Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) has raised questions about his own alleged drug scandal after he accused President Joe Biden of planning to take “performance-enhancing drugs” ahead of his debate against Donald Trump this week.
Jackson, a former White House physician, announced he would be requesting Biden take a drug test both before and after the debate while speaking to Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo during an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures” over the weekend.
Jackson told Bartiromo he had “no choice” but to ask if the president was being medicated after witnessing his performance at March’s State of the Union address.
“There was a Joe Biden that came out that was not similar at all to what we see on a day-to-day basis for the last 3 1/2 years,” he said. “And there’s surely no way to explain that other than he was on something. That they’d given him medications.”
Jackson offered a detailed description of how he thought the president’s doctors would be medicating him, claiming Biden’s trip to Camp David prior to the debate would give his team an opportunity to experiment with “getting the doses just right.”
Asked what drugs the president could be taking, Jackson listed off a pharmacy’s worth of medications, including drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, as well as stimulants like Adderall and Provigil.
Jackson’s accusations seemed a little too on the nose considering he was implicated in his own alleged drug scandal after his time as the head of the White House Medical Unit.
In 2018, a report was released by the office of Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), a ranking member on the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, that claimed Jackson allegedly gave a White House Military Office staffer a “large supply” of the opioid Percocet without going through the proper procedures.
The report also alleged that White House staffers had nicknamed Jackson “Candyman” after witnessing his loose approach to prescribing controlled substances.
Jackson was the White House’s top physician under President Barack Obama and Trump. He exited the role in 2018 and became Trump’s chief medical adviser a year later.
In January, a report by the Defense Department’s inspector general found that from 2017 to 2019 of the Trump administration, White House physicians liberally prescribed controlled substances to Washington aides in violation of federal law, all while keeping subpar records of the medications being dispersed.
In response to the report, which did not name Jackson directly, a spokesperson for the doctor told NBC News that he was not the director of the White House Medical Unit during the bulk of the period records cited in the report were from.
