Despite concerted efforts to present a facade of unity, the Biden administration has been beset with rumors and reports of dissension and infighting between disparate camps in the White House aligned with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Now comes word that Biden himself attempted to tamp down such reports and even threatened to fire any administration staffers who were caught spreading negative information about Harris to the media, Fox News reported.
Yet, obviously, that effort has failed, and the reports of internal bickering and lingering hard feelings between the two factions have continued to flow from the media.
All is not well in the Biden-Harris White House
The latest example, from which the claim of President Biden’s threat to fire staffers speaking critically of Vice President Harris, is contained within a new book published by New York Times journalists Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns titled “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future.”
Playbook has an exclusive look at the Biden/Harris tensions in THIS WILL NOT PASS
– TOP STAFF disparaging VP
– HARRIS frustrated w/Biden on filibuster
– BIDEN threatened to fire anti-Harris leakersAnd what @FLOTUS said about Harris during veepstakes…https://t.co/Qsf3untRCe
— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) March 22, 2022
Politico Playbook got a sneak peek at the forthcoming book and shared some of the “juicy excerpts” it had seen about the “frustrations at the highest echelons of the White House” involving both the Biden and Harris camps.
Biden threatens to fire staffers spreading rumors about Harris
According to that new book, President Biden was reportedly furious at the anonymously-sourced leaks originating from the White House that was disparaging to VP Harris last year in the aftermath of her less-than-stellar visit to several Central American nations to discuss the illegal migration issue.
The Playbook shared that “The president hauled senior staff into the Oval Office and warned if ‘he found that any of them was stirring up negative stories about the vice president, Biden said, they would quickly be former staff.'”
That certainly wasn’t the only critical tale included in the book, which also delved into the reported bickering and blame-shifting within the White House, typically in regard to the “portfolio” of issues assigned to Harris to deliver meaningful progress on.
However, the Biden camp reportedly feels Harris has failed in that regard while the Harris camp has reportedly claimed that she isn’t receiving the necessary support from the president to get anything of merit accomplished.
Jill didn’t want Kamala; Biden and Harris “friendly but not close”
Also included in Playbook’s excerpts from the book was a claim that first lady Jill Biden had opposed the choice of Harris as Biden’s running mate in large part due to lingering hard feelings over Harris’ 2019 primary debate attack on Biden in which she essentially insinuated that he was racist.
As for the purported relationship currently between the president and vice president, it was described as “friendly but not close” and that “their weekly lunches lacked a real depth of personal and political intimacy,” which further undermines the false facade presented to the media of a unified White House team.