Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is taking loads of incoming fire from former colleagues of all stripes after she announced that she’d left the Democratic Party and has a book coming out in which she reportedly urges Americans to move beyond the current two-party political system.
One particularly nasty comment came from a former Biden adviser, who called the ex-Biden spokesperson “kinda dumb.”
Jean-Pierre, who served as then-president Joe Biden’s mouthpiece from May 2022 until the end of his term this past January, is set to come out with her White House memoir, titled Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, this October.
The book’s publisher Hachette, calls it a “groundbreaking, revelatory assessment of America’s broken two-party system” and states that the former flack will take readers “through the three weeks that led to Biden’s abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision.”
It did not take long for the knives to come out for the 50-year-old, whose experience in government was limited to a stint as a regional political director in the Obama administration’s political affairs shop before she joined the Biden administration’s press operation.
Perhaps the harshest criticism came from Tim Wu, the Columbia University law professor who served as Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy from 2021 to 2023.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter) which Wu deleted shortly after posting, he slammed Jean-Pierre, a Columbia graduate who has lectured at the university’s School of International and Public Affairs, as lacking the smarts for her former gig.
“From WH policy staff perspective, the real problem with Karine Jean-Pierre was that she was kinda dumb,” he wrote.
“No interest in understanding harder topics. Just gave random incoherent answers on policy,” Wu added.
The legal expert’s assessment of the former White House spokesperson’s abilities and limitations is consistent with the view shared by former White House officials who spoke to The Independent on condition of anonymity during her time as press secretary.
In hushed tones, members of Jean-Pierre’s own staff routinely characterized her —their boss — as ill-prepared and unqualified compared with her predecessor, Jen Psaki, citing Psaki’s prior experience as an Obama-era State Department spokesperson and as White House Communications Director.
They said Jean-Pierre’s ascent to fill Psaki’s shoes after she decamped for a job at MSNBC was in no small part due to the perceived benefits of elevating the first Black, female and LGBT+ person to the press secretary role, as well as her closeness with then-first lady Jill Biden’s chief of staff, Anthony Bernal.
While Jean-Pierre did spend more than a year as Psaki’s principal deputy and gained experience behind the iconic White House lectern delivering briefings in her stead on occasion, once she took over the top job it quickly became clear that she was nowhere near as polished or as fleet of rhetorical foot as her predecessor.
Nowhere was the gulf between the two Biden spokespersons as evident as when it came to the foreign policy matters that dominated much of the Biden administration’s attention, leading Biden to enlist Pentagon spokesperson and retired Navy Rear Admiral John Kirby to speak on national security matters, ostensibly as part of the National Security Council communications team.
Jean-Pierre is understood to have bristled at Kirby;s presence in the James Brady briefing room, seeing him as a rival who undermined her authority as the president’s spokesperson.
Attempts by Dunn and others to entice her to step away from her post — including by arranging for her to be offered a seven-figure salary to run the reproductive rights PAC called EMILY’s List — failed as she stubbornly remained in her post. She reportedly threatened to enlist high-profile Black activists such as Rev. Al Sharpton, her former MSNBC colleague, to raise the alarm if she were pushed out.
Others who worked with Jean-Pierre described her as incurious and unwilling to prep for briefings to the point where she would rely heavily on a binder full of briefing notes but would always appear as she was reading them for the first time when answering questions — because she often was.
And in the wake of her book announcement, the criticisms have grown sharper and harsher.
One ex-official said Jean-Pierre’s leadership in the press shop was nonexistent.
“She didn’t know how to manage a team, didn’t know how to shape or deliver a message, and often created more problems than she solved,” they said, according to Axios.
The ex-official also told the outlet that Jean-Pierre routinely “had meltdowns” whenever she participated in an interview that veered off of the narrow set of topics she’d been notified of in advance. Another agreed, saying that Jean-Pierre required “coddling” that distracted her team from “actual matters of substance” on a regular basis.
As for her book, another ex-White House staffer called the book project a “bizarre cash grab” and slammed Jean-Pierre for having “have enjoyed the perks of extreme proximity to power — which ... bestows the name recognition needed to sell books off your name” while trying to position herself as an outsider to sell books. They added that the hypocrisy displayed was “as breathtaking as it is desperate.”
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