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Anita Dunn is the 10th former Biden administration aide appearing before the House Oversight Committee as the panel investigates whether former President Joe Biden’s inner circle covered up evidence of mental decline, and whether decisions were signed off on via autopen without his full awareness.
Dunn is a longtime Democratic operative who has run communications for top left-wing figures and causes for decades.
She first likely engaged with Biden when serving as communications director for Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, in the late 1980s.
Dunn was a central figure in shaping communications policy during Biden’s White House term as well, and she played a key role in helping him prepare for re-election in 2024.
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Her husband, lawyer Robert Bauer, is also known as a figure close in Biden’s orbit – having reportedly served as his personal lawyer.
“If it’s a room of five people, Anita and Bob are two of them,” an unnamed former White House aide told NBC News in January 2023.
But her relationship with others in Biden’s circle has reportedly been rocky at times, particularly toward the end of his four-year term.
NBC News reported in July 2024 that Biden family members discussed whether the president should fire Dunn and Bauer amid fallout from his disastrous debate against now-President Donald Trump, though White House chief of staff Jeff Zients dismissed the reports as “unfounded and insulting rumors” in a statement to the outlet at the time.
Her relationship with Hunter Biden in particular, the former president’s only living son, has been in the spotlight on multiple occasions.
Dunn criticized the president’s handling of his son Hunter’s pardon during an event in Dec. 2024, saying that she disagreed with the “timing” and the “rationale,” describing it as an “attack on our judicial system.”
“Had this pardon been done at the end of the term in the context of compassion, the way many pardons will be done, I’m sure, and many commutations will be done, I think it would have been a different story,” Dunn told a New York Times panel at the DealBook Summit 2024.
“So, I will say, I absolutely agree with the president’s decision here. I do not agree with the way it was done, I don’t agree with the timing, and I don’t agree, frankly, with the attack on our judicial system.”
Hunter, meanwhile, recently name-checked Dunn during a tirade against Democratic operatives during a recent interview on YouTube show Channel 5.
He said Dunn “made $40 or $50 million” off of work on behalf of the Democratic Party, while going further in criticism of others like David Axelrod and James Carville.
Notably, however, Dunn was among those who continued to defend Biden after his debate – while criticizing fellow Democrats’ reaction to it.
“It was a bad debate, but it didn’t feel catastrophic at all, certainly in terms of voters,” Dunn told Politico Magazine in Aug. 2024, noting she was watching the debate at home while monitoring voters’ reactions in real time.
“What did change it was 24 days of unremitting negative, horrible attacks on Joe Biden. . . . From his own party and from the press,” Dunn said.
She went further in that interview, calling the public criticism of Biden “bullying” while arguing that it was led by the media rather than voters themselves.
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“[T]he data still didn’t support this at all. We were looking at it and we were not seeing huge changes. But we were seeing an environment in the press that was just unremittingly negative. And nobody was covering Trump whatsoever,” Dunn said.
“I went to Wisconsin with [Biden] for an event, and people felt very strongly about the bullying. They didn’t like it, and voters didn’t like it. They felt that it was unfair and that it was wrong. So you had a lot of different things going on here. You know, clearly there were leaders of the party who decided to go ahead and go very public. And that gave permission to other people to go public.”
Before joining Biden’s 2020 campaign and later his White House as a senior advisor, Dunn was known as a close ally of former President Barack Obama, having aided both his 2008 and 2012 campaigns.
Both she and her husband worked in the Obama administration. Dunn served as White House communications director in 2009 and Bauer as White House counsel from 2010 to 2011.
Dunn spent time before and after that as a consultant at public affairs firm SKDK, raising questions at the time about her influence with both outside actors and those in Obama’s inner circle.
The New York Times reported in 2012 that Dunn had visited more than 100 times since leaving her communications job there.
That report also had White House officials denying any conflicts of interest on the part of Dunn or the administration.
After leaving Biden’s White House, Dunn moved on to play a key role in former Vice President Kamala Harris’ short-lived 2024 campaign.
She’s since returned to SKDK as a principal.
Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report.
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