The House Oversight Committee is expecting Dr. Kevin O’Connor, former President Joe Biden’s physician, to appear before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday despite his request to delay his scheduled deposition.
“It’s clear that the latest letter from Dr. O’Connor’s attorney is another delay tactic to stonewall the Oversight Committee’s investigation,” a House Oversight Committee spokeswoman told the Washington Examiner, noting that the deposition is still scheduled.
O’Connor, who has been Biden’s physician since 2009, asked the House Oversight Committee on Saturday to postpone a closed-door deposition over disagreements on the scope of the questions related to allegations that he helped cover up Biden’s mental decline in the White House.
David Schertler, O’Connor’s lawyer, said the doctor could face “serious consequences” for violating his obligations as a physician, including losing his medical license. The doctor requested to postpone his testimony to the week of July 28 or Aug. 4.
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“Dr. O’Connor has legal and ethical obligations that he must satisfy and for which violations carry serious consequences to him professionally and personally,” Schertler wrote in a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the committee chairman. “We are unaware of any prior occasion on which a Congressional Committee has subpoenaed a physician to testify about the treatment of an individual patient. And the notion that a Congressional Committee would do so without any regard whatsoever for the confidentiality of the physician-patient relationship is alarming.”
O’Connor’s team has floated concerns about violating Biden’s right to medical privacy for weeks, even as Comer has argued that laws cited by the physician’s lawyers do not bar congressional testimony.
Comer is leading the House investigation into Biden’s health and who controlled the White House as part of a growing effort to determine whether his aides or family members concealed signs of the former president’s cognitive decline or covertly utilized an autopen to sign various policies without the then-president’s full awareness.
Despite O’Connor’s request, Comer’s committee is expecting the doctor to appear on Wednesday for the closed-door deposition.
“The House’s deposition regulations outline a process for witnesses to assert privilege on a question-by-question basis, and the Chair to rule upon those claims,” the committee spokeswoman said. “To the extent that Dr. O’Connor wishes to assert privilege in response to specific questions, the Oversight Committee will follow that process at the deposition. Dr. O’Connor is not permitted to disregard a congressional deposition subpoena because he believes he may be asked questions that, in his view, will implicate privileged information.”
A year ago, Comer sought an interview with O’Connor, but the Biden White House blocked his appearance before the GOP-led House.
In May, Comer wrote a letter to O’Connor, requesting that the physician voluntarily sit for transcribed interviews as part of an investigation into Biden’s mental and physical decline. After the doctor declined to do so, Comer subpoenaed him the following month, demanding he appear for a deposition on June 27, with that date later changing to Wednesday.
“Given your connections with the Biden family, the Committee sought to understand if you contributed to an effort to hide former President Biden’s fitness to serve from the American people,” Comer wrote in the subpoena. “You refused the Committee’s request. However, to advance the Committee’s oversight and legislative responsibilities and interests, your testimony is critical.”
“The cover-up of President Biden’s obvious mental decline is a historic scandal,” Comer previously said. “The American people deserve to know when this decline began, how far it progressed, and who was making critical decisions on his behalf.”
While it is legal for the president to utilize autopens for official business, Republicans are probing whether Biden was fully aware or had explicitly authorized such activity, due to mounting accusations that the former president was suffering from dementia-like symptoms during his time in office from 2021 through 2025.
O’Connor denied such allegations last year when he swore that his patient was fit to lead the country.
However, concerns have festered in recent months, in part because of multiple books accusing Biden’s inner circle of covering up his cognitive decline from the public.
Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, sparked an uproar when it was published in May. And 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, which was released Tuesday, has provoked another cycle of allegations that Biden sat in the White House and attempted to run for another term despite experiencing severe mental decline in recent years.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said Republicans should be more concerned about people who could lose healthcare through the newly passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
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“I mean, the only person’s healthcare that Republicans care about is Joe Biden’s,” Garcia said on MSNBC’s The Weekend. “Give me a break. Why are we continuing to look back at the former president?”
The Washington Examiner reached out to O’Connor’s lawyer and Biden’s team for comment.
