Jean-Pierre had defended Biden’s mental and physical fitness in the months leading up to the presidential election.
Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has revealed her reason for leaving the Democratic Party after years of loyalty, citing disappointment in how then-President Joe Biden was forced off the presidential ticket in July 2024.
In an excerpt from her new memoir “Independent,” published on Oct. 16 by Newsweek, Jean-Pierre recounted the moment Biden told his senior staff via Zoom that he would exit the race, a decision she said that she “never thought” he would make.
According to her account, Biden appeared “totally at peace” with having to quit the race. But she wrote that she was overwhelmed with anger and sadness.
“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 been treated poorly by members of his own party,” Jean-Pierre wrote. “It was horrible.”
She was one of the White House’s most outspoken defenders of Biden’s mental and physical fitness. She consistently rejected claims that he was unfit for office, going on record as early as June 2022 to dismiss such reports as “hearsay” when then-CNN anchor Don Lemon asked whether Biden had the “stamina” to finish a second term.
In February 2024, after special counsel Robert Hur declined to prosecute Biden for allegedly mishandling classified documents on the premise that a jury would likely see him as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” Jean-Pierre said that assessment “does not live in reality.”
After Biden’s performance in the June 2024 debate against then-presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump, which was widely criticized and deepened public skepticism about his ability to continue doing the job, she again defended Biden’s fitness for office, saying that the then-81-year-old president was “as sharp as ever.”
Biden’s withdrawal the next month cleared the path for Vice President Kamala Harris to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination without a primary contest. Harris, who tried to distance herself from Biden and his policies during the campaign, went on to lose to Trump in a landslide in November 2024.
Jean-Pierre, who had stood by Biden throughout his presidency and reelection campaign, said she was left to question the political loyalty that had shaped her entire career.
By Bill Pan
