One of President Biden’s most trusted advisers, his son Hunter Biden, could have a conflict of interest while advising his father to stay in the race despite a disastrous debate performance last week.

Hunter Biden was one of the strongest voices in imploring his father to stay in the presidential race during a family huddle at Camp David on Sunday, according to a report from the New York Times.

‘Hunter Biden wants Americans to see the version of his father that he knows – scrappy and in command of the facts – rather than the stumbling, aging president Americans saw on Thursday night,’ the report said, noting that the president’s son has ‘long’ been one of his most trusted advisers.

The president’s son was joined by First Lady Jill Biden in encouraging him to see things through to November, the report noted, while other family members such as a grandchild have expressed interest in trying to do more to help the campaign, with the grandchild suggesting they could reach out to influencers on social media.

But Hunter Biden has perhaps the most to lose if his father drops out of the race, with the president’s son still facing sentencing after a conviction in a federal gun trial last month and another trial, this time on federal tax charges, later this year.

While President Biden has the ability to pardon his son in both cases – presidents can pardon prospectively, that is before someone has even been tried – he has so far indicated that he believed the first trial was fair and that he would ‘abide by the jury’s decision.’ 

‘I am not going to do anything,’ Biden told reporters last month.

Mike Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital that the president’s son advocating for him to stay in the race was far worse than a garden variety conflict of interest.

‘It’s not a conflict of interest at all, it’s just a pure and simple massive interest in his dad staying president so he can pardon not only Hunter, but Joe and the rest of the family for the crimes they committed, and probably Merrick Garland, too, for his role in the cover-up,’ Howell said.

Representatives for Hunter Biden did not immediately respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment.

Biden’s Camp David huddle with family members came just days after a debate performance that set off anxiety among Democratic politicians and donors, who noted the president appeared feeble and weak compared to former President Trump.

Biden has faced calls to drop out of the race and let a younger candidate grab the torch ahead of November, with many expressing doubt that the president was capable of defeating his chief political rival a second time.

Those fears were seemingly justified by a CBS News poll taken after the debate, where 45% of Democrats indicated the party should choose another candidate. Worse yet, only 27% of registered voters overall believe that Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president, down from 35% in the last survey taken before the debate.

Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign has forcefully pushed back against the idea the president would drop out, though the New York Times report notes that some sources close to the president said the door was not closed to the possibility.

But what the president chooses to do will ultimately come down to discussions between him and his family, NBC News reported after the debate, citing top Democratic sources.

‘The decision-makers are two people – it’s the president and his wife,’ one of the sources said. ‘Anyone who doesn’t understand how deeply personal and familial this decision will be isn’t knowledgeable about the situation.’

‘The only person who has ultimate influence with him is the first lady,’ added another. ‘If she decides there should be a change of course, there will be a change of course.’

The Biden campaign and White House did not immediately respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment.

The House Judiciary Committee is suing Attorney General Merrick Garland to obtain recordings of President Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.

The committee, as part of the lawsuit filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, stressed the importance of the ‘verbal and nonverbal context’ of Biden’s answers that could be provided by the audio recordings – especially considering that Hur opted against charging Biden after the interview, in part, because he was viewed as ‘a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’ 

The lawsuit comes amid chaos in the Democratic Party as leaders consider whether Biden should continue with his re-election campaign after the president’s widely panned debate performance last week.

The committee, in its lawsuit, says the president’s invocation of executive privilege over the materials ‘lacks any merit,’ and it asks the court to overrule that assertion of privilege. 

‘This dispute is about a frivolous assertion of executive privilege,’ the lawsuit states. 

As part of the House impeachment inquiry against the president, the committee issued a subpoena to Garland to obtain records related to Hur’s investigation of Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified records. The committee sought materials related to Hur’s interviews with Biden and Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of Biden’s 2017 memoir. 

The Justice Department has provided the committee with transcripts of those interviews, but Garland ‘has refused to produce the audio recordings of the Special Counsel’s interviews with President Biden and Mr. Zwonitzer.’ 

‘Instead, Attorney General Garland asked that President Biden assert executive privilege over those recordings, and President Biden complied with that request,’ the lawsuit states. 

The committee argues that audio recordings ‘are better evidence than transcripts of what happened during the Special Counsel’s interviews with President Biden and Mr. Zwonitzer.’ 

‘For example, they contain verbal and nonverbal context that is missing from a cold transcript,’ the committee states. ‘That verbal and nonverbal context is quite important here because the Special Counsel relied on the way that President Biden presented himself during their interview – ‘as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’ – when ultimately recommending that President Biden should not be prosecuted for unlawfully retaining and disclosing classified information.’

The committee argued that the audio recordings – not merely the transcripts of them – are ‘the best available evidence of how President Biden presented himself during the interview.’ 

