Sen. Ron Johnson is demanding the National Archives turn over all records related to former President Joe Biden’s ‘mental and physical health and cognitive decline,’ Fox News Digital has learned.

Fox News Digital exclusively obtained a letter Johnson, R-Wis., sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is serving as the acting archivist of the United States.

Johnson, who leads the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said he is now conducting an investigation into ‘the cover-up of former President Biden’s health and cognitive decline.’

‘My office has been reviewing the allegations that former President Biden, cabinet members, and his staff covered up his declining mental and physical health over the course of his presidency,’ Johnson wrote to Rubio, adding that the allegations ‘raise serious questions about who was making key presidential decisions if the former president was incapable of doing so.

‘One of these key decisions may have involved the presidential power to grant clemency or pardons — a matter that the White House Counsel’s Office, among other entities, are currently investigating,’ Johnson wrote.

Fox News Digital exclusively reported Tuesday that the White House Counsel’s Office, in conjunction with the Justice Department, is investigating Biden’s use of an autopen and already is reviewing more than 27,000 documents turned over by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

‘The reporting further suggests that these records represent only a portion of the information in NARA’s possession that may be related to the coverup of former President Biden’s alleged mental and physical decline,’ Johnson wrote to Rubio, referring to the Fox News Digital exclusive report.

Johnson is now demanding that NARA turn over all records provided to the White House Counsel’s Office referring to or relating to Biden’s mental or physical health or the alleged cover-up, including all communications.

Johnson also is demanding communications between or among any former White House officials, members of Biden’s Cabinet or their staff or other staff relating to Biden’s mental or physical health.

Specifically, Johnson is demanding records belonging to former White House chief of staff Ron Klain, former White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, former advisor Mike Donilon, former counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, Biden personal attorney Bob Bauer, Biden senior advisor Anita Dunn, former White House Physician Kevin O’Connor and others.

Johnson gave Rubio until July 30 to turn over the records.

Trump sent a memo in June to the Department of Justice directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the autopen use and to determine whether it was related to a decline in Biden’s mental state.

The White House Counsel’s Office is investigating Biden’s use of an autopen, a machine that physically holds a pen and features programming to imitate a person’s signature. Unlike a stamp or a digitized print of a signature, the autopen has the capability to hold various types of pens, from a ballpoint to a permanent marker, according to descriptions of autopen machines available for purchase. 

Biden used an autopen to sign a slew of documents while in office. He also used an autopen to sign final pardons, including preemptive pardons for members of his family, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley and members and staff of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots. He only signed one pardon by hand, for his son Hunter, after vowing to the American people for months he would not pardon Hunter.

In his final weeks in office, Biden granted clemency and pardoned more than 1,500 individuals in what the White House described at the time as the largest single-day act of clemency by a U.S. president.

Biden, in a recent interview with The New York Times, defended his use of an autopen, saying he ‘made every decision’ on his own.

‘We’re talking about (granting clemency to) a whole lot of people,’ Biden said. 

However, the Times reported that Biden ‘did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people,’ according to the former president and his aides.

Congressional committees, like the House Oversight Committee, are also investigating the autopen use and Biden’s health while in office. 

A senior administration official recognized the simultaneous efforts but stressed that the White House Counsel’s investigation is separate from any congressional probes. 

Officials told Fox News Digital the investigation is a ‘massive effort,’ and one that they hope to finish ‘as soon as possible.’ 

As for Trump, officials told Fox News Digital he does not use an autopen for anything that could be considered official business.

The only time Trump may use the autopen is for unofficial business, including correspondence, letters for birthdays or commissioned records for widely shared documents, his office said.  

The White House is pushing back against criticism of the administration’s handling of files pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein as figures on both sides of the aisle demand their release.

‘The fact that Democrats have now seized on this as if they ever wanted transparency when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, which is an asinine suggestion for any Democrat to make. The Democrats had control of this building, the White House, for four years, and they didn’t do a dang thing when it came to transparency in regards to Jeffrey Epstein and his heinous crimes,’ White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Thursday. 

Leavitt then attempted to shift focus, saying that President Donald Trump cared more about other issues, such as the GENIUS Act and the border. This echoed a sentiment expressed by Trump, who said that the Justice Department has ‘bigger problems’ than the Epstein case.

Additionally, Leavitt told reporters that Trump is not recommending a special prosecutor in the Epstein case, saying that ‘the idea was floated from someone in the media to the president.’
A recent joint Justice Department-FBI memo obtained by Axios showed the department and the bureau concluded they had no evidence of Epstein blackmailing powerful people, keeping a client list or being killed.

Republicans have grown frustrated with what they see as a lack of transparency from the Trump administration. The president has lashed out amid the criticism, claiming that it is a ‘hoax’ and that those on the right concerned about the release of the files were being ‘duped’ by Democrats. 

On Wednesday, Trump said Attorney General Pam Bondi would release ‘whatever’s credible’ related to the Epstein case.

‘He’s dead. He’s gone,’ Trump said of Epstein. ‘And, all it is, is the Republicans, certain Republicans got duped by the Democrats, and they’re following a Democrat playbook and no different than Russia, Russia, Russia and all the other hoaxes.’

The infighting isn’t limited to Republican lawmakers. A source recently told Fox News Digital that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino was considering resigning over the handling of the files. However, he has not made any announcements about leaving.

Fox News Digital’s Danielle Wallace and Amanda Macias, and Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich, David Spunt and Jake Gibson contributed to this report.

Senators are not thrilled with a top White House official’s comments that the government funding process should become more partisan, and fear that doing so could erode Congress’ power of the purse.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought told reporters during a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast Thursday morning that he believed ‘the appropriations process has to be less bipartisan.’

