What is going on with these neurologist visits? Is there something wrong because the palace intrigue has now reached absurd new heights, with yet another lie about these trips being exposed by The Associated Press? Since August of 2023, Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, met with Dr. Kevin Cannard, a neurologist specializing in Parkinson’s Disease. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tried deflecting, but since she’s terrible at her job, she made things worse. Dr. O’Connor released a letter about this matter, which the White House thought would diffuse the situation. The new narrative was that Cannard’s presence was standard operating procedure.
“Dr. Cannard was the neurological specialist that examined President Biden for each of his annual physicals. His findings have been made public each time I have released the results of the President's annual physical,” O’Connor wrote. “President Biden has not seen a neurologist outside of his annual physical.”
That last quote is the problem: it’s a total lie. Biden visited a neurologist in January (via AP):
President Joe Biden saw a neurologist at the White House on Jan. 17 for a neurological exam, the results of which were later reported as part of his annual physical more than a month later, the White House said on Tuesday.
The confirmation came after the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre inaccurately said during the daily briefing with reporters that the Jan. 17 meeting was not related to care for the president in response to a question from the Associated Press.
The AP had asked whether a meeting, which was reported through the White House visitors’ logs, between renowned neurological expert Dr. Kevin Cannard and Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Biden’s personal doctor, was about the president himself. It was the only meeting between those two men, according to the logs, that had been reported between July 2023 and this past March — a period that has come under scrutiny because Cannard had visited the White House eight times in that time frame.
“Because the date was not mentioned in the question, I want to be clear that the Jan. 17 meeting between Dr. O’Connor and Dr. Cannard was for the President’s physical,” Jean-Pierre said in a statement to the AP on Tuesday. “It was one of the three times the President has seen Dr. Cannard, each time for his physical. The findings from each exam have been released to the public.”
She got the dates mixed up. It’s been a circus inside the press briefing room with Ms. Jean-Pierre, who is hopeless at this job. For too long, the White House thought that anything it pushed out would be widely accepted by a docile press. For the most part, they were correct until the June 27 debate and everyone and their mother who wasn’t a flaming liberal doing victory laps around these saps for not doing their jobs: we all saw Biden’s decline. The Left was blind to it through bias and sheer media illiteracy.
Now, given that the press got throttled for not being aggressive enough in reporting on the president’s condition, everything is being double- and triple-checked and look at the nugget we have here. Not for nothing, but it’s likely this story would never have surfaced if Biden was boat-raced by Trump during the debate. It looks like the press was able to report on the president’s health matters with gusto.
This White House misspoke, which is code for we lied and got caught. It’s reached a point where you can’t trust this White House. Jean-Pierre said Biden never saw a doctor about a cold, which his team partially blames for his bad debate night. Biden later told Democratic governors that he had a secret visit relating to this ailment, which the AP included in this story:
Last week, Jean-Pierre said Biden “did not get checked out by the doctor” for a cold that was noticeable during the June 27 debate. But Biden later said in a private meeting with Democratic governors that he had been checked out by his doctor after the debate concluded. Jean-Pierre said she meant Biden did not get a full medical exam and that the president did indeed have a “check-in” with his doctor, which he does a couple of times a week.
Don’t be shocked if Karine-Jean Pierre doesn’t do any more briefings this week. What a disaster.