With every passing week, it seems as though new, damning details emerge about what really went on behind the scenes in the Biden White House, both in terms of the former president’s cognitive frailty and also of the efforts undertaken by staffers to hide it.

As the New York Post reports, Ian Sams, the former White House spokesperson who famously touted Biden’s supposed sharpness and physical vigor and attacked anyone who dared suggest otherwise, has since confessed that he hardly ever saw the then-commander in chief in person.

Sam's steadfast defense scrutinized

The former administration representative’s spin campaign kicked into high gear in the wake of Biden’s disastrous presidential debate against Donald Trump in June 2024, an event that prompted widespread concern due to the Democrat incumbent’s foggy, often incoherent performance.

Days after the on-stage debacle, Sams made the media rounds, telling MSNBC that Biden’s fierce reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity was illustrative of his continued sharpness and fitness for the job.

Sams said at the time, “Yesterday, when he [gave] the speech about what the Supreme Court did, he drove that speech.”

He continued, “That’s the President Biden that so many of us experience every single day, who’s asking the tough questions so that we as staff can be sharp to do our job best for the American people.”

Working hard to portray himself as someone with first-hand insight into Biden’s acuity, Sams added, “When I deal with him, he is sharp. He’s asking tough questions.”

Cracks in the narrative emerge

As the Post explains, however, when subjected to scrutiny from the House Oversight Committee in August, Sams’ prior accounts began to crumble.

According to a transcript of the sit-down released earlier this week, Sams admitted that his direct observations of Biden were far less significant than his prior statements implied.

Sams told the panel, “The first time I met President Biden personally was in a meeting, maybe in early 2024,” adding, “I interacted with him pretty infrequently.”

Upon further questioning from committee interviewers, Sams acknowledged that he only dealt directly with the then-president “three or four times.”

Those interactions, he said, took the form of two in-person meetings, one telephone meeting, and one virtual meeting, causing many to doubt the basis on which his later claims of Biden’s mental agility were made.

Tour of denial

Sams is not the only former Biden-era communications staffer to face harsh scrutiny regarding their past -- and persistent -- representations about their then-boss’s cognitive facility while in office, as former press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been drawing widespread mockery as she attempts to flog her new memoir, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.

Speaking to Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker Jean-Pierre insisted it was never her place to say whether Biden was too feeble to consider a second term, and when the issue of the catastrophic debate performance “and the other things that everyone saw” was raised, she said simply, “the debate for me was one time. I had never seen him like that before,” taking a position that, according to multiple pundits -- even on the left -- could be the final blow to her career.