White House doctors scrutinized in wake of Biden diagnosis

Top oncologist and former Biden team member Ezekiel Emanuel said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Monday that he believes former President Joe Biden had prostate cancer for years before his formal diagnosis on Friday. Emanuel is a former member of Biden’s transition team and brother to former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

Biden’s office said that his cancer ranks at number 9 of 10 on the Gleason scale and that it has metastasized to the bones. Emanuel said it is rare for cancer to progress to that level in only the few months since Biden left office. He also speculated that former physician to the president Kevin O’Connor either did not disclose his full health reports or that he allowed Biden to opt out of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) exams. In February of 2024, O’Connor gave Biden a clean bill of health following his annual physical.

But Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C., said it is likely that doctors could not have caught it earlier. Murphy is a urologist who treats prostate cancer. He told NewsNation Monday that PSA levels often read deceptively low until a case is advanced. Murphy added that there’s no evidence yet that doctors hid an earlier diagnosis. He said patients can live 10 to 15 years after a diagnosis of aggressive prostate cancer if they respond well to treatment.

What’s the context here? The diagnosis of an aggressive form of prostate cancer comes two days after the release of excerpts from a book claiming the White House covered up Biden’s physical decline. Alex Thompson of Axios and Jake Tapper of CNN wrote in “Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” that Biden presented signs of cognitive and physical decline only a year into his presidency. Over the weekend, Axios published a redacted version special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with Biden last year. Hur said Biden struggled to remember events from only a few years ago. He decided not to press charges against Biden for storing classified information in his basement because a jury would likely find the president to be what he characterized as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. The Department of Justice during the Biden administration refused to release the audio from the full interview.

During a press briefing today, reporters asked press secretary Karoline Leavitt whether Trump would investigate the former White House physician and whether he was concerned about the quality of his care. Leavitt said Trump has full confidence in the current White House physician and the team at Walter Reed Medical Center. She said she’d wait for the president to speak on any further scrutiny of former White House physician Kevin O’Connor before making any comment on that.

Who is the president’s doctor? Up until March of this year, retired U.S. Army Col. Kevin O’Connor was the physician to the president. He began working in the White House physicians office in 2006 during the Bush administration. In 2009, he became physician to then-Vice President Joe Biden. Biden promoted him to physician to the president in 2021. He remained in that role for the first few months of Trump’s second term. In March, Trump replaced O’Connor with U.S. Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella.

What has Biden said? Biden has not made any public remarks, but he posted a photo of himself and former First Lady Jill Biden to social media and thanked well-wishers. Cancer touches everyone, he said. He added that, like so many others, he and former first lady Jill Biden had learned that they were strongest in the broken place.