Andrew Bates, a former senior deputy press secretary in the Biden White House, told House Oversight Committee investigators in a closed-door interview that reactions to President Joe Biden’s June debate performance against Donald Trump were "overblown" and that he ultimately agreed with Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race after reviewing polling data.
Bates, who worked in Biden’s communications shop for nearly the entirety of the administration, spent more than five hours with committee staff, according to a person familiar with the session. The source said Bates told investigators that immediate public reaction to the debate did not fully reflect the broader political picture and that later polling during the final week of the campaign influenced his view that withdrawing was the appropriate course.
A separate source close to Bates said that after having time to process the events and observing shifts in public polling in the campaign’s closing week, Bates agreed that Biden had made the right decision to end his re-election bid. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the closed-door proceedings.
Bates's appearance reflects the committee’s broader effort to question current and former White House staff about the administration’s communications and decision-making in the run-up to Biden’s withdrawal. Bates was one of the administration’s most visible communications officials and was often a public defender of the president’s policies and messaging.
Committee officials have not released a transcript of the interview. House Oversight, led by Republicans, has conducted multiple closed-door interviews as part of inquiries into the administration. Bates’s comments about the debate and his description of looking to polling in assessing the campaign’s prospects were among the more explicit acknowledgments by a senior former aide that public reaction to a single event did not alone determine the president’s course of action.
Bates’s tenure in the communications office spanned most of Biden’s term, giving him direct knowledge of internal strategy and messaging choices. He has not publicly detailed the content of his interview, and the committee has declined to provide an accounting of closed-door testimony beyond narrow summaries or when witnesses have testified publicly.
The Oversight Committee has pursued multiple lines of investigation related to the president, and testimonies from current and former aides have been a central part of its fact-finding. Bates’s characterization of the debate fallout as "overblown" and his explanation that polling data influenced his judgment add to the record of how the campaign and White House evaluated the political landscape in the weeks before Biden’s withdrawal.