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Donald Trump has launched a probe into aides of Joe Biden for allegedly concealing his mental decline, as the US president escalates his effort to seek retribution against political foes.
In an executive order released on Wednesday, Trump said the White House counsel would investigate “whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the president”.
The investigation follows the release of a book last month by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson that contains damaging revelations about Biden’s declining mental and physical acuity as he launched his ill-fated campaign for re-election.
Trump, 78, has fixated on allegations that staffers had Biden sign documents without his knowledge using electronic signatures or “the autopen”. During his election campaign, Trump vowed to investigate his predecessor.
Wednesday’s order said that in recent months “it has become increasingly apparent that former president Biden’s aides abused the power of presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline”.
Responding to the order, Biden said he made the decisions during his presidency. “Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”
The former president last month gave his first interviews since leaving office in an attempt to defend his legacy. In one, the 82-year-old claimed he could have defeated Trump if he had remained in the race despite languishing in the polls and his disastrous debate performance.
Biden’s re-emergence drew criticism from Democratic operatives, saying it was hampering the party’s effort to recover from November’s presidential defeat and renewing focus on his decline.
He struggled in an appearance on ABC’s chat show, The View, when he said the claims of cognitive lapses were “wrong” before wandering off the topic. His wife Jill intervened.
On Wednesday, Biden said that Trump’s probe was “nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programmes like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations”.
The order was part of a flurry of actions announced by the White House late on Wednesday, including a ban on citizens of 12 countries from entering the US.
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