Joe Biden’s former White House press secretary faced a tough line of questions about her ex-boss’ 2024 decision making during an interview Monday, and largely found herself deflecting blame and claiming ignorance of the problems that plagued the last administration.
Karine Jean-Pierre participated in a pair of interviews to begin the week as she kicks off a press tour for her book, Independent, which is out Tuesday. The formerly Democratic press secretary explained the title earlier this year, stating that she’d left the party after its institutional failure in 2024.
During interviews on the anti-Trump news site The Bulwark and CBS Mornings, Jean-Pierre took some of the toughest questions yet to be faced by anyone who was at Biden’s side during the collapse of his presidential campaign and the disastrous debate in June when he appeared confused, often lost track of what he was saying and appeared faint, even whispery compared to Donald Trump.
Her appearances coincide with Harris’ own media tour, which began in September as Harris promotes the tale of her ascendancy to the top of the Democratic ticket in 2025.
Jean-Pierre struggled in both settings to defend her old boss’s decision-making, particularly under a barrage of questions from The Bulwark’s Tim Miller regarding an anecdote from Harris’s 107 Days memoir in which the vice president detailed a pre-debate phone call from Biden complaining that members of her team were supposedly criticizing him. According to Harris, she was unsure if her own boss was in that moment trying to deliberately sabotage her by psyching her out — or, merely doing so unintentionally.
Miller, in his line of questioning, pressed Jean-Pierre to explain how her former boss prioritized the election over his own ego and public image, if he did so at all.
“I look back at [the questions of loyalty to Biden] and think, man, wasn’t there too much emphasis on Joe Biden and Joe Biden’s legacy? And not enough on setting the party up to succeed, on setting Kamala Harris up to succeed?” Miller asked, noting that many in Harris’s circle (including the candidate herself) seemingly felt that way.
Jean-Pierre responded that she couldn’t “speak to her experience”, before Miller pressed her for answers. As an example of how Biden supposedly put his own self-interest above Harris’s after “stepping aside” from the Democratic ticket, Miller said: “he story– he called her before the debate to say that people were being mean to him? Like what is happening? What is happening? That is insane! That is an insane thing to do!”
“Hold on a second, Tim,” she responded. “You’re talking about her experience– I can’t speak to that.”
“But you were around,” Miller replied, with some sarcasm.
Jean-Pierre could respond only by saying that Biden’s legacy was not her focus as his press secretary, which she said had been on the administration’s work for the American people.
But she was similarly evasive on CBS when asked about something she should be able to speak to: her own perception of the president as she traveled with him on Air Force One ahead of the campaign-ending June debate with Donald Trump. Jean-Pierre claimed that she “didn’t really see him until after the debate,” a statement that would be hard to believe coming from any press secretary but particularly from one set to speak for the president as he returned from a foreign trip and was preparing for a major televised clash with his political opponent.
Gayle King, reading from Jean-Pierre’s book, explained that she had just one simple question in response to the press secretary’s claim that she hadn’t seen Biden’s noticeable mental and physical decline, seemingly picked up on by millions of Americans not in the room: “How?!”
“So really, I want everybody to know that I take this question incredibly seriously,” responded Jean-Pierre. “I was his White House press secretary, which means I had a role that saw him practically every day.”
But, she added, “I never saw someone who ‘wasn’t there.’ I saw someone who was always engaged. I saw someone who understood policy; pushed us on the policy. And also understood history.”
Her statements, if an accurate depiction of her experience, only serve to reinforce the narrative that Joe Biden’s presidency and campaign was isolated at the highest levels from the true extent of the president’s declining mental acuity and ability to present himself to the public, as well as the earnestness of the criticism surrounding those issues.
There’s still no real explanation from anyone inside Bidenworld as to why it was too late to save the party from defeat by the time anyone in that circle was listening to the deafening calls for a new candidate, weeks after the president declared onstage to millions of Americans that his administration “beat Medicare”.
Those questions are widely thought to have contributed to Harris’s decision not to run for governor of California next year. She’s still considered a possible contender for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2028, but has gone nearly a year since her defeat without answering tough questions from journalists about her last year in the Biden administration. Other Democrats who worked in top positions in the former the administration are now similarly dodging interviews.
The former vice president wrote in her book that she felt that Biden’s team — including the press shop of which Karine Jean-Piere was a member — hung her out to dry, explaining that she found “getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks [to be] almost impossible.”
“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,” claimed Harris in 107 Days. “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well.”
Biden, who recently entered radiation therapy treatment for prostate cancer, spoke about his decision to step down earlier this year.
“I don’t think it would have mattered” had he dropped out sooner to let the Democrats find another candidate, the president said. “Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away. And it was a hard decision…I think it was the right decision…[But] it was just a difficult decision.”
