White House comms director blames Harris for chaos in the vice president's office: report

Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications director, reportedly pins the blame for disfunction in the vice president's office squarely on the shoulders of Kamala Harris, according to a new book.

"This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future," by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, was profiled in Politico on Tuesday and reported details about chaos in the vice president's office were on display.

Harris' office has lost 10 staffers since summer of 2021 and is reportedly a difficult environment in which to exist. Some of Harris' staffers reportedly blamed the issue primarily on mismanagement of the vice president, to which Bedingfield responded.

Martin and Burns write that "Bedingfield had taken to noting that the vice presidency was not the first time in Harris’s political career that she had fallen short of sky-high expectations."

"Her Senate office had been messy and her [2020] presidential campaign had been a fiasco. Perhaps, she suggested, the problem was not the vice president’s staff," write the pair.

Politico notes that Bedingfield unequivocally denies making such remarks.

"The fact that no one working on this book bothered to call to fact check this unattributed claim tells you what you need to know. Vice President Harris is a force in this administration and I have the utmost respect for the work she does every day to move the country forward," wrote the White House comms director. 

The book reports that frustration between the White House and the office of the vice president began to grow last year after Harris' widely panned trip to Mexico and Guatemala to assess the "root causes" of the migration crisis at thee U.S. southern border. The vice president has since been tasked with leading a number of political missions, most of which have ended in abject failure – most notably, the election reform bill that failed in the senate after months of political back-and-forth.