Concern about who was actually running day-to-day operations at the White House under former President Joe Biden stretched all the way to the top of the Democratic National Committee, former vice chair David Hogg unknowingly revealed this week.
Hogg, who was stripped of the powerful perch earlier this month, said that he and other party leaders were fearful of the power wielded by Anthony Bernal, the chief of staff to former First Lady Jill Biden, who was deeply involved in directing the administration’s activities behind the scenes.
Asked by an undercover Project Veritas journalist just how “corrupt” the DNC became under Biden, Hogg demurred but said Bernal carried “enormous” influence in the West Wing.
“That was an open secret. Like, I would avoid him. He was scary,” Hogg recalled.
Bernal was a “shadowy, Wizard of Oz-type figure” orchestrating many of the Democratic administration’s policy and personnel decisions.
Hogg added, “He wielded an enormous amount of power. I can’t stress to you how much power he had at the White House.”
Before joining the Bidens, Bernal served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations. He was the deputy campaign manager for President Biden’s failed 2024 reelection campaign.
He has been among the closest confidants of the Bidens and was subpoenaed by U.S. House Republicans in July 2024 shortly after Biden dropped out of the race to explain what lengths aides went to conceal the president’s mental decline. Bernal was reportedly among the top four aides present with Biden at his Delaware home when he made the decision to end his bid, the LA Times previously reported.
The botched Biden campaign has torn open fissures among Democrats seeking to recriminate one another for the election of President Donald Trump. Hogg, who was ousted as DNC vice chair following an internal vote by party elites, is just the latest party member to detail who was running the country while President Biden fell asleep in debate prep and forgot the names of his longtime staffers.
Elected on a platform of pushing his party further to the left, Hogg fell out of favor with DNC colleagues after establishing an outside political action committee intending to raise funds and defeat sitting moderate Democrats in the 2026 elections. He gained notoriety for being one of the most prominent advocates for gun control after surviving the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
Since Trump took office, Washington, D.C. Republicans have realigned their focus toward passage of his agenda, but other postmortems of the Biden presidency are still taking place. Last week, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino announced that Biden-era investigations around the J6 pipe bombs, the discovery of cocaine in the White House, and the 2022 leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision are being reviewed for “potential public corruption.”
