Axios news reported Friday that Top White House officials are mobilizing to defend Vice President Kamala Harris amid a gusher of leaks about dysfunction and infighting in her office.
- Administration officials are privately calling Kamala Harris’ office “a s—show,” Axios reports.
- Top Biden officials are circling the wagons around Harris’ operation as internal discord boils over.
- Recent reports in Politico and CNBC detailed unhappiness from Harris staffers, allies, and donors.
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told Axios in a statement: “The President’s trust and confidence in her is obvious when you see them in the Oval Office together.” Biden senior adviser Cedric Richmond said in an interview late Thursday night: “It’s a whisper campaign designed to sabotage her.”
Their responses came after Axios approached the White House with new reporting about growing tensions between West Wing officials and the Harris team, including chief of staff Tina Flournoy.
- Some White House officials have been frustrated by a series of missteps from Harris and increasingly public bickering in her orbit, which spilled out in a Politico story on Wednesday. Flournoy’s old boss, former President Bill Clinton, came to her defense with a statement calling her “an extraordinary person.”
Why it matters: 2024 is the elephant in the room. While Biden aides overwhelmingly believe he’ll be the Democratic nominee, they also know he’d be 81 when seeking re-election.
- An operation sometimes visibly out of sync with Biden’s — and missteps during a recent trip to the U.S.-Mexico border, following a scrutinized interview with NBC’s Lester Holt — have reignited questions from Harris’ 2020 primary bid.
- Harris would be the presumptive nominee if Biden didn’t run. Administration sources believe it would be nearly impossible to unseat the first Black woman vice president.
Yet many Democrats, including some current senior administration officials, are concerned she could not defeat whomever the Republican Party puts up — even if it were Donald Trump.
- One Democratic operative tells Axios’ Alayna Treene that most Democrats aren’t saying, “‘Oh, no, our heir apparent is f***ing up, what are we gonna do?’ It’s more that people think, ‘Oh, she’s f***ing up, maybe she shouldn’t be the heir apparent.'”
- Some Democrats close to the White House are increasingly concerned about Harris’s handling of high-profile issues and political tone deafness, and question her ability to maintain the coalition that Biden rode to the White House, sources tell Axios’ Hans Nichols.
What we’re hearing: Relations between the West Wing and the Vice President’s office are tense.
- Several administration officials used “shitshow” when describing Harris’ office, and contrast her operation with disciplined, virtually leakproof Biden aides.
- Some Biden officials view the Harris operation as poorly-managed and staffed with people who don’t have long-term relationships with her. They feel she’s gotten bad advice from her press and communications shop and think it’s telling that she’s already lost two advance aides and a digital director.
Case in point: A few months ago, what should have been a no-brainer of a press request came to the vice president’s office. Forbes wanted to feature Harris on the cover of its “50 Over 50” issue — saluting her rise to be the “first woman, the first Black person, and the first South Asian-American to become U.S. vice president.”
- After concluding that Flournoy had been sitting on the request — a characterization that an aide to the V.P. flatly disputes, explaining that she was simply nailing down details before sharing it with a larger White House circle — ultimately the West Wing intervened to get an answer for Forbes.
- The vice president ended up participating — and getting glowing treatment. But Biden advisers couldn’t understand why it had to be this hard, people familiar with the incident tell Axios.
About the Author
The Washington Examiner had a recent article on this very subject entitled “‘Repeat problem’: Fingers point at Kamala Harris as history of staff unrest continues” by Katherine Doyle on 1 July 2021, as follows:
A toxic work environment that is alleged to be inside the office of Vice President Kamala Harris stems from the top, with complicating “power centers” plaguing her road to the White House.
“Look, this is a bottom-line business.”
“And the bottom line is the vice president has challenges with staff — wherever she is,” one senior Democratic operative told the Washington Examiner.
end quotes
Which is to say that Kamal Harris has a long established history with staff problems in her office, wherever she is, which takes us back to that article as follows:
President Joe Biden handed Harris a politically fraught portfolio of issues, which could cause some strife within any official’s staff, but the complaints are not new.
This source called the office discord a “repeat problem” for Harris, adding that the troubles are “not surprising.”