His sentiment came on the heels of Senate Republicans advancing President Donald Trump’s $9 billion clawback package, which would cancel congressionally approved funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting, just a few hours before.

Unlike the hyper-partisan bills that have dominated the Senate’s recent agenda, including the rescissions package and the president’s ‘big, beautiful bill,’ the appropriations process is typically a bipartisan affair in the upper chamber.

That is because, normally, most bills brought to the floor have to pass the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, and with the GOP’s narrow majority, Senate Democrats will need to pass any spending bills or government funding extensions to ward off a partial government shutdown.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who alluded to issues down the line with the appropriations process if Republicans advanced Trump’s resicssions package, took a harsh stance against Vought. 

‘Donald Trump should fire Russell Vought immediately, before he destroys our democracy and runs the country into the ground,’ Schumer said. 

Members of the Senate Appropriations Committee also did not take kindly to Vought’s comments.

‘I think he disrespects it,’ Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said. ‘I think he thinks that we are irrelevant, and I wish I had actually heard the speech, because, you know, again, everything in context.’

‘But you have to admit that when you look at the quotes that are highlighted in the story this morning, it is pretty dismissive of the appropriations process, pretty dismissive,’ she continued.

Vought has no intention of slowing the rescissions train coming from the White House, and said that there would be more rescissions packages on the way.

He noted another would ‘come soon,’ as lawmakers in the House close in on a vote to send the first clawback package to the president’s desk.

‘There is no voter in the country that went to the polls and said, ‘I’m voting for a bipartisan appropriations process,’’ Vought said. ‘That may be the view of something that appropriators want to maintain.’

Both Murkowski and Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, voted against the rescissions package, and warned of the cuts to public broadcasting, lack of transparency from the OMB and the possible effect it could have on legislating in the upper chamber.

‘I disagree with both those statements,’ Collins said of Vought’s push for a more partisan appropriations process. ‘Just as with the budget that the President submitted, we had to repeatedly ask him and the agencies to provide us with the detailed account information, which amounts to 1000s of pages that our appropriators and their staff meticulously review.’

Fox News Digital reached out to the OMB for comment. 

Vought’s comments came at roughly the same time as appropriators were holding a mark-up hearing of the military construction and veterans’ affairs and Commerce, Justice and Science spending bills.

Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said during the hearing that Senate Republicans coalescing behind the rescissions package would only make hammering out spending bills more difficult, and argued that ‘trust’ was at the core of the process.

‘That’s part of why bipartisan bills are so important,’ she said. ‘But everyone has to understand getting to the finish line always depends on our ability to work together in a bipartisan way, and it also depends on trust.’

Other Republicans on the panel emphasized a similar point, that, without some kind of cooperation, advancing spending bills would become even more challenging.

Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., said that finding ‘critical mass’ to move spending bills was important, and warned that people have to ‘quit saying it’s gotta just be my way or the highway,’ following threats Schumer’s threats last week that the appropriations process could suffer should the rescissions package pass. 

‘People better start recognizing that we’re all gonna have to work together and hopefully get these [appropriations] bills to the floor and see what we can move,’ he said. ‘But if somebody just sits up and says, ‘Oh, because there’s a rescission bill, then I’m not going to work on Appropriations,’ you can always find an excuse not to do something. Let’s figure out how we can work forward.’

The Trump administration reversed a Biden-era legal opinion from the Department of Justice on Thursday that permitted taxpayer dollars to be used for ancillary services associated with helping someone obtain an abortion, such as transportation costs. 

The policy was particularly used in aiding unaccompanied minor migrants to get abortions, according to the Trump administration.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, the Health and Human Services Department took the view that taxpayer dollars – even though prohibited by Congress from being used to pay for abortions directly under the Hyde Amendment – could be used to provide transportation services for patients seeking an abortion. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), charged with interpreting the laws for the president and executive branch agencies, agreed at the time under the Biden administration.    

However, that interpretation and opinion have been upended after Trump’s OLC issued a new one Thursday that bars taxpayer funds from going toward any ‘ancillary services’ that might help someone get an abortion. 

The 2022 Biden-era OLC opinion formed the basis for HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to use federal funds to help unaccompanied minors obtain transportation and other services in support of getting an abortion, according to the July 11 opinion released Thursday.

‘Current regulations require ORR to ‘ensure that all unaccompanied children in ORR custody… be provided with… access to… family planning services,’ and recognize that ‘transportation across State lines and associated ancillary services’ may be ‘necessary to access’ such ‘family planning services,” the new opinion stated.

‘Where such transportation services are necessary for an individual to obtain an abortion, the associated costs constitute the kind of indirect expense that the post-1993 Hyde Amendment limits,’ the opinion continues. ‘Under current circumstances, interstate transportation expenses could dwarf the cost of the abortion procedure itself. It would thus be inconsistent with longstanding congressional policy – as reflected in the Hyde Amendment’s textual bar on ‘expend[itures] for any abortion’ – for HHS to fund such expenses merely because they do not go directly to the person or entity performing the abortion.’

In 1993, Congress changed the statutory language of the Hyde Amendment, which resulted in years of disputes over the measure’s interpretation. 

The new OLC opinion released Thursday argues that the 1993 change expanded the Hyde Amendment to include anything done in service of someone receiving an abortion, not just the abortion itself.

Fox News Digital did not receive a response from the Justice Department prior to publication of this story.

The move to strengthen the Hyde Amendment’s protections follows the president’s Executive Order 14182, instructing agencies to ‘end the forced use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion.’