“Who’s Really in Charge?’ Mike Johnson Reveals First Biden Meeting Left Him Alarmed – Claims Biden Was Unaware of His Own Executive Order”

House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed Friday that his first private meeting with President Joe Biden made him fearful as the president had no idea what was in an executive order he had recently signed.

Johnson said Biden was clueless as to what was in his own order banning natural gas exports to Europe he asked himself, “Who is running the country?”

The leading House Republican sat down with The Free Press in D.C. where he claimed Biden was cognitively impaired and had not been running the country for “some time,” and he believed the president was simply signing what others were putting in front of him.

Bari Weiss asked him to describe a January 2022 White House meeting with Biden – his first. Johnson said the meet took months after the president’s inner circle initially stonewalled him.

Johnson said he felt no “animus” toward Biden and that he actually pitied him after spending time with him alone

“I mean, he’s in the twilight years of his life,” Johnson said. “He obviously 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, very concerning to me over the last year and a half.” He added:

I became speaker in October 2023. And there were all sorts of big national security concerns and everything going on. And I started requesting a meeting with the president because, you know, I’m kind of old school and constitutional law guy, speaker of the House, should be able to talk to the president, especially in times of great national interest and calamity. But they wouldn’t let me meet with him. And his staff kept putting it, getting in excuses. This went on for like eight or nine weeks.

Johnson said instead of meeting Biden alone he was in a room with the president, House and Senate Democrats, Vice President Kamala Harris, and a CIA official. He explained he was alone with Biden only after the president asked his advisers to leave the room – which he said they did hesitantly. He then explained:

The speaker said he raised some “national security” issues with Biden but pressed him over an executive order he said was hurting his constituents in Louisiana.

“Mr. President, can I ask you a question?” Johnson recounted asking. “I cannot answer this from my constituents in Louisiana, sir. Why did you pause LNG exports to Europe? Like, I don’t know. You know, liquefied natural gas is in great demand by our allies. Why would you do that? Because you understand we just talked about Ukraine. You understand you’re fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine because they’ve got to get their gas from him.”

Johnson added:

You know, and he looks at me stunned with this – and he said, I didn’t do that. I said, Mr. President, yes, you did. It was an executive order like three weeks ago. And he goes, no, I didn’t do that. He’s arguing with me. I said, Mr. President, respectfully, I could I go out here and ask your secretary to print it out? We’ll read it together.

You definitely did that. And he goes, you talk about natural gas. Yes, sir. He said, No, no, I have to. You misunderstand, he said, What I did is I signed this thing. We’re going to conduct a study on the effects of LNG.

I said, No, you’re not, sir, you paused it. I know I have the terminal, the export terminals in my state. I talked to those people this morning. This is doing massive damage to our economy, national security.

It occurred to me Bari, he was not lying to me. He genuinely did not know what he had signed. And I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, “We’re in serious trouble. Who is running the country?” Like, I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know.

On Jan. 26, 2024, the White House announced a “temporary pause on pending approvals of liquefied natural gas exports” as part of its climate agenda.