‘The Committee thus needs those recordings to assess the Special Counsel’s characterization of the President, which he and White House lawyers have forcefully disputed, and ultimate recommendation that President Biden should not be prosecuted,’ the suit states. 

The committee said Biden’s ‘self-serving attempt to shield the audio recording’ of his interview from the public ‘represents an astonishing effort to expand the scope of executive privilege from a constitutional privilege safeguarding certain substantive communications to an amorphous privilege that can be molded to protect things like voice, inflection, tone and pace of speech.’ 

The committee also noted that the transcript of the interview was made public, which essentially ‘waived’ executive privilege.’ 

‘Additionally, the heart of the privilege claim – that Executive Branch employees will be less likely to cooperate with DOJ investigations if they know that audio recordings of their interviews may be released to Congress after DOJ has made transcripts of those same interviews publicly available – is at odds with common sense,’ the lawsuit states. 

‘If the potential for disclosure would chill cooperation, it would be the disclosure of a transcript, which DOJ voluntarily disclosed here, not the disclosure of audio recordings after the transcripts are widely available,’ the lawsuit states. 

The committee argued that because of this, Biden’s invocation of executive privilege ‘lacks any merit.’ 

‘The Committee therefore asks this court to overrule the assertion of executive privilege and order that Attorney General Garland produce the audio recordings of the Special Counsel’s interviews with President Biden and Mr. Zwonitzer to the committee,’ the lawsuit states. 

The lawsuit comes just weeks after the House of Representatives voted to hold Garland in contempt of Congress, referring him for criminal charges over defying the congressional subpoenas for the audio recordings.

The Justice Department, though, said it would not prosecute Garland. 

‘Consistent with this longstanding position and uniform practice, the Department has determined that the responses by Attorney General Garland to the subpoenas issued by the committees did not constitute a crime, and accordingly the Department will not bring the congressional contempt citation before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute the Attorney General,’ Assistant Attorney General Carlos Felipe Uriarte told House Speaker Mike Johnson in a letter last month. 

Hur, who released his report to the public in February after months of investigation, did not recommend criminal charges against Biden for mishandling and retaining classified documents, and he stated that he would not bring charges against Biden even if he were not in the Oval Office. 

Those records included classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and other countries, among other records related to national security and foreign policy, which Hur said implicated ‘sensitive intelligence sources and methods.’

A poll released by CBS News on Sunday found that more voters have doubts about President Biden’s cognitive abilities after Thursday’s presidential debate.

The poll, which was conducted between Friday and Saturday, found that 18% of voters thought Biden’s debate performance inspired confidence, while 44% believed that former President Trump’s performance did. Only 21% of polled voters believed that Biden presented his ideas clearly.

When asked earlier in June if Biden had the mental and cognitive health to serve as president, 35% of respondents said he did. After the debate, that number dropped to 27%.

Sixty-five percent of polled voters said Biden did not have the mental and cognitive health to serve as president when asked on June 9. That number has increased to 72%.

When the respondents were asked about President Trump’s mental and cognitive abilities, around 50% voted in favor of Trump and 49% voted against him.

Among respondents who were registered Democrats, 55% said Biden should continue running and 45% believed he should step aside.

Biden’s poor performance at the CNN presidential debate has fueled anxieties about his chances of being re-elected. Both Republicans and Democrats have called for the president to end his campaign.

The New York Times editorial board and the editorial board of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution have called for Biden to drop out of the race. After the debate, the Times’ editorial board wrote that the ‘greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election.’

Fox News Digital reached out to the Biden campaign and Trump campaign for comment but did not immediately hear back.

Former Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel — who is 94 years old — wondered whether President Biden belongs in a nursing home instead of the White House following last week’s debate disaster.

‘I have never been more shocked and embarrassed by any presidential debate than I was last Thursday,’ Rangel, who served in Congress from 1971 to 2017, said Sunday on 770 WABC radio’s ‘The Cats Roundtable.’ 

‘One [candidate is] a convicted felon who has no respect for the truth, for morality. The other seemed so damned confused I didn’t even know whether he knew where the hell he was at in terms of responding to the moderator.’

Rangel, a Democrat, told host John Catsimatidis he ‘would not object’ to both candidates taking cognitive tests to determine their fitness. Trump is 78, just three years younger than Biden.

‘It’s clear that Biden was shaky in responding … One has to think about what happens in [the next] four years.’

Biden’s debate performance was so troubling that voters have to be reminded that Trump could be sentenced to prison time for his conviction in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, Rangel said.

He said in most states Republicans and Democrats will vote for their party nominee despite their flaws, and the election comes down to seven battleground states.  

‘If Trump is in jail, Republicans will vote for him. If Biden is in a nursing home, [the Democrats] are going to vote for him,’ he said. 

But Rangel wasn’t ready to abandon Biden, noting he was good on the stump the day after the debate.

