A Disturbing, But Not Surprising, Story

On Saturday, Red State posted an article about the workings of the Biden administration, including some comments by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

The article includes the following story:

JOHNSON: They wouldn’t let me meet with him, and his staff kept giving me excuses. This went on for like eight or nine weeks, “I’m sorry Mr. Speaker, he doesn’t have time.” What are you talking about? I’m second in line to the presidency, he has time. I need to talk to him. We had, I can’t say the classified parts, but we had some big national concerns at the time that I was losing sleep over. Finally, I just went to the whole press corps and said the president is not being allowed to meet with the speaker so they start putting pressure on him. 

Long story short, they finally relented, they invited me to the White House, I show up and I realize it’s actually an ambush because it’s not just me and the president. It’s actually Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem, the CIA Director, and everybody, and then so I walk into the Oval, and I say, “Ah, I know what this is. They’re going to hotbox the Speaker on Ukraine funding.” That’s what it was. 

This is probably the third week of January. We sit down, we’re in the midst of it and I’m saying, “We don’t need to have this conversation.” The president reaches over, just like this, we were sitting right next to the fireplace in the Oval, and he says, “The Speaker and I just need a couple minutes together. We y’all just leave us alone?” And I looked up on the faces of some of staff standing around the wall, and they were like, “No, he did it.” 

He called it, he’s the commander in chief, so everybody leaves, and he and I are standing awkwardly in the middle of the Oval Office right over the rug by that coffee table, and I said, “Mr. President, thanks for the moments, you know, this is very important, I’ve got some big national security things I need to talk to you about that I’ve heard, and I think you know, but first, real quickly, Mr. President, can I ask you a question?”

“I can’t answer this for my constituents in Louisiana. Sir, why did you pause LNG exports? Liquified natural gas is in great demand by our allies, why would you do that? Cause you understand, we just talked about Ukraine, you understand you’re fueling Putin’s war machine?”  And he looked at me, stunned, and he said, “I didn’t do that.” And I said, “Mr. President, yes you did, it was an executive order like three weeks ago.” He said, “No, I didn’t do that,” he was arguing with me. 

The story continues:

That’s where things get even crazier. Biden went on to admit he signed an executive order, but he told Johnson that believed he had only authorized a study on the effects of LNG. 

JOHNSON: I said, “No you’re not sir, you paused it, I have the terminal, the export terminal in our state, I talked to those people this morning. This is doing massive damage to our economy, to our national security.”

I thought, “We are in serious trouble.” Who’s running the country?” I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know.

In other words, someone had used subterfuge to get the President of the United States to sign an executive order he didn’t even know he was signing. Those around him were weaponizing his senility to push through their far-left agenda, and Biden wasn’t even sentient enough to notice. That is the very definition of shocking. 

There are four major points to note in this story:

1. President Biden’s staff was reluctant to have him meet with Speaker Johnson.

2. President Biden’s staff did not want him to meet with Speaker Johnson alone.

3. What President Biden signed was not what he was told he was signing.

4. Why did Speaker Johnson wait until now to tell this story?