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Di Leo: A White House Physician Takes the Fifth
Illinois Review ^ | July 17, AD 2025 | John F. Di Leo

Posted on 07/19/2025 11:43:03 AM PDT by jfd1776

Kevin O’Connor, a presidential physician during the Biden-Harris years, recently infuriated Congress by repeatedly invoking both the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination and the tradition of physician-client privilege, when being grilled by a House committee about his care of patient Joseph R. Biden, and the question of when it became clear to all concerned that Biden was incapacitated.

A current historical anniversary crystallizes the difference in how we treat this issue:

Forty years ago this week, President Ronald Reagan was in the hospital recovering from colon surgery. He had gone under general anesthesia for an operation on July 13, before which, he sent a letter to Congress, as required by the 25th Amendment, notifying them that he would be incapacitated for a few hours, and Vice President George H.W. Bush would be on call if needed.

Similarly, some 20 years later, both in 2002 and 2007, President George W. Bush twice sent such notes to Congress, to inform them he too would be incapacitated briefly, just for a matter of hours, so Vice President Dick Cheney was on call.

In all three cases, the Presidents emerged successfully from surgery and continued their terms of office without issue.

They took the job seriously in those days. Both Reagan and Bush – and their administrations – knew that it is critical that a President must always be capable of decisive action; it’s part of the job. Even though everyone sleeps every day – anywhere from four to eight hours per night in fact – it’s imperative that a president can be quickly roused if needed for what we call in the business “that 3:00am phone call.”

We expect a president to be in good mental health at all times, and anything that would obstruct the ability to be instantly and fully awakened – such as general anesthesia, recreational drug use, coma or dementia – is simply unacceptable in the presidency.

The country’s national security is in the president’s hands; we cannot afford for him or her to be incapacitated.

Two serious examples hit us in the 20th century:

First, Democrat President Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke, and spent what we now know was approximately a year incapable of decision-making, a period during which his new wife spoke for him and essentially acted as an utterly unconstitutional replacement.

Then, Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose physical handicap had been hidden from the public for decades, was incapacitated by nagging headaches and persistent pain in his final years. While his death is acknowledged to have been from a stroke, historians agree that he was in such diminished mental capacity for at least the final year or more of his life that he could only work a few hours a day, and even that, not well. He was in such bad shape during the Yalta Conference that he (and his staff) virtually turned over Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. Millions died as a result of that disastrous bargaining session.

Without fully acknowledging out loud what everyone admitted to themselves, the nation eventually recognized the need for the 25th amendment, and happily ratified it, to give the government a smooth Constitutional path, enabling the transfer of power if a president’s condition ever compromised his mental state.

This was always understood to include the risk of Alzheimer’s (or any of the many similar conditions formerly lumped together as senility). The issue has often been a political issue when older politicians have run for office since the 25th’s ratification; Reagan, Bentsen, Trump, and others have all fielded the question in some way, in both their primary campaigns and their respective general elections.

This is the main reason, after all, why so many Republicans didn’t take the Biden campaign seriously in 2020. In addition to the man’s lackluster Senate and Vice Presidential career and his two previous runs that both ended in embarrassment due to chronic lying and plagiarism, he was clearly off his game by 2020. Anyone could see that he was suffering from some form of early-onset Alzheimer’s or some similar issue.

But here’s the strange thing about the Biden era: while Republicans wrote about his mental decline regularly, Democrats were in utter denial, verbally at least. The Democrats happily nominated him, happily voted for him (and/or stole/fabricated votes for him), and happily installed him in the office, despite his clearly diminished abilities.

One cannot help but wonder if that was in fact a part of the plan all along: if the 25th only requires the retirement of a president if his capacity has been diminished in office, might the obligation go away if is capacity is already so weak upon assuming the office that one cannot honestly prove that he’s gotten worse?

Even now, we see some Democrat apologists say things like “I found him just as sharp in 2024 as he was in 2021.” At first blush, that sounds like a defense of Biden, but if you read into it more closely, it could just be the pundit’s defense of himself. If Biden was an incoherent fool in 2021, then continuing to be an incoherent fool in 2024 represents no decline.

The official line – the public line trumpeted by authors Jake Tapper and Alex Johnson in their 2025 book “Original Sin” – is that Biden’s incapacity only became clear during his train wreck of a 2024 presidential debate against President Donald Trump.