‘He was so on point, so articulate. He was better than he was at the State of the Union [address]. And I wondered, ‘Where the hell was that Joe Biden [during the debate]?” he said.

Biden intends to seek re-election despite calls from the liberal New York Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and even some Democrats that it’s time for him to step aside for the good of the party and the country.

During the debate, Biden frequently stumbled over his answers and at one point froze and then said ‘I beat Medicare.’

Rangel, during the latter part of 46 years in Congress, struggled with his physical health but appeared mentally sharp.

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., cited his own ‘difficult’ debate performance in 2022 against Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz while arguing Sunday that President Biden can still win in November and ‘deserves’ a second term. 

In an appearance on ‘Fox News Sunday,’ Fetterman dismissed the New York Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a number of left-leaning pundits calling on Biden to drop out of the race. 

‘There’s no value in, in any of those things. I mean, there was that same kind of a freak out after my debate. And in fact, I might even say that I had a more difficult evening than the president did,’ Fetterman told host Shannon Bream. ‘And here I am right now, having this conversation. And I really like to remind to everybody watching that right now, Biden is one and Trump is still zero, and he’s the only person that’s ever beaten Trump. And I really believe that Joe Biden will do that again, despite all of the Democrats wetting the bed over that kind of thing.’ 

Bream noted that Fetterman was recovering from a stroke at the time of his debate, and has improved over time, while voters are more concerned about 81-year-old Biden because of his advanced age.

‘We had a difficult debate, and yet we still managed to go on to win,’ Fetterman said. ‘Now everybody was calling that… the end of my career. That was the end of this race. And everyone was predicting that I was going to lose actually by two points or more. And I smoked Oz by five points. And that’s why I’m saying it’s like one debate. It’s not a career any more than Donald Trump’s… convictions for felonies aren’t really going to define, you know, his reputation and his presidency. And that’s why they’re both here again.’

Trump was convicted of 34 counts in the Manhattan hush money trial and is awaiting sentencing just days before the Republican National Convention. 

In a post on X following the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday, Fetterman urged panicked Democrats to ‘chill the f— out’ about Biden’s widely panned performance because he is living proof ‘a rough debate’ doesn’t disqualify a political candidate. 

Fetterman suffered a stroke in May 2022, causing clear auditory processing issues that impacted his speaking abilities in the months leading up to Election Day that November. Despite a jarring debate performance that left many Americans questioning his fitness for office, Fetterman still defeated the former daytime TV host known as Dr. Oz, the Republican in the Pennsylvania Senate race.

On Sunday, Fetterman further argued that Biden ‘deserves’ a second term, citing his economic record and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

‘I’ve watched him for the last four years and he’s done incredibly good things. I mean, he got us through that pandemic, that pandemic, that over a million Americans lost their lives through that. And look at our economy. Ours is the world’s envy,’ he said. ‘And look at the stock market. Look at all these other kinds of metrics. People were calling that it was going to be a recession. And here we are now, booming and all of those kinds of things. So the president has done a really good job and he deserves a second term. But I really do want to be clear, it’s going to be very close.’

According to a Fox News poll conducted April 11-16, registered voters in Pennsylvania gave Trump wide margins over Biden regarding who they trusted to best handle the economy, foreign policy and the border.   

‘The only poll that’s really going to matter is Election Day,’ Fetterman said. ‘And the polls changed and they inverted in my race as well. And here I am as a United States senator. And I just got back from Israel just a couple days ago. And that’s why I want to remind everybody that one debate does not define a person’s record or the kind of person or the situation.’ 

Fox News’ Brian Flood contributed to this report.

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday spoke about President Biden’s age following the president’s much-criticized debate performance against former President Trump.

Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, appeared on ABC’s ‘This Week’ and was asked about whether Biden, who is 81 years old, should be running for re-election.

‘You know, I think it’s just an individual choice, and you really can’t generalize,’ Fauci said. 

Fauci, who helped lead the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, said one must look at each person as an individual and evaluate ‘how they feel, what they feel they can do.’

‘You know, what their passion is, what their energy is,’ Fauci said. ‘Those are the kind of things.’

When asked if he was surprised by anything he saw during Thursday’s presidential debate, Fauci said he did not want to comment on anything that ‘would have political implications.’ 

He added that what he felt comfortable speaking about were his ‘very positive’ dealings with Biden during their time working together.

‘He asks probing questions. He’s right on point on things,’ Fauci said of Biden, without going into detail on specific instances. ‘So my personal experience has been quite positive with him.’

With a raspy voice and delivering rambling answers, Biden struggled during portions of Thursday night’s debate. He also lost his train of thought several times, raising concerns among some Democrats and in the media. 

In the wake of the debate, both The New York Times and Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial boards have called on Biden to step down as the Democratic nominee.

The Democratic National Committee, however, has said it will continue to support Biden as the nominee.

Fox News’ Sarah Rumpf-Whitten contributed to this report.