In an expected turn of events, Vice President Kamala Harris was to blame for her disastrous first year in office, President Joe Biden’s team revealed.
The New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns revealed this through their new book titled “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” which detailed information about the tensions between Harris and Biden in the White House.
Joe Biden’s communications director Kate Bedingfield revealed her feelings toward Harris while speaking with the New York Times reporters.
Here’s an excerpt from the book:
In private, Bedingfeld had taken to noting that the vice presidency was not the first time in Harris’s political career that she had fallen short of sky-high expectations: Her Senate office had been messy and her presidential campaign had been a fiasco. Perhaps, she suggested, the problem was not the vice president’s staff.
Bedingfeld disavowed her reported remarks in an email to Politico.
Bedingfield said while describing Harris as a force in this administration, “The fact that no one working on this book bothered to call to fact check this unattributed claim tells you what you need to know.”
Harris also reportedly took offense whenever Biden’s staffers failed to stand up whenever she entered a specific room and interpreted it as “a sign of disrespect.”
Burns and Martin continued “Some of Harris’s advisers believed the president’s almost entirely white inner circle did not show the vice president the respect she deserved. Harris worried that Biden’s staff looked down on her; she fixated on real and perceived snubs in ways the West Wing found tedious.”
The book also claims that Biden warned that if “he found that any of them was stirring up negative stories about the vice president … they would quickly be former staff.”
The authors also describe first lady Jill Biden’s dissatisfaction with her husband’s pick of Harris as a running mate after Harris attacked her husband during a June 2019 presidential debate over his stand on school busing.
“Speaking in confidence with a close adviser to her husband’s campaign, the future first lady posed a pointed question. There are millions of people in the United States, she began. Why she asked, do we have to choose the one who attacked Joe?” the book said.
Jill’s spokesman, Michael LaRosa provided a statement but did not confirm nor deny the reports in the book and gave a tepid answer.
“Many books will be written on the 2020 campaign, with countless retellings of events — some accurate, some inaccurate. The First Lady and her team do not plan to comment on any of them,” LaRosa said.
The book also added that Harris felt frustrated at times and blamed her frustrations on Biden. After specifically asking to help with the push for both election overhaul bills — the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom To Vote Act — Harris reportedly complained that unless Biden forcefully declared his willingness to support senate rule changes, she could not hope to move the measure forward.
“How was she supposed to communicate clearly about voting-rights legislation, Harris asked West Wing aides, when the president would not even say that he supported changing the Senate rules to open the path for a bill?” the book added.
Martin and Burns also noted in the book that Biden and Harris have had a “friendly but not close” personal relationship, “and their weekly lunches lacked a real depth of personal and political intimacy.”
Sources: Conservative Brief, Breitbart