“The Harris inner circles, and I’ll use that plural, because they’ve been different inner circles in California, in her Senate office, on her presidential campaign, and now in her vice presidential-campaign-in-office, they’ve always been rife with a lot of dissension, and a lot of infighting,” this person said.
“It’s probably a little unfair to say it’s just her.”
“But she is a common denominator in all of these situations.”
end quotes
Kamala Harris is clearly not ready for prime time, but we are now stuck with here for the duration, God help the nation for that!
Getting back to the article, it continues as follows:
One report published Wednesday detailed a climate of fear inside the Office of the Vice President, including “a tense and at times dour office atmosphere.”
“Ideas are ignored or met with harsh dismissals, and decisions are dragged out,” the article read, with aides and associates pointing the finger at Tina Flournoy, a longtime Democratic Party operative and Harris’s chief of staff.
Two top advance staffers recently announced their departures, according to another report, along with Harris’s head of digital strategy, Rajan Kaur.
Kaur was welcomed to Twitter by another Harris staffer just one month earlier.
Symone Sanders, the senior adviser and chief spokesperson for Harris, rebuked the claims, saying in the first media report: “We are not making rainbows and bunnies all day.”
“What I hear is that people have hard jobs, and I’m, like, ‘welcome to the club.’”
“We have created a culture where people, if there is anything anyone would like to raise, there are avenues for them to do so.”
“Whoever has something they would like to raise, they should raise it directly,” she said.
end quotes
Oh, really!
Getting back to the article:
Reports say Flournoy walled off Harris from longtime friends, donors, and associates, a move that the Democratic operative defended.
“It does feel like the intentions of Tina Flournoy are good, which are to kind of clean up some of the mess and keep the hanger-ons away.”
“And to establish some order and a standard, which is understandable,” this source said.
The source added: “The consistent thread with all of the infighting and dissension, with all of the different power centers of Kamala Harris, is Vice President Harris.”
end quotes
Joe Biden seems to have a propensity to reward incompetence with positions of power in his administration, so none of this should be surprising, which takes us back to the articles for the excuses we are supposed to accept for the incompetence of Kamala Harris, as follows:
Allies said that Harris, who made history with her election as Biden’s vice president, confronts challenges not shared by others who’ve held the role.
“There’s a challenge that comes along with being the first woman in that position and the first woman of color in that position,” the Democratic operative said.
“That doesn’t mean that she and her team are above critique — they’re not.”
“But I think it would be naive to not consider that [in observing] kind of an uneven rollout of her time as vice president.”
end quotes
The vice president of the United States of America is essentially a no-show job, and if Kamala Harris cannot handle a no-show job as vice president, we are in serious trouble if God forbid, Joe Biden goes out on 25th Amendment grounds of mental instability, and Kamala Harris ends up in the oval office.
Wayne:
Unfortunately, this is more Washington insider “much ado about nothing”, dog
days of summer non-news. Move along, move along!
When she was running for president, before she was soundly rejected by the American people as not being anywhere near presidential material, Kamala Harris did an interesting interview with NPR, wherein she stated that in her opinion, Black people like herself have some serious mental issues because they were slaves and were raped by the Democrats who owned them, which serious mental issues may well be at play here, where Kamala Harris cannot seem to handle the stress of being vice president, which is hardly “summer non-news” as some in America would have us believe:
NPR
“Sen. Kamala Harris On Reparations”
March 14, 2019
Heard on Morning Edition
Sen. Kamala Harris, a candidate for president, is floating a new idea: funding for mental health treatment as a form of reparations for slavery.
She talks with NPR’s Steve Inskeep.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
One of the Democratic presidential candidates is floating an idea.
It’s a way to pay reparations for slavery and racial discrimination.
Several candidates have endorsed that notion, although they’re rarely giving specifics.
Senator Kamala Harris also says the matter needs study.
But in a talk with NPR, she did suggest what’s on her mind.
Can you give me an idea of one possible form this could take?
KAMALA HARRIS: Sure.
