White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield reportedly snarled that Vice President Kamala Harris was to blame for her public misconduct and a toxic work environment in her office, a new book claims.
Details of the upcoming text “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, were reported by Politico on Tuesday as Harris’ office struggles with an emigration of 10 employees since last summer. On Monday, Nancy McEldowney, VP’s national security adviser, was the latest to step aside.
In response to snipers from Harris ‘staff saying she was badly controlled by the White House, Martin and Burns reportedly wrote that “Bedingfield had noted that the Vice Presidency was not the first time in Harris’ political career that she was fallen short. – high expectations. ”
“Her Senate office had been messed up and her [2020] presidential campaign had been a failure, ”they say. “Perhaps, she suggested, the problem was not the vice president’s staff.”
Bedingfeld dismissed her reported remarks in an email to Politico.
“The fact that no one working on this book bothered to call the fact check this unwritten claim tells you what you need to know,” she wrote. “Vice President Harris is a force in this administration, and I have the utmost respect for the work she does every day to bring the country forward.”
The book reports that cracks began to form in the administration’s united front in June last year following Harris’ trip to Mexico and Guatemala to discuss the migration crisis. During the visit, Harris was heavily criticized for her response to NBC News anchor Lester Holt’s question about when she would visit the US-Mexico border.
“And I have not been to Europe,” VP sarcastically responded to Holt’s statement that she had not yet visited the border. “And I mean, I do not understand the point of what you mean. I do not rule out the meaning of the boundary.”
Weeks after Harris returned, Politico published the first report of strife in Harris’ office, a story that Martin and Burns say annoyed Biden.
During an Oval Office meeting with senior staff, they write, the president warned that if “he found out that any of them were stirring up negative stories about the vice president … they would soon be former employees.”
At the same time, the book says, Harris became more and more concerned about the promising political tasks she was given.
“A senator close to her, who described Harris ‘level of frustration as’ up in the stratosphere ‘, lamented that Harris’ political decline was a ‘slowly rolling Greek tragedy’,” the authors write.
“Her approval numbers were even lower than Biden’s, and other Democrats already saw the 2024 race if Biden refused to run,” they add.
As for the two principals, Martin and Burns report that Harris and Biden have a “friendly but not close” personal relationship, adding that their weekly lunches “lacked a real depth of personal and political intimacy.”
The authors also write that Harris was on guard against being hit by the White House, telling aides “in honest terms that she did not want to be confined to a few topics that were primarily related to women and black Americans.”
One initiative that the administration spearheaded Harris was its efforts to pass the election reform, which fell to defeat in the Senate earlier this year, after moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refused to change the chamber’s legislative filibuster rule.
Harris blamed the White House for the failure, reports Martin and Burns.
“How should she communicate clearly about suffrage legislation,” Harris asked West Wing aides when the president would not even say he supported changing Senate rules to pave the way for a bill? “The book reads.
The vice president’s office declined to comment to Politico about the book.
The authors also describe First Lady Jill Biden’s dissatisfaction with her husband’s choice of Harris as deputy, after Harris attacked her husband during a presidential debate in June 2019 about his stance on school bus driving. ,
“When the future first lady spoke in confidence with a close adviser to her husband’s campaign, she asked a pointed question,” the book states. “There are millions of people in the United States,” she began. Why, she asked, should we choose the one who attacked Joe?