A senior Biden administration official reportedly said this week that the president is “not a pleasant person to be around” at work and that people are genuinely terrified of him.

The remarks come as President Joe Biden has faced widespread calls to step down following his disastrous debate against former President Donald Trump last week.

The senior official told POLITICO that Biden’s staff has to withhold briefing him on specific matters likely to cause him to erupt in anger.

“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared s**tless of him.”

“He doesn’t take advice from anyone other than those few top aides, and it becomes a perfect storm because he just gets more and more isolated from their efforts to control it,” the person added.

The report said that those who are shielding Biden from having the “tough conversations” that need to occur include first lady Jill Biden and his sister, Valerie Biden Owens.

The report comes after veteran investigative journalist Carl Bernstein told CNN on Monday that sources told him Biden’s debate performance on Thursday was part of an ongoing pattern of the president showing signs of cognitive decline.

“They are adamant that what we saw the other night, the Joe Biden we saw, is not a one-off, that there have been 15-20 occasions in the last year and a half, when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed,” Bernstein said. “And what’s so significant is the people that this is coming from, and also how many people around the president are aware of such incidents, including some reporters, incidentally, who, who have witnessed some of them.”

He said that the people he spoke to have worked very closely with Biden for many years and that they “say that in the last six months particularly, there has been a marked incidence of cognitive decline and physical infirmity.”

One specific example he mentioned happened last year at a Four Seasons hotel where Biden spoke at a fundraiser.

“He started at the podium and then he became very stiff, according to the people there as if it were almost a kind of rigor mortis,” he said. “And he became very stiff and a chair had to be brought for him to do the latter part of the event.”

At the end of the segment, Bernstein seemed to imply that the White House’s physician report on Biden’s health was dishonest and that information was being concealed.

“I mean, obviously, it’d be great if we could have real doctor’s reports from both candidates,” he said. “Well, that’s not gonna happen.”

For 16 years, the grand jury documents behind Jeffrey Epstein’s 2006 prosecution for sex trafficking have been sealed, but on Monday, a Palm Beach, Florida, judge unsealed the transcripts.

Epstein killed himself in 2019 while in federal custody awaiting trial for sex-trafficking, but a decade later he was given a sweetheart deal on similar allegations and served just 13 months in a work-release program after pleading guilty. That deal was reached in 2008, two years after a grand jury was assembled to determine whether Epstein would be indicted on charges he solicited and procured minors for prostitution.

The 176-page grand jury document released this week contains new information about Epstein’s crimes, Fox News reported, including specifics about how he paid teenagers who recruited other teens for his sex crimes, the testimony of his victims, and detailed allegations of his rapes.

Circuit Judge Luis Delgado, in his order releasing the grand jury documents, said the contents would be disturbing.

“It is widely accepted that Epstein is a notorious and serial pedophile,” the order says. “The testimony taken by the Grand Jury concerns activity ranging from grossly unacceptable to rape – all of the conduct at issue is sexually deviant, disgusting, and criminal. The details in the record will be outrageous to decent people.”

Palm Beach County court clerk and comptroller Joseph Abruzzo announced the release of the documents just before 3 p.m. Monday, noting that a new Florida law had just gone into effect that allows the release of grand jury documents in certain cases.

“It is our hope that the release of these records gives peace of mind to our community and gives Jeffrey Epstein’s victims the closure they deserve,” Abruzzo said in the statement, which also included a graphic content warning above the PDF file of the documents.

The documents were released in response to a motion from the Palm Beach Post and other news outlets seeking to unseal the grand jury testimony, ABC News reported. The documents are meant to provide answers to how a grand jury could return an indictment on just one count of solicitation of a minor, yet the documents don’t reveal what charging options were presented to the grand jury.

Epstein’s crimes began to unravel in the early part of the millennium when two girls at a local Palm Beach high school got into a fight after one called the other a prostitute, the documents revealed. A school official later found $300 in the accused girl’s purse, which was given to her by Epstein, according to the grand jury documents.

The girl, 14, testified before the grand jury that she had been told to lie about her life story and say she was 18 years old in order to get $200 after giving Epstein a massage. The girl described how, for the massage, she was asked to strip down to her underwear and was then sexually abused by Epstein.

Before long, more victims would be revealed.

Epstein’s suicide in 2019 has been the subject of questions and conspiracy theories, with some suggesting he couldn’t have killed himself and was possibly murdered.