House Speaker Mike Johnson recalled a meeting with Joe Biden months after Republicans took control of the House that convinced him the president’s mind was failing him and that officials within Biden’s inner circle were keeping his condition from the American people. The Louisiana Republican, in an interview with The Free Press, said that after he became speaker, it took weeks for him to finally get a meeting with Biden after Johnson learned of a number of growing national security threats.
“He has not been in charge for some time — and I know this by personal observation, and now the whole world knows it, and it’s been very concerning to me,” Johnson said in an “Honestly” podcast interview with The Free Press’s founder and editor, Bari Weiss. Johnson confirmed a June 2024 Wall Street Journal report, which relied on unnamed sources, that detailed the speaker’s reaction to Biden’s remarks during a late February 2024 White House meeting on sending military aid to Ukraine.
On the sidelines of that meeting, Johnson privately expressed his concern to Biden that freezing U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG)—a move reportedly intended to reassess America’s status as the world’s largest LNG exporter—could push European allies to rely on Russian supplies. Such a shift would, in turn, indirectly finance Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war efforts and jeopardize several multibillion-dollar LNG export projects in Johnson’s home state of Louisiana. “And he looked at me, stunned, and said, ‘I didn’t do that,’” Johnson recalled in the video posted below.
“And I said, ‘Mr. President, yes, you did — it was an executive order three weeks ago.’ And he says, ‘I didn’t do that.’ He’s arguing with me,” Johnson continued. “I say, ‘Mr. President, respectfully, can I go out there and ask your secretary to print it out while we are here together — you definitely did that.’ He goes, ‘Oh, you’re talking about natural gas!’”
According to Johnson, Biden then claimed he had signed an order to launch a study on the effects of LNG. Johnson responded by informing the president that the policy in question was not just a subject for study—it was already being implemented in Louisiana, where the export terminal is located. He recalled telling Biden that this policy was causing significant harm to both the economy and national security.
“It occurred to me, Bari, he was not lying to me. He genuinely did not know what he signed. And I walked [back] into that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, ‘We’re in serious trouble — who’s running the country? Like, I don’t know who put the paper in front of him but he didn’t know'” he had signed the LNG ban.
Johnson noted that it was not First Lady Jill Biden who had been running the White House for the past year and a half. Instead, he suggested that some individuals from Biden’s Democratic presidential primary rivals, whom Biden had brought into his administration, were responsible for devising policies that the president ultimately signed as “incongruous as they were, as dangerous as they were.”
From inauguration weekend in D.C., @SpeakerJohnson and @BariWeiss dive into Elon vs. Bannon, why he calls Biden “the worst president ever,” his vision for a GOP-led “new golden age,” and his best Trump impression.
Presented by Uber and X. pic.twitter.com/84PiXyI0op
— The Free Press (@TheFP) January 18, 2025
