Aides to former President Joe Biden are on the warpath after former Vice President Kamala Harris accused them of sabotaging her presidential campaign.
She made the claims — which include painting Biden as “reckless” for running again — in her new memoir 107 Days, which will be published on September 23. The Atlantic published an excerpt from the book this week.
A former Biden official brushed off her criticism and told Axios that she was not an impressive vice president.
“Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” the official, speaking anonymously, said. “She had basically zero substantive role in any of 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.”
The official insisted that Biden is “not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her 2019 [presidential] campaign.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris accused former President Joe Biden’s staffers of undermining her during her time in his administration and of sabotaging her 2024 presidential chances in her new memoir (Getty)
“Or lost the 2024 campaign, for that matter,” the official said. “The independent variable there is the vice president, not Biden or his aides.”
In the excerpt, Harris recounts her perception of some of the thought process among Biden’s team and his allies ahead of the 2024 election, and accuses some of undermining her while she was vice president.
“‘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,” Harris wrote.
In another section, Harris writes that the stakes for the election were “simply too high” to let “an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition” determine who should run against then-former President Donald Trump in 2024.
She did accept some responsibility, noting that she should have “perhaps” voiced her concerns then, but didn’t want to look like she was making a grab for power.
“I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out,” she wrote.
A former Biden aide told Axios Harris’s mea culpa wasn’t exactly inspiring.
“I’m not sure the very robust defense of not having the courage to speak up in the moment about Biden running is quite as persuasive as she thinks it is. If this is her attempt at political absolution: Lots of luck in your senior year,” the aide said.
Harris also accused Biden’s camp of trying to undermine and minimize her while she served as vice president.
“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well,” Harris wrote. “His team didn’t get it.”
She further accused them of being silently accepting of negative news stories about her.
“When the stories [about Harris] were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more,” she said.
Despite some of the aides’ comments, Harris had some sympathetic voices in the former Biden camp.
Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, said he thought that Harris “did a good job” in her role as vice president and said he felt “badly that she found the experience negative.”
Another former aide told Axios that “we all know that Biden folks treated her and her team like s***.”
“We never thought she would actually say anything,” they aide said. “The staffers across a range of ages and positions that I’m talking to are proud of her.”
