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Longtime Democratic operative Steve Ricchetti is appearing before House investigators on Wednesday, the seventh former White House aide to be summoned for Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s probe.
Ricchetti most recently served as counselor to President Joe Biden during the vast majority of the Biden White House’s four-year term.
He’s now expected to sit down with House Oversight Committee staff for a closed-door transcribed interview that could last several hours.
Comer, R-Ky., is investigating whether Biden’s top White House aides concealed signs of mental decline in the president, and if that meant executive actions were signed via autopen without his knowledge.
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Ricchetti first began working for Biden in 2012, when he was appointed as counselor to the vice president during the Obama administration. He was soon promoted to Biden’s chief of staff in late 2013.
Ricchetti, who made a living as both a lobbyist and a Democratic insider, chaired Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign as well.
The committee’s interest in him, however, lies in his alleged key role in managing the White House while aides reportedly worked to obscure signs of the president’s mental decline.
“As Counselor to former President Biden, you served as one of his closest advisors. According to a report, you were part of a group of insiders who implemented a strategy to minimize ‘the president’s age-related struggles,’” Comer wrote to Ricchetti in June, referencing a Wall Street Journal report.
“The scope and details of that strategy cannot go without investigation. If White House staff carried out a strategy lasting months or even years to hide the chief executive’s condition—or to perform his duties—Congress may need to consider a legislative response.”
Axios reporter Alex Thompson, who co-wrote “Original Sin” with CNN host Jake Tapper about Biden’s cognitive decline and his aides’ alleged attempts to cover it up, told PBS program Washington Week earlier this year that Ricchetti was part of a small group of insiders that some dubbed Biden’s “Politburo.”
He also played a key role in Biden’s legislative agenda, most notably as one of the Democratic negotiators working with then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to avoid a full-blown fiscal crisis over the U.S. national debt in early 2023.
It comes after another close former aide, former White House Chief of Staff Ronald Klain, appeared before investigators for his own transcribed interview last week.
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Like Klain, Ricchetti is appearing on voluntary terms—the fourth former Biden aide to do so.
Three of the previous six Biden administration officials who appeared before the House Oversight Committee did so under subpoena. Former White House physician Kevin O’Connor, as well as former advisers Annie Tomasini and Anthony Bernal, all pleaded the Fifth Amendment during their compulsory sit-downs.
But the three voluntary transcribed interviews that have occurred so far have lasted more than five hours, as staff for both Democrats and Republicans take turns in rounds of questioning.
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