Former Vice President Kamala Harris offered up several criticisms of the Biden White House’s communications team in her new book, painting a picture of a staff that did little to defend her.
‘They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day,’ Harris wrote in her book ‘107 Days’, released on Tuesday and providing detailed insight into her ill-fated presidential run.
‘But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.’
Harris added that the ‘president’s inner circle seemed fine with it’ when ‘unfair or inaccurate’ stories about Harris circulated and that it even ‘seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little more.’
In a chapter titled ‘July 24: 104 days til the election,’ Harris suggested that Biden’s team was not only being unhelpful, but at times had worked against her in the past.
‘This was total nonsense, but the White House seemed glad to let reporting about my ‘gaffe’ overwhelm the significant thaw in foreign relations I’d achieved,’ Harris wrote about the White House not pushing back against media reports she had ‘faked a french accent’ in 2021.
‘Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprung up around me,’ Harris wrote.
Harris took issue in the book with Republicans who ‘mischaracterized’ her role as the ‘border czar’ and lamented that ‘no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do’ or to ‘highlight any of the progress I had achieved.’
In another part of the book, Harris wrote about how Biden began ‘taking on water’ over the conflict between Hamas and Israel, saying that ‘when polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging.’
Harris also provided details about her struggles with the Biden campaign staff before and after she became the nominee, writing specifically about meetings the Biden-Harris team had during the campaign in a pavilion on the White House grounds.
‘These political briefings often made no sense to me,’ Harris wrote. ‘Mike Donilon would filter the data from the polls and present the numbers in soothing terms: that the razor-thin, within-the-margin-of-error results were no cause for hair on fire; that really there was nothing to see here. Doug had wanted to stop sitting next to me because he got tired of me kicking him under the table when I asked a question and got a nonanswer.’
‘My chief of staff, Lorraine Voles, turned to me as we left one of these meetings and said, ‘If I ever organized that sort of dog-and-pony bullsh– for you, you’d have my head on a platter.’’
Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, was also quoted in the book with some strong words for the Biden team as Harris recounted an instance where his staff gauged the couple about their loyalty to Biden on July 4th, shortly before Biden dropped out of the race.
‘They hide you away for four years, give you impossible, sh– jobs, don’t correct the record when those tasks are mischaracterized, never fight back when you’re attacked, never praise your accomplishments, and now, finally, they want you out there on that balcony, standing right beside them,’ Emhoff is quoted as saying. ‘Now, finally, they know you are an asset, and they need you to reassure the American people. And still, they have to ask if we’re loyal?’
Ultimately, Harris concluded that the Biden White House was mistakenly operating using ‘zero-sum’ thinking.
‘If she’s shining, he’s dimmed,’ Harris wrote. ‘None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.’
Fox News Digital reached out to Biden’s office for comment.
