POLITICO: Friction between Harris and Biden camps revealed in new book
By EUGENE DANIELS and RACHAEL BADE
The White House has worked hard to project a united front between President JOE BIDEN and VP KAMALA HARRIS and their respective teams.
But the upcoming book “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future” , by NYT’s Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, reveals some frustrations at the highest echelons of the White House between the Biden and Harris camps, as well as the VP’s angst over the policy portfolio she was given.
Playbook got its hands on some juicy excerpts:
— Harris allies complained throughout the first year of the administration that she was handed an impossible portfolio. According to the book, KATE BEDINGFIELD, Biden’s comms director, not only grew tired of the criticism that the White House was mismanaging Harris — she blamed the VP.
“In private, Bedingfield 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,” Martin and Burns write.
“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,” Bedingfield responded in an email Monday night. “Vice President Harris is a force in this administration and I have the utmost respect for the work she does every day to move the country forward.”