I agree with Chris Cillizza about POLITICO's headline here:
"Karine Jean-Pierre’s announcement that she’s leaving the Democratic Party — timed with the rollout of a new book — has detonated long-simmering grievances among her former White House colleagues about Jean-Pierre’s pursuit of celebrity and personal media exposure while serving as then-President Joe Biden’s press secretary.
The attention-grabbing ploy lit up Democratic and Biden alumni texting groups and reignited frustrations that burned for years about Jean-Pierre, according to seven former Biden administration officials granted anonymity to describe private conversations.
One former official recalled that Jean-Pierre had joked about becoming an independent even while on the job in the Biden White House, an off-key comment for someone ostensibly serving as a major messenger for the Democratic Party. Another former official said that Jean-Pierre had begun working during the Biden administration with a New York-based publicist and had copied that person on official emails before some of Jean-Pierre’s White House colleagues intervened.
“Everyone thinks this is a grift,” the first former official said of Jean-Pierre’s book project.
As Biden’s press secretary, Jean-Pierre’s halting, ineffectual briefings exasperated reporters and routinely offered material for the Republican Party’s main account on X. She frustrated colleagues throughout the West Wing for focusing on raising her own profile while leaving the hands-on management of media relations and the White House press shop to other aides.
While it’s unclear how she will portray Biden or her time in the White House in the book, titled “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines,” several former colleagues expressed confusion at how Jean-Pierre seemingly intends to paint Biden as a victim while pinning her own decision to leave the party on his “broken” White House...
Jean-Pierre’s former staffers offered withering criticism of what they see as an opportunistic grift.
“She made a joke about being an independent last year and now it’s a book. All ideas are monetary — even the dumb ones,” said one of the former staffers...
From POLITICO
From the Daily Mail:
"Jean-Pierre, 50, has frequently been seen shouting down journalists and descending into hostile back-and-forths since she assumed the high-profile role in May 2022.
Just weeks before election day, Jean-Pierre had perhaps her most fiery moment at the lectern, as she stormed out of the press room accusing reporters of spreading misinformation about FEMA's response to Hurricane Helene...
From the Daily Mail
As Fred Schneider wrote yesterday:
"And as far as Karine-Jean Pierre: before the Biden White House, she was part of the left-wing group MoveOn. She's not a Democrat in ideology anyway. More like a Berniecrat, or a member of the so-called Squad in the House. She was a registered Democrat, because she thought that party was the best way to advance her left-wing, social democratic brand of politics. And according to...
And as Jim Acosta and Don Lemon both said, what KJP is doing here, is a very Trumpy thing to do. You work for the man as long as you can, you compile a lot of information about him and other people who worked for the President, then you leave The White House and spill the beans (so to speak) about what you saw when you were there. Most of the information that you compiled probably being very negative about who you worked with and for. And you make a lot of money as a result. But this is Donald Trump's Reality TV America now. So why not? Because this is how his game is played.
From The New Democrat
Fred touched on this yesterday, but the reason we believe she only had the job that she had at The White House, was to appease the left-wing of the Democratic Party, who saw Joe Biden as too mainstream, too establishment, to "moderate" (whatever that means at this point) back in 2019-20. And this was a favor from the President to them, along with all the environmental actions that President Biden signed, to keep the left-wing off his back while he did what he really wanted to do as President. Which is probably why only the left-wing of the Democratic Party stayed behind the President, when everyone else in the country ditched him last summer and wanted him to drop his presidential campaign.
But, when you do political favors for people, those come with real political consequences:
The one big not really gaff, but more like Karine Jeanne Pierre caught being honest and letting people know what her real politics is, on a hot mic, was when Hamas attacked Israel in October of 2023 and the press wanted to know what the President and White House thought about that and instead of just answering that simple question and condemning the Hamas attack on Israel, she pulled a Kelly-Anne Conway and totally ignored the question and instead talked about what Israel has done to Palestine. Almost as if she was justifying the Hamas attack.
Anyone else who showed such horrible, lack of political judgment and communications, whether it's about Israel and Hamas, or any other key issue in the country, probably gets fired the next day for being so politically stupid. But Karine Jean-Pierre keeps her job because the President had already decided that he was going to run for reelection in 2024 and didn't want to risk offending the left-wing of his party.
So, look, this is nothing new. Thanks to Donald Trump, politics and government, is just another division of realty TV and celebrity culture in America, where everyone is looking to "go viral" and grift people off of that. And why not, when you worked in The White House for 4 years and were the press secretary for 18 months and have no much insider information that you want to profit off of, in Donald Trump's America?
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