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Michael Donilon, a longtime aide to former President Joe Biden, is sitting down with House investigators in Oversight Committee Chair James Comer’s autopen probe on Wednesday.
Donilon is one of Biden’s most enduring confidantes, with a working relationship that began in 1981 when the former president was a U.S. senator from Delaware.
He’s also no stranger to Washington, D.C., having earned both his Bachelor’s Degree and Juris Doctor from Georgetown University.
Donilon later worked on both Biden’s 2020 and 2024 campaigns as a chief strategist and is one of the key people to have gone on the offensive against his fellow Democrats after they cast Biden out following his disastrous June 2024 debate against now-President Donald Trump.
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“Now, lots of people have terrible debates,” Donilon said during a Harvard University event. “Lots of people have terrible debates. Usually the party doesn’t lose its mind, but that’s what happened here. It melted down.”
It earned him rebukes from fellow left-wingers, including ex-Obama advisor and CNN political commentator David Axelrod, who called Donilon’s comments “delusional” on X.
And while his work for Biden made him a national-level figure, Donilon spent years working on other notable Democratic campaigns.
He played a role in the electoral successes of both former President Bill Clinton in 1992 and ex-Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder in 1989, among others.
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But it’s the four-year period during which Donilon served as senior advisor to the Biden White House, and then his stint on Biden’s short-lived 2024 campaign, that’s captured the attention of the House Oversight Committee.
He was dubbed a member of Biden’s “Politburo” by Axios reporter Alex Thompson and CNN host Jake Tapper in their book “Original Sin” – described as a small group of insiders who reportedly helped run the White House while covering signs of Biden’s decline from others.
“The president valued Mike Donilon’s advice so much that aides would later joke that if he wanted, he could get Biden to start a war,” the authors wrote.
Donilon was also paid $4 million to work on Biden’s re-election bid, according to the book.
The Wall Street Journal reported in Dec. 2024 that Donilon was also a key intermediary between Biden and his pollsters during that short-lived campaign.
And he was with Biden until the very end of his administration, reportedly as one of the aides in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, joining the then-president when he drafted the explosive letter that ended his campaign.
Since that ended, Donilon took up a role as a Spring 2025 Resident Fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics.
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