President Donald Trump has ordered an investigation into pardons and other executive actions issued by his predecessor, Joe Biden — launching an extraordinary effort to show that the Democrat hid his cognitive decline and was otherwise too mentally impaired to do the job.
Trump, who turns 79 this month, has long questioned the mental acuity and physical stamina of Biden, and is now directing his administration to use governmental investigative powers to try and back up those assertions. Biden, 82, and now undergoing treatment for prostate cancer, dismissed Trump’s actions as “ridiculous.”
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Legal experts are skeptical about that the investigation will do much more than fire up Trump’s core supporters.
“I think it’s more of a political act than one that will have any legal effect,” said Richard Pildes, a constitutional law scholar at New York University School of Law. He added: “I think it’s designed to continue to fuel a narrative that the administration wants to elevate, but courts are not going to second-guess these sorts of executive actions” undertaken by Biden.