Harris says Biden White House comms team fueled negative narratives against her in new book
In 107 Days, Harris says the Biden administration's communications operation failed to defend her and sometimes aided criticism, with broader implications for the president's standing.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris says the Biden White House's communications operation did little to defend her and at times added fuel to negative narratives about her, according to her new book, "107 Days." She writes that while the team was large and Karine Jean-Pierre briefed daily in the press room, getting anything positive said about her work or a defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible. She also writes that the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it, and that unfair or inaccurate stories about Harris circulated and were allowed to stand.
In a chapter titled "July 24: 104 days til the election," Harris suggests Biden's team was not only unhelpful but sometimes worked against her—citing coverage of a supposed 'faked a french accent' in 2021 and noting the White House did not push back against those reports. She also laments that Republicans mischaracterized her role as the border czar and says no one in the White House comms staff helped her push back to explain what she had been tasked to do or to highlight any progress she had achieved.
She recounts campaign-era meetings in a pavilion on the White House grounds, where political briefings often made little sense to her. "Mike Donilon would filter the data from the polls and present the numbers in soothing terms: that the razor-thin, within-the-margin-of-error results were no cause for hair on fire," Harris writes. "Doug had wanted to stop sitting next to me because he got tired of me kicking him under the table when I asked a question and got a nonanswer." Her chief of staff, Lorraine Voles, is quoted as telling her, "If I ever organized that sort of dog-and-pony bullsh-- for you, you’d have my head on a platter."
These passages illustrate a tense dynamic between Harris and the president's team during the campaign, including internal disagreements over messaging and strategy.
Douglas Emhoff, Harris's husband, is quoted as recounting how staff gauged the couple's loyalty to Biden around July 4, shortly before Biden's campaign faced a setback. He is quoted saying, "They hide you away for four years, give you impossible, sh-- jobs, don’t correct the record when those tasks are mischaracterized, never fight back when you’re attacked, never praise your accomplishments, and now, finally, they want you out there on that balcony, standing right beside them," and "Now, finally, they know you are an asset, and they need you to reassure the American people. And still, they have to ask if we’re loyal?"
Harris concludes that the Biden White House was operating under "zero-sum" thinking: "If she’s shining, he’s dimmed." She argues that his own standing would benefit from her visible success and that his team didn’t understand that dynamic. The book notes that broader Democratic comfort with an endorsement strategy varied at the time and that internal tensions extended beyond Harris to other senior advisers. Fox News Digital reached out to Biden’s office for comment.