A new round of scrutiny has emerged on Capitol Hill following former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s testimony about how the Biden administration handled videos that showed President Joe Biden appearing confused or frail and the pressure to have these videos removed online.

During her September 12, 2025, appearance before the House Oversight Committee, Jean-Pierre defended the administration’s use of the term “cheap fakes” to describe the clips, language critics now say was part of a wider censorship effort to discredit and suppress unflattering footage of the president.

The exchange, of which the transcript has recently been made available, shed new light on a communications strategy that began while Jean-Pierre was still in the White House.

We obtained a copy of the transcript for you here.

In 2024, she and other officials routinely dismissed viral clips showing Biden wandering off during events or appearing momentarily disoriented as “cheap fakes” or “deepfakes.”

The videos, many of which came from official public recordings, caused widespread discussion about the president’s health.

At the time, the Biden administration insisted the footage was manipulated, maliciously edited.

“We’re seeing these deepfakes, these manipulated videos, and it is, again, done in bad faith,” Jean-Pierre said from the White House podium in response to reporters’ questions about Biden’s behavior at the G7 summit in Italy and a Juneteenth celebration in Washington.

The administration’s position was reinforced by a newly formed campaign task force tasked with pressuring social media companies to remove or flag the videos.

Campaign spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said the effort was intended to ensure voters were “well-informed and not misled.”

But Jean-Pierre’s testimony revealed uncertainty over how the “cheap fakes” narrative was created.

She told investigators that the phrase appeared in her official briefing binder, though she could not recall who added it.

She said the term originated with the media and that the White House was simply “elevating…what the media was saying.”

When asked whether any of the videos showing Biden freezing or appearing confused were real, Jean-Pierre said she did “not recall any that were real.”

The Oversight Committee, led by Chairman James Comer, is now probing whether the administration’s messaging crossed into coordinated suppression of legitimate political speech.

Lawmakers argue the “cheap fakes” campaign echoed the same tactics under review in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court case that challenges alleged government pressure on social media platforms to censor disfavored viewpoints.

During the Biden years, the push to label clips of the president as misleading aligned with the broader federal effort to combat so-called “disinformation.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) had already been urging platforms to apply mandatory labels to AI-generated media, but the White House went further, demanding action against videos that were not proven to be manipulated.