A devastating new video released by the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday shows one of former President Joe Biden’s top advisers admitting he would have received a massive payday – if his boss stayed in the 2024 race and was able to win.
The clip involves former Biden Senior Advisor Mike Donilon. And while it was reported over the summer that he told the committee he was paid $4 million to work on Biden’s reelection campaign and was set to receive an additional $4 million if he was re-elected, the release of the video of Donilon testifying is damning.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by the hosts of Ruthless – Josh Holmes, Michael Duncan, John Ashbrook, and Comfortably Smug – to discuss the tape and why it is so shocking.
The Admission
According to video and transcripts made public by the House Oversight Committee as part of a staff report titled “The Biden Autopen Presidency: Decline, Delusion, and Deception in the White House,” Donilon begrudgingly admitted in a July 31 interview that not just the 2024 campaign – but the whole Biden presidency – was essentially, in Megyn’s words, “nothing more than a money-making operation for his family and friends.”
The admission was made during a question and answer session led by House staffers Peter Spectre, special staff member for the majority, and Margaret Harker, senior advisor for the majority. Here is how it began:
SPECTRE: Well, I’m just curious because you’re saying that you believe that the President should stay in the race, and then you advocated for that. And I think, you know, I’m just curious if your own final stake in the matter had any — was a factor in any way in your advice to the President?
DONILON: Well, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe it was a factor in my advice to the President. I had given the President advice for a long, long time, and I believed in him. And so that’s my view.
SPECTRE: Just to be clear, would the amount of pay you received for your role on the campaign, would that have changed, depending on how far into the race President Biden made it?
DONILON: My sense is that, that he — in my view, the money was — it was a guarantee, the campaign, that we had a negotiation, and that’s my memory of the agreement.
That is when Harker jumped in.
HARKER: You never received a bonus — depending on the way the campaign went, was that a possibility?
DONILON: How the campaign went?
HARKER: Were there any circumstances in which you would have received a bonus?
DONILON: Yes, it was.
HARKER: What were those circumstances?
DONILON: That Joe Biden would have been reelected President of the United States.
HARKER: What would the bonus have been?
DONILON: I believe it would have been $4 million.
HARKER: In addition to the $4 million that you were already paid?
DONILON: Yes.
Spectre then took the reins once more.
SPECTRE: Do you consider $4 million to be a significant sum of money?
DONILON: I thought it was a — I thought it was a fair agreement that we had reached.
SPECTRE: Do you think that the prospect of a significant payday, say, of $4 million could impact someone’s judgment in general?
DONILON: Well, I think, under the circumstances you’re discussing, the incentive was to keep the President in the race. At the end, I gave him my judgment that he should withdraw.
SPECTRE: At what point did you determine that you believed he should withdraw?
DONILON: Well, I think that judgment on the weekend that he made that decision.
SPECTRE: So, up until that point, you continued to advocate that he stay in the race?
DONILON: Yes.
It should be noted that, in that same interview, Donilon defended Biden’s fitness for office. And that doesn’t come as much surprise given his decades-long relationship with the D.C. veteran (they’ve known each other since 1981) and proximity to power. “We’ve talked about Mike Donilon before on this show because he was part of President Biden’s… ‘politburo’ – a group of advisers that Biden always turned to,” Megyn noted.
The group also is believed to have included Bruce Reed, Steve Ricchetti, and Ron Klain, and a person familiar with this internal dynamic told Jake Tapper for his book Original Sin that “five people were running the country and Joe Biden was, at best, a senior member of the board.”
The ‘Dumb’ Delivery
What is missing from the transcript is the drawn out pauses, stammers, and stuttering that took place as a visibly uncomfortable Donilon tried to spit out his answers over the course of two long, awkward minutes (you can watch it in the video above).
“He pauses and stutters as he tries to answer a simple question: Would he have received money if Mr. Biden was re-elected? It’s a yes or a no,” Megyn said. “But it’s clear he doesn’t want to say because he knows the implications.”
His delivery, in her view, is what makes the video so much worse for Donilon. “He is clearly dodging. He is self conscious. He knows they’ve got him. He knows the motive for his terrible behavior is about to be outed in what I presume was an under oath deposition… and he wouldn’t even answer yes or no [at first],” she noted. “As we get to the end, because they followed… saying, ‘No, we’re asking whether it would have gone up; you had a bonus if he got reelected,’ finally he says yes. So, you know he was lying there when he was answering ‘it was guarantee’… Good for them for following up.”
Megyn said he would have been better off just owning it. “[It was] the worst possible… way to handle it,” she added. “The best way is to be like, ‘Yes, and I was to receive another $4 million if he made it across the line.’ That’s it… Then, they got their admission, which they were going to get no matter what, and you don’t look like a dishonest cretin. I can’t believe how dumb this guy was.”
‘Absolutely Not Normal’
The Ruthless fellas have worked on many a political campaign over the years, and they said it is hard to overstate just how shocking the $8 million figure is. “I don’t want your audience to think that that is what campaign managers are paid to run political campaigns,” Holmes noted. “That is insane.”
“When we used to run political campaigns, you had a very finite amount of cash that you were able to raise through hard dollar limits and whatnot… You try to keep your own overhead as low as possible in order to maximize resources for TV ads, for field work, for all the things that you need to do during the campaign,” he continued. “For someone to just say, like, ‘I’m going to take [$8 million] off the top of that’ in what is going to be a nip and tuck race is wild.”
As Smug explained, that money was coming from well-intentioned donors. “When they like, ‘Hey, keep shipping five bucks, 20 bucks,’ those small dollar donors… are getting rolled up into $8 million to go into Donilon’s pocket,” he said. “That is how greedy this guy is. That is absolutely not a normal amount to be paid.”
Ashbrook had an idea for getting things under control. “In Major League Baseball, there’s a lot of talk about a salary cap,” he joked. “So I wonder if, in Democrat politics, maybe some of the donors might be considering coming together and instituting a salary cap on Democrat campaigns.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Ruthless by tuning in to episode 1,181 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.