Kamala Comes Out Swinging At Team Biden In New Book

Former Vice President Kamala Harris published the first excerpt of her new book Wednesday and took some major shots at the Biden White House.

Harris’ book, “107 Days,” is set to publish toward the end of September and detail her short time on presidential campaign trail. The former vice president published an excerpt of the book in The Atlantic, in which she blames the Biden press team for failing to successfully highlight her work as “border czar” and for stunting her success in office.

“They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible,” Harris’ excerpt reads.

The former vice president goes on to give an example from 2021 in which she visited the Élysée Palace to help strengthen the country’s relationship with France after the administration signed the Australia-U.K.-U.S. security pact. She met with French President Emmanuel Macron and also visited the Pasteur Institute, where Harris’ mother had engaged in mRNA research connected to breast cancer, the excerpt says. During that visit, Harris details how she was speaking “informally” with scientists about how she wished politicians would better follow “the scientific method.”

“[T]esting a hypothesis and adjusting according to results, rather than coming in with the Plan, as if they had all the answers up front,” she writes.

“I said ‘the Plan’ with exaggerated emphasis and air quotes. Fox News, the New York Post, and Newsmax went wild, claiming I’d faked a French accent. This was total nonsense, but the White House seemed glad to let reporting about my ‘gaffe’ overwhelm the significant thaw in foreign relations I’d achieved,” the former vice president writes.

Harris then goes on to say she learned that former President Joe Biden’s staff was “adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me.”

“Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a ‘chaotic’ office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year,” she added.

In her first two years in the White House, Harris suffered from a number of staffers leaving her office, Politico reported, adding that many staffers alleged the atmosphere was filled with incompetence and toxicity. Harris had a 91.5% turnover rate on staff in her first three years, according to OpenTheBooks in July 2024.

The former vice president pushes back on these stories in her book, blaming the Biden White House for allowing, and in some cases promoting, these narratives.

“Because of this constant attention, things that had never been especially newsworthy about the vice president were suddenly reported and scrutinized,” Harris wrote of being the first vice president to have a “press pool” tracking her every move.

“And when the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more,” she wrote.

US Vice President Kamala Harris (R) tours the El Paso US Customs and Border Protection Central Processing Center, on June 25, 2021 in El Paso, Texas. – Vice President Kamala Harris is traveling in El Paso, Texas on Friday, where she will tour a Customs and Border Protection processing facility, meeting with advocates and NGOs.  (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)

Harris also frequently came under fire for her handling of the border crisis during the Biden administration. Biden assigned Harris the role of tackling the migration crisis coming from Mexico and the Northern Triangle in March 2021. At least one reporter soon after dubbed the former vice president the “border czar.” (RELATED: Corporate Media Goes Into Overdrive To Memory-Hole Kamala’s Border Record)

The former vice president conducted multiple roundtables and bilateral meetings with leaders from those countries within the “northern triangle,” but only visited the border once prior to hitting the campaign trail. But the border crisis continued.

“When Republicans mischaracterized my role as ‘border czar,’ no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved,” Harris writes. “I won commitments of $5.2 billion in new investments by private companies for the region. I had already seen almost a billion dollars of that money deployed, thanks to enthusiastic partners such as Mastercard, Microsoft, and Nespresso.”

“Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Even the breathtaking cruelty of Trump’s family-separation policy hadn’t deterred the desperate. It was an issue that absolutely demanded bipartisan cooperation at an impossibly partisan, most uncooperative time,” she added.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris greets White House staff as she returns to the White House on November 12, 2024 in Washington, DC. Harris had lunch with President Joe Biden at the White House. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Harris also points to public remarks she gave in Selma, Alabama, while Biden’s polls suffered, and took an even bigger hit because of his support for Israel following Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack.

“I reiterated my strong support for Israel’s security and called on Hamas to release the hostages and accept the cease-fire agreement then on the table,” Harris says of her remarks. “I also called on Israel for greater access to aid.”

“It was a speech that had been vetted and approved by the White House and the National Security Council. It went viral, and the West Wing was displeased. I was castigated for, apparently, delivering it too well,” she adds.

The excerpt concludes with Harris boiling down all of these excerpts to one conclusion: the Biden White House did not want her to succeed.

“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands,” she wrote. “My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.”