(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) President Joe Biden speculated that then-Sen. Kamala Harris and her aides filled the mainstream media with negative stories about other candidates for Vice President to ensure that she got the job, the Washington Examiner reported.
Two New York Times reporters, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, revealed that the Harris team used opposition research to spike her opponent’s chances in an upcoming book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” which Simon & Schuster will publish on May 3.
Martin and Burns noted that in the vice presidential vetting period “something about this [the negative press for other candidates] seemed more deliberate, even targeted.”
They wrote that the negative stories were “aimed at all of the most formidable Black women under consideration, except for Kamala Harris.”
Harris relied on negative tactics during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, using opposition research against her opponents, including then-candidate Biden, who she targeted for resisting forced busing.
Two top vice presidential contenders, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice and Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., had to answer for their past behaviors, but the media let Harris off without much interrogation.
Bass faced scrutiny for praising dictator Fidel Castro and the Church of Scientology, which many view to be a cult. Rice faced criticism for being too rough on her subordinates.
The double-standard worked well for Republicans because Harris, one of the most unlikeable political figures in memory, became the vice president. But Democrats noticed it.
“Even Joe Biden wondered aloud: Was Harris’s team driving this?” Martin and Burns wrote.
Harris was not certain to get the job.
Former Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who served on Biden’s vice presidential search committee, pulled for Bass.
Eventually, Democrats turned on Harris, too.
“Biden was startled by some of the intra-state factional attacks on Harris by her fellow Democrats, including members of the state’s large congressional delegation,” Martin and Burns wrote.
