(PresidentialHill.com)- A forthcoming book, co-authored by two New York Times writers, Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, peels back the curtain and gives a glimpse of the ongoing drama in the Biden white house.
Titled “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” it paints a picture of a White House that is more fraught with tension than they allow revealed in public.
Kamala Harris has been beaten up in the polls, her approval ratings in the dumper, and according to the book, the president threatened to can anyone that was caught leaking any stories that spoke ill about the beleaguered vice president.
Biden was on high alert, as alert as he can be, after stories began cropping up last June that Harris staffers were dissatisfied. The president gathered senior staff into the Oval Office and informed them, in very harsh tones, that if “he found that any of them was stirring up negative stories about the vice president, they would quickly be former staff!”
The first year of the Biden/Harris regime was seething with leaks that the Harris’ staff was miserable. What followed was a ceaseless run of resignations from the vice president’s office as staffers and aides ran for the hills.
Notable departures included:
-Communications director Ashley Etienne
-Press secretary Symone Sanders
-Director of press operations Peter Velz
Coupled with reports of exasperation between Harris’ office and Biden’s and Harris’ lagging approval ratings, the white house is in turmoil.
The exits continued into 2022. In January, Vincent Evans, who served as the vice president’s deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental vice president’s office, high-tailed it.
According to authors Martin and Burns, Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s communications director, grew weary of the criticism that Biden could not control Harris
and was mismanaging her. She would have none of it; Bedingfield put the blame squarely on Harris, herself.
The book also notes that “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.”
Bedingfield has denied the claims made in the book.
“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,” she informed Politico.
“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.”
Damage control by a damaged White House?