All of a sudden, the fact that Joe Biden’s head was seemingly full of mashed potatoes was finally on full display, and we were confronted with a wide array of both Democrat politicians and media figures, angrily finger-pointing at whoever they could propose as a scapegoat for the crime of “hiding Biden’s decline from us all.”

In “Original Sin,” at least, the writers acknowledge that Biden couldn’t have had a stroke that day; he had to be declining pretty far for months in order to be at that point. But even they don’t admit what the Republican side of the aisle had known all along and had been publicly shouting for years.

Talk show hosts, reporters, columnists and politicians on the Right had been correctly identifying Biden’s senility since 2019, and both the Democrats and their media allies had always refused to acknowledge it, pretending it was just meaningless political insult humor and exaggeration from the Right. The Left maintains that there was no way anyone could tell that Biden was failing until close to the end.

Poppycock.

I must switch to the first person for a moment, Gentle Reader, to cite my own example:

I wrote three books in 2021, a series entitled “Evening Soup with Basement Joe,” a thinly veiled political satire of a fictional presidency following the daily events of the Biden years. While I obviously used exaggerations for humor and added some fictional plot devices, my books follow the day-to-day news stories of the Biden era.

These books have my character, President Joe Buckstop, tripping up the stairs to Air Force One, wandering off stage in the middle of an event, trying to shake hands with people who aren’t there, forgetting the subjects of E.O.s that he allegedly just signed, forgetting trips he had just completed, and constantly being caught at unawares concerning the most basic information of his life, from his current job to the roles of his own direct appointees.

Those dozens of examples of the real Joe Biden’s growing dementia were witnessed on television in real time, the world over, and they didn’t just occur during the weeks surrounding the 2024 debate; they took place throughout 2021, starting virtually as soon as the man took the oath.

Knowing the nature of this disease, I painted the character some days as more addled, some days less. That’s how the illness works, and that’s exactly how it manifested throughout Joe Biden’s alleged presidency.

I received frequent derision for the way that my books called out the subject’s condition, and I’m not even a famous writer. I can only imagine the abuse that more famous columnists and reporters with a national following, and politicians in the public eye, must have received when they had the nerve to point out the elephant in the room.

We are now living through a challenging period, as we try to confront all the nation’s current problems, without losing sight of the very real need to expose and explore the fundamental issue at the heart of the Biden-Harris years: the fact that the man behind the Resolute Desk was not just unfortunately, but intentionally, incompetent – virtually the entire time.

There are many who say we should let it go and “just move on,” but that would be irresponsible.

Three times this nation has had a White House with a severely diminished leader for an extended period of time; each time it was during a Democrat administration. FDR’s condition is largely responsible for the iron curtain coming down over eastern Europe (in Churchill’s tragic but apt phrase), similarly, Biden’s condition is responsible for a host of problems, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the unconstitutional covid vaccine mandates being only the most prominent.

We don’t just need to get to the bottom of it, we need to fully expose how the modern Democratic party functions – how it exults in diminished leaders specifically because that empowers their deviant, destructive bureaucratic class, and removes the normal structural ease in identifying guilty parties and providing punishment.

We are asked if we should keep digging, keep questioning, keep holding these hearings and covering these issues. We are asked if we should press the issue on who really made these appointments, who really wrote the speeches on Biden’s teleprompter, who really wrote the executive orders and operated that autopen.

The answer is clearly yes, indeed we must.

As long as there is a Democratic Party in American politics, the risk of a repeat remains. It has become that party’s S.O.P., and we must find a way to guard both the nation and the world from such unconstitutional, unethical abuse in the future.

Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. Once a County Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, after serving as president of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009. Professionally, he is a licensed Customs broker, and has worked in freight forwarding and manufacturing for over forty years. John is available for very non-political training seminars ranging from the Incoterms to the workings of free trade agreements, as well as fiery speeches concerning the political issues covered in his columns.

His book on vote fraud, “The Tales of Little Pavel,” his three-volume political satires of the Biden-Harris regime, “Evening Soup with Basement Joe,” and his first non-fiction work covering the 2024 campaign, "Current Events and the Issues of Our Age," are available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Conspiracy; Government; Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: autopen; biden; democratvoterfraud; fabricatedvotes; fjb; scandal; senility; votefraud

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1 posted on 07/19/2025 11:43:03 AM PDT by jfd1776
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To: jfd1776

We have a scarce 3.5 years to fumigate the exec branch or our tormentors will reemerge bolder than ever.