You can look at the issue of untreated and undiagnosed trauma.
end quotes
One has to presume that she is in fact talking about herself there as suffering from untreated and undiagnosed trauma due to her being Black and her ancestors having been slaves, and that is a serious issue for us in her case, where we have the present incumbent, Democrat Joe Biden, teetering his own way towards a 25th Amendment removal from office based on mental incapacity.
Getting back to Kamala on NPR:
African-Americans have higher rates of heart disease and high blood pressure.
It is environmental.
It is centuries of slavery, which was a form of violence where women were raped, where children were taken from their parents – violence associated with slavery.
And that never – there was never any real intervention to break up what had been generations of people experiencing the highest forms of trauma.
And trauma, undiagnosed and untreated, leads to physiological outcomes.
end quotes
As I say, I think that goes a long way towards explaining why Kamala Harris simply cannot stand the pressure of her no-show job as Joe Biden’s vice president, which takes us back to that interview as follows:
INSKEEP: We’re talking about the same thing as post-traumatic stress from a war.
HARRIS: Sure.
INSKEEP: That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about.
HARRIS: Absolutely.
end quotes
And as Rensselaer County Attorney Gordon Mayo, a real hot-shot attorney really up on this kind of stuff related to PTSD from war famously told a Supreme Court judge in New York, post-combat stress condition can result in irrational behavior, which certainly works for me in explaining why Kamala Harris is unable to deal with being vice president, and as a result, has so many issues with the people around her, because she herself has PTSD that makes her act irrationally.
As to this Michelle Flournoy who the Democrats have put in place as Kamala Harris’s “minder,” she is an Obama-era retread who seems to have come down quite a few notches in the Democrat pantheon, given she was once being considered by Hussein Obama as his secretary of defense, to wit:
“US defense chief confirms plans to leave office in 2011”
Mon Aug 16, 9:47 am ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed Monday plans to leave office next year, saying he first wanted to make sure the start of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan is on track.
The Foreign Policy report said there was much speculation about who might replace him.
It mentioned Michele Flournoy, the current under secretary of defense for policy, John Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, as possible candidates.
end quotes
I would guess her star got tarnished somewhere along the trail, so that now she is essentially demoted to being the “minder” of Kamala Harris who is in way over her head as vice president.
And then we have her showing up again in the Associated Press story “Sex is major reason military commanders are fired” by Lolita C. Baldour on 21 January 2013, as follows:
WASHINGTON (AP) – Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair, fired from his command in Afghanistan last May and now facing a court-martial on charges of sodomy, adultery and pornography and more, is just one in a long line of commanders whose careers were ended because of possible sexual misconduct.
Sex has proved to be the downfall of presidential candidates, members of Congress, governors and other notables.
It’s also among the chief reasons that senior military officers are fired.
The figures bear out growing concerns by Defense Department and military leaders over declining ethical values among U.S. forces, and they highlight the pervasiveness of a problem that came into sharp relief because of the resignation of one of the Army’s most esteemed generals, David Petraeus, and the investigation of a second general, John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.
From sexual assault and harassment to pornography, drugs and drinking, ethical lapses are an escalating problem for the military’s leaders.
“I think we’re on the path.”
“I think the last two defense secretaries have made this a very high priority and have very much held people accountable.”
“But we’ve got a ways to go,” said Michele Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense under President Barack Obama.
She said the military must enforce a “zero tolerance” policy and work to change the culture so service members are held accountable and made to understand that their careers will be over if they commit or tolerate such offenses.
“The policy is in place,” she said.
“I don’t know that it’s as evenly and fully enforced as intended.”
end quotes
So one must wonder what it is she has done to get herself demoted to being Kamala Harris’s “minder.”
And thanks to the Cape Charles Mirror for bringing this serious matter involving Kamala Harris’s inability to perform the duties of vice president, which essentially are nothing at all, to our attention as concerned American citizens!
Lets be frank, this entire thing is a Chit show!
Trump Won!!!!!
Fauci Lied!!!!!
When did she become an African American? Her daddy was a Jamaican, not an African American. Here is the video of her being sworn in as the first Indian American Senator.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/article124327739.html
On the night that China-Joe picked her as his running mate, I looked up her nationality on Google. It listed her as Indian-Jamaican. Twenty minutes late Google had changed it to Black.
All smoke and mirrors.