Several of former President Joe Biden's aides lashed out at Kamala Harris, accusing the former vice president and one-time Democrat presidential candidate of rewriting history and shifting blame after she charged in a new memoir that Biden acted recklessly in seeking reelection and that his staff worked to undermine her.
"Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job," one former White House official told Axios. "She had basically zero substantive role in the administration's key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was.
"Biden is not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her campaigns. The independent variable there is the vice president."
In an excerpt from Harris' book, "107 Days," published in The Atlantic, she wrote that Biden's 2024 reelection bid at age 81 was "recklessness" disguised as duty.
"'It's Joe and Jill's decision,' we all said that, like a mantra, as if we'd all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness," she wrote.
Harris also said that Biden's decision to run again "wasn't a choice that should have been left to an individual's ego, an individual's ambition."
She further wrote that she considered raising concerns but felt she was "in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out."
Another aide dismissed Harris' claim that she stayed quiet about Biden's reelection plans to avoid looking opportunistic.
"I'm not sure the very robust defense of not having the courage to speak up in the moment is quite as persuasive as she thinks it is," the aide said. "If this is her attempt at political absolution: Lots of luck in your senior year."
Several former officials also criticized her work on immigration.
"If she had spent a fraction of the time and energy doing the work that she did on complaining about how she was perceived, she would have been perceived a whole lot better," one said.
Others argued that Biden erred in choosing her as vice president and mocked the idea of a 2028 run.
"We're not going back!" one quipped, using one of Harris' own campaign lines.
Harris also argued that Biden's advisers viewed her success as a threat.
"Their thinking was zero-sum: If she's shining, he's dimmed," she wrote. "When the stories [about her] were unfair or inaccurate, the president's inner circle seemed fine with it."
While Harris stressed she never believed Biden was incapacitated, she conceded that "at 81, Joe got tired. That's when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles."
Not every Biden veteran sided against Harris.
"We all know that the Biden folks treated her and her team like s***. We never thought she would actually say anything," one former aide said. "The staffers I'm talking to are proud of her."
A former senior Biden official added that Harris "was right that Biden shouldn't have run for reelection, and not enough aides appreciated her. There were others on the Biden team, though, who really tried to help her thrive as VP. But she and her team did not seize that support and make the most of it. It is all a tragedy."
Former chief of staff Ron Klain was more conciliatory.
"I thought she did a good job as VP and I feel badly that she found the experience negative," he said.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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