Mike Johnson: When I Asked Biden Why He Paused LNG Exports to Europe, He Seemed to Have No Idea He Did That

Johnson: “I do stand by it. And I say this without any personal animus at all.I mean, you know, in some ways I actually kind of feel sorry for Joe Biden. I mean, he’s in the twilight years of his life. He is not — 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, you know, year and a half since I’ve had this — “
Weiss: “Can you tell us a story when you say personal observation? What kind of thing did you see?”
Johnson: “Well, this is — it’s public now, because The Wall Street Journal got it and put it on the front page, but January, a year ago, almost exactly a year ago, I had been asking — 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, I’m a constitutional law guy. The 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 — giving me excuses. This went on for, like, eight or nine weeks. ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Speaker, he doesn’t have time.’ ‘What are you talking about? I’m second in line of the presidency. He has time. I need to talk to him.’ We had — I can’t say the classified parts, but we had some big, big national concerns at the time that I was losing sleep over. Finally, I just went to the whole press corps and said the president has not been allowed to meet with the speaker, there’s a problem, so they started putting pressure on them. Long story short, they finally relented, they invited me to the White House, I show up and I realize it’s actually an ambush, because it’s not just me and the president, it’s also Kamala Harris, Chuck, Schumer, Hakeem, you know, the whole — CIA director, everybody. And then — so I walked in the Oval and, ‘Ah, I know what this is. They’re going to hot-box the speaker on Ukraine funding. That’s what it was.’ This is probably the third week of January. We sit down, we’re in the midst of it, and the whole conversation and I’m going, ‘We don’t need to have this conversation.’ The president reaches over just like this, we’re sitting right next to the fireplace in the Oval and he grabs my arm and he says, ‘The speaker and I just need a couple minutes together. Would you all just leave us alone?’ And I looked up on the faces of some of the staff standing around the wall and they’re like, ‘No, he did it!’ So he called it, he’s the commander-in-chief. So everybody leaves and he and I are standing awkwardly in the middle of the Oval Office, right over the rug by that coffee table and I said, ‘Mr. President, thanks for the moment. This is very important. I got some big national security things I need to talk to you about that I’ve heard, and I think you know. What do we do? But first, real quickly, Mr. President, can I ask you a question? I cannot answer this for my constituents in Louisiana. Sir, why did you pause LNG exports to Europe? Like, I don’t understand. 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 got to get their gas from him?’ And he looks at me stunned with this, and he said, ‘I — I didn’t do that.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, yes, you did. It was an executive order like three weeks ago.’ He goes, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and he’s arguing with me. I said, ‘Mr. President, respectfully, can I — could I go out here and ask your secretary to print it out? We will read it together. You definitely did that.’ He goes, ‘Oh, you’re talking about natural gas?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘No, no, 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 terminals, 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.”