’s staff and political allies exploited his mental decline to issue purported presidential orders without his knowing approval.” 

That may overstate the case somewhat. It seems more likely that they manipulated a senile old man into giving some sort of ex post facto approval to the orders. One has to wonder whether that same mechanism was behind Biden’s insistence on running for a second term when he’d been running on cognitive fumes for at least a couple of years by the time of that decision in later 2023. Bailey’s point remains valid, though; it seemed clear since at least the Easter Bunny intervention in April 2022 that Biden was being run rather than running things himself. 

Bailey further alleges that the same cabal running Biden went wild under his name in the final weeks of the presidency:

Finally, there is the streak of extraordinarily far-left orders purportedly issued by Biden. Just the extraordinary orders since November include:

• Vacating the death sentences of nearly all persons sentenced to the ultimate punishment,
• Granting his son Hunter a blanket pardon going back more than 10 years, despite previously promising he would not do so, and
• Endorsing the legally frivolous theory that the Equal Rights Amendment was timely ratified.

Oddly enough, I find this a rather weak set of arguments, and believe Bailey would have been better advised to omit these specifics. No one ever really believed Biden when he claimed he wouldn’t pardon the bagman for the family’s corrupt business. The fact that Biden lied is one of the most consistent features of Biden’s entire career, not a sign of cognitive decline. The ERA announcement just proves that Biden’s an idiot, also a consistent feature of Biden’s career. The death-sentence commutation was despicable, but more because Biden claimed to be doing it out of principle — but still left three in place for defendants that Biden didn’t like. Cravenness is also a rather consistent feature of Biden’s long career in DC. 

Consider this a corollary to Hanson’s Razor, which advises never to assume malice when stupidity explains all the circumstances. Call it the Biden Razor: Don’t assume senility when Biden’s idiocy and/or corruption suffices. 

Anyway, Bailey wants an investigation so as to vacate the orders from the Biden years. “It is black-letter law,” he writes, “that a document is void, ab initio, when the person signing it lacks mental capacity.” That’s true in personal matters, but the process of voiding out official orders would be massively complex and, I’d daresay, a can of worms that everyone would wish to jam shut again once that process got underway. At the very least, every such order would have to be litigated as to whether Biden had sufficient cognitive capacity at each moment when those orders were signed. Anyone who has dealt with an elderly relative in such situations knows the good days/bad days scenario. 

Aaron says to “embrace the chaos”:

Regular readers know that this author has been saying since Joe Biden issued a pardon to his son that we needed to investigate whether or not Joe Biden was competent as president, and to look into nullifying any actions taken when he wasn’t. As we wrote about the Hunter Biden pardon:

what if Joe Biden was no longer competent, mentally, to issue such a pardon, either in general or just at the specific moment he signed it? The 25th Amendment sets up one method of dealing with incompetent presidents but the law might organically develop another.

For instance, imagine this outlandish scenario. Imagine someone slipped an unusually potent dose of LSD into the president’s drink and while under the influence, the president issued all kinds of crazy new regulations. When the president was him or herself again, surely the President can say that the regulations were not properly issued because he was not competent to do so, right? So why can’t someone say that at some point in the presidency, Biden became unable to issue pardons? Thus the Trump administration could investigate the pardon on that basis: To see if Biden was competent to issue it. And if he wasn’t, perhaps it could be rescinded.

Naturally, what we are saying about pardons can apply to any presidential action. The obvious response is to say that this could threaten complete chaos in our system, up to and even including the nullification of a Supreme Court appointment, and our response to that is we should embrace the chaos.

I’m not so sure. That would set a precedent that would undermine the reliability and continuity of government in a manner that everyone would live to regret at some point. You can bet that Democrats would be itching to use this mechanism to declare the appointments of Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch invalid, at the very least, as well as to overturn regulations by fiat rather than through the appropriate processes. 

The better approach would be to go after the aides rather than the orders. Find out who knew what and when, and just how the orders and other decisions were made and by whom. That will be complicated enough, but that is absolutely necessary to hold accountable all those who covered up the unconstitutional hijacking of presidential authority. Horowitz and the DoJ should already be investigating it, and that should start at the top and work down. That means Jill Biden and Kamala Harris, neither of whom are covered under pardons also issued under questionable circumstances. Or even better: start by hauling lower-level aides into grand jury rooms and see who they’ll give up in return. 

Time for accountability. And if Horowitz doesn’t want to provide it, then perhaps Pam Bondi will.