Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre sat for an interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner that turned contentious as the journalist peppered her with questions about former President Biden’s mental health and what she knew about his condition.
“You feel like you had to leave the Democratic Party because of the way it treated Joe Biden. How did it treat Joe Biden?” Chotiner asked Jean-Pierre early in the back-and-forth.
“I call it a betrayal. And the reason I say this, and I really want people to understand my perspective and where I come from and the role that I played in those three weeks — from the debate to the president deciding that he was no longer going to be at the top of the ticket and handing over the baton — is that I was the person who was standing on that podium behind that lectern, having to take in all the hard questions on this,” she responded.
“And I was watching what Democratic leadership was doing. It was an all-out, full-on campaign to embarrass him, to push him out.”
Jean-Pierre said there was a time when she was questioning “what was happening and how do we treat our own, how do we treat people who are decent people?”
“And then you also have to think about how I’m thinking about this as a Black woman who is part of the LGBTQ community, and living in this time where I also don’t think Democrats right now, Democrats’ leadership, is protecting vulnerable people in the way that it should,” she continued.
Chotiner shot back that he was “a little unclear about what this has to do with Democratic leaders and many Democrats in the country thinking that Joe Biden was going to lose to Donald Trump — which was what the polls all showed — and therefore thinking that he should be replaced.”
“Nobody knows anything. Nobody knows what would’ve happened,” Biden’s former press secretary insisted. “We can’t forget that there was an incumbency issue as well. This is real. There are, like, several G10 countries with incumbents who did not get reelected. There was an incumbency issue as well.”
“I’m not sure what you’re saying,” Chotiner responded.
“Nobody knew that Joe Biden was going to win in 2020,” Jean-Pierre argued. “Nobody
knew what was going to happen in 2024. People believed in their hearts that [former Vice President] Kamala [Harris] was going to win. They believed it. They saw the polling and they thought she was going to win, looking at the polling. Nobody knew anything. I’m only bringing up the polls because you brought up the polls to me.”
Jean-Pierre is conducting a series of media interviews as she promotes a new book about her time working in the White House under Biden.
She is one of several former White House officials that Republicans and conservative media figures have alleged knew about Biden’s faltering mental acuity and as a result tried to shield the then-president from public view before the 2024 election.
“I always couch it with this: of course, he was older,” Jean-Pierre told Chotiner. “Of course, he was aging. He mentioned it. He talked about not speaking as well as he used to. He talked about not walking as well as he used to.
“No one is saying that he didn’t age, but he is someone that I engaged with. I saw him every single day as his White House press secretary, and he was someone that was engaged, on top of policy, challenging his staff.”
