Joe Biden‘s former press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has revealed she was left feeling ‘enraged and heartbroken’ by her ex-boss as she spills about her time working inside the White House.
Jean-Pierre penned a memoir detailing her decision to become an independent after years of towing the Democratic Party line.
Her shocking decision came after she stood by the president’s side throughout the 2024 presidential election – and repeatedly touted his mental and physical acuity from the White House Briefing Room.
But when Biden told White House officials in a Zoom call that he was dropping out of the race, Jean-Pierre said she felt betrayed.
She recounted in one poignant excerpt shared by Newsweek how the former president told White House staffers ‘the party had done so much damage to his campaign, there was no coming back from it,’ leaving her and others stunned.
‘I never thought Biden would step down,’ Jean-Pierre wrote in the book titled ‘Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.’
She continued: ‘The way the Democratic leadership was coming after him, I believed he would fight back harder.’
The then-president, however, ‘seemed to be totally at peace with his decision, but I was stunned, my feelings a blur. I was angry and sad,’ she said.
‘I was enraged and heartbroken that this man had given more than 50 years of his life to serving the American people and, in the end, he’d be treated poorly by members of his own party. It was horrible.’
Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has revealed how she was left feeling ‘enraged and heartbroken’ by her ex-boss
She recounts in her new memoir how Former President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race left her ‘enraged and heartbroken’
She noted that the ‘Democratic Party had defined my life, my career.
‘Everything I’d done to make people’s lives better had been connected to it,’ Jean-Pierre wrote.
‘The party was the vehicle that allowed me not to just have a front seat to history, working first on [Barack] Obama’s presidential campaign then in his administration, but also to make some history of my own as the first black woman and openly queer person to ever be a White House press secretary,’ wrote Jean-Pierre, who worked as a political director for Obama.
She also recounted how she ultimately made the decision to abandon the party when she appeared on The View – in her first public appearance following the bombshell news.
‘Now the cloud of unease hovering over me solidified into an idea about how I could possibly do something different. How I could channel my disappointment into some kind of concrete action that would allow me to fight for what I believed in without giving blind loyalty to a party I felt no longer deserved it,’ Jean-Pierre remembered thinking.
‘You know what? I’m going to become an independent,’ she continued. ‘I don’t think I can stomach being in the Democratic Party anymore.’
Prior to Biden’s announcement that he was dropping out of the race on July 21, 2024, Jean-Pierre had gained flack as she repeatedly touted the president’s physical and mental acuity from the podium
Jean-Pierre’s memoir has been described as an ‘urgent, timely analysis’ with publisher Hatchette urging Americans to ‘vote their values and maintain individuality within party lines.’
But some of her former colleagues have hit out at the former press secretary, whom they accused of being a ‘grifter’ for cashing in with the book.
‘I laughed reading her book announcement that claims she “presents clear arguments and provocative evidence” when our party failed to make a compelling argument for Democrats with her as one of our most visible messenger for three years,’ one former Biden administration official told DailyMail.com.
‘Probably best to purge the party of our most delusional and self-serving personalities,’ the former official added.
Another operative told Politico it was ‘the most grift-y thing I’ve seen in a long time, and that’s saying something in Washington.’
Former White House official Symone Sanders-Townsend, a former advisor to VP Kamala Harris, also wrote on X that ‘a lot of group chats were revived today,’ with former Biden State Department spokesman Vedant Patel saying he was ‘counting 13 on my end.’
Jean-Pierre’s new memoir, which runs 256 pages, is set to go on sale on Tuesday
She has previously referenced some of the scores she planned to settle during an interview in February at the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
At the time, she told how the ‘toughest thing to see’ was a ‘firing squad’ during the weeks after Biden’s debate, when party stalwarts pushed him to drop out – arguing he could not defeat Donald Trump with his lousy approval ratings.
‘I had never seen anything like it before,’ she intoned. ‘I had never seen a party do that in the way that they did. And it was hurtful and sad to see that happening – a firing squad around a person who I believe was a true patriot.’
Her new book, which runs 256 pages, is set to go on sale on Tuesday.