Imagine if the cypher Kamala succeeded the cypher FJB . . . Obama’s fourth term.

Republic? LOL.


2 posted on 07/19/2025 11:59:24 AM PDT by Jacquerie (ArticleVBlog.com)
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To: jfd1776

It doesn’t matter what the Feds are asking you, it is always best not to talk to them. I don’t blame this man at all. It is good advice that 99% of Lawyers will tell you.


3 posted on 07/19/2025 12:01:00 PM PDT by Vermont Lt
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To: jfd1776
A White House Physician Takes the Fifth

I posted this on July 16:


When I hear of people pleading the fifth it screams ‘guilty’.

I'll say this much...

If my doctor told Congress under oath that he's asserting his 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination when asked about his medical treatment of me, I know exactly how that would "scream" to me.

I want my doctor to declare unequivocally, "I gave my best care possible" whenever asked that question.


-PJ

4 posted on 07/19/2025 12:12:51 PM PDT by Political Junkie Too ( * LAAP = Left-wing Activist Agitprop Press (formerly known as the MSM))
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To: jfd1776

The most prominent sentence written in bold on the front of a DemonRAT Party voter registration is THE FIFTH AMENDMENT.


5 posted on 07/19/2025 12:35:43 PM PDT by FlingWingFlyer (If you have asylum in the U.S. and you go home to visit family, is it like violating a Protect Order)
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To: jfd1776

Democrats lower the standards for everything they touch.

Carter showed us that if Americans are held hostage by a foreign nation, it’s okay for a Democrat President to do nothing about it. He also showed us it’s fine to give away critical strategic interests, such as the Panama Canal.

Clinton showed us that a Democrat President can get away with adulterous sexual misconduct in the workplace, and lying about it under oath.

Obama taught us a complete fraud can be elected President as long as he’s a Democrat, and that when his term is over, it’s ok to commit treason against the duly elected President elect, so long as that President Elect is a Republican.

Biden showed us that a brain dead Democrat can steal an election, sell out the country and be the head of a treasonous crime family - all without having any clue what is going on.


6 posted on 07/19/2025 12:36:22 PM PDT by enumerated (81 million votes my ass)
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To: jfd1776

Why haven’t they called Biden’s neurologist to testify? His testimony would be more expert in neurological matters than the personal physician. Why can‘t we see medical notes, labs, tests, and radiological results? Comer at least and his committee should have them and they could be used to as leverage in immunity negotiations with O’Connor and the neurologist. If the physicians wrote things in their notes that contradicts information from medical testing, that would be a problem for them.
The first people who talk will get the best deal.


7 posted on 07/19/2025 12:55:30 PM PDT by grumpygresh
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To: jfd1776

Another RAT pleads the Fifth. Nothing new. They’re just trying to stay our of prison.


8 posted on 07/19/2025 12:56:14 PM PDT by FlingWingFlyer (If you have asylum in the U.S. and you go home to visit family, is it like violating a Protect Order)
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To: enumerated
Biden also gave away another strategic asset, the Bagram Air Force base.

-PJ

9 posted on 07/19/2025 12:57:57 PM PDT by Political Junkie Too ( * LAAP = Left-wing Activist Agitprop Press (formerly known as the MSM))
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To: grumpygresh

In actuality O’Connor was not Biden’s doctor .
He was America’s doctor, on our payroll.
The doctor patient confidentiality was between the doctor and the American people.


10 posted on 07/19/2025 1:08:23 PM PDT by tet68 ("We would not die in that man's company that fears his fellowship to die with us." Henry V.)
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To: Political Junkie Too

Yeah, when it comes to Biden, the list of damages is way too long.


11 posted on 07/19/2025 1:11:45 PM PDT by enumerated (81 million votes my ass)
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To: FlingWingFlyer

He knows he lied
We know he lied
He has to cut a deal
His only hope is Democrat and media protection


12 posted on 07/19/2025 1:17:19 PM PDT by AppyPappy (If Hitler were alive today and criticized Trump, would he still be Hitler?)
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To: jfd1776
We expect a president to be in good mental health at all times, and anything that would obstruct the ability to be instantly and fully awakened – such as general anesthesia, recreational drug use, coma or dementia – is simply unacceptable in the presidency.

SecDef Hegseth stopped drinking ever since he got confirmed in his current role. He was well-known for having a "good time". He can have a cold one when he leaves the administration.

13 posted on 07/19/2025 1:19:33 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
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