Leaks are continuing to emerge from the White House that suggest serious cracks are widening in the relationship between Democrat President Joe Biden and his VP Kamala Harris.
According to new reports, Harris is struggling to hide her anger over Biden’s gaffes.
New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns have revealed insider details on the strained relationship in their new book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future.”
Martin and Burns say Harris cracks when Biden makes mistakes and snaps at the president in frustration.
The authors claim that during an April meeting with Congressional Black Caucus leaders, Biden praised Harris and said she would do “a hell of a job” handling immigration.
“The vice president corrected him at once,” they write.
“Excuse me, it’s the Northern Triangle — not immigration,” Harris reportedly snapped at Biden.
The authors continue:
“Some of Harris’s advisers believed the president’s almost entirely white inner circle did not show the vice president the respect she deserved.
“Harris worried that Biden’s staff looked down on her; she fixated on real and perceived snubs in ways the West Wing found tedious.”
“Staff floated the possibility of the vice president overseeing relations with the Nordic countries — a low-risk diplomatic assignment that might have helped Harris get adjusted to the international stage in welcoming venues like Oslo and Copenhagen,” the authors wrote.
They claim the job of overseeing Nordic countries was “rejected” by White House aides and “privately mocked.”
“More irritating to Biden aides was when they learned the vice president wanted to plan a major speech to outline her view of foreign policy,” they write.
“Biden aides vetoed the idea.”
Martin and Burns also claim that Harris does “not hesitate to chide Biden for characterizing her assignment” in terms of addressing immigration.
From The Daily Mail:
Then amid leaked reports of chaos, toxicity and dysfunction in the VP’s office, Biden himself called in his staff and threatened to fire anyone who went to the press with damaging information.
Gripes among Harris staffers were that they had been handed an ‘impossible’ portfolio.
The president has on multiple occasions been accused of punting critical but over-broad tasks to his deputy, notably including solving the southwestern border crisis, voting rights, leading a pro-union task force and chairing the National Space Council.
But Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield privately blamed Harris herself for failing to meet the bar set for her, according to the book.
‘In private, Bedingfeld 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,’ the journalists write.
‘Perhaps, she suggested, the problem was not the vice president’s staff.’
The Biden aide criticized the reporting in a statement to Politico: ‘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. 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.’
