Mike Donilon, an aide to former President Biden, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that he would have received a roughly $4 million bonus if the former president won reelection last year.
In a video released Tuesday by the committee, Donilon said in July that if Biden won the 2024 race, he would have gotten the bonus as part of “a guarantee by the campaign.” That was on top of his roughly $4 million base salary, which Donilon confirmed during his testimony.
CNN’s Jake Tapper first reported on Donilon’s testimony in July. The interview was part of the Oversight Committee’s investigation into Biden’s physical and mental decline, the findings of which were unveiled Tuesday.
The committee’s 100-page report claimed that financial incentives “motivated [Biden’s] inner circle to conceal the president’s decline while running the government in his stead.” It said that Donilon, who was responsible for briefing Biden on the latest polling data in his reelection battle against President Trump, “held a tight grip on which polling data President Biden received and how to interpret such data.”
Biden, already the oldest president in U.S. history, initially ran for reelection despite suggesting during his victorious 2020 campaign he would be a “bridge” to a future generation. But after his halting debate performance against Trump in June 2024, which led the public and many Democratic lawmakers to call for his exit, he dropped out of the race the following month.
Vice President Harris then ascended to the top of the ticket before losing to Trump in the November election.
Donilon, a decades-long adviser to Biden, was the chief strategist of the former president’s 2020 and 2024 campaigns. The president’s first chief of staff, Ron Klain, told the committee in July that Donilon presented polling compiled by individual contractors to Biden.
In his testimony to the committee, Donilon said that he was honest with Biden about the polling data. The committee’s report noted, though, that even after the debate, Donilon thought Biden could win reelection — despite polling overwhelmingly showing him as an underdog and other members of the former president’s inner circle, such as chief of staff Jeff Zients and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, believing he should drop out.
“Regardless of their personal opinions about whether President Biden should run for reelection in 2024, President Biden’s inner circle persisted in its cover-up and gaslighting scheme to conceal the president’s mental state and deterioration from the American people throughout the 2024 campaign,” the report says.
