Biden picks Ron Klain as his potential White House chief of staff

Joe Biden has chosen Ron Klain as his White House chief of staff if he is the next President, the Biden-Harris transition team announced Wednesday.  

Klain is a longtime adviser to Biden and served as the Ebola czar under President Obama. He will have an active role in choosing the remainder of Biden’s team, should Biden become the president. President Trump is challenging the results of the election in several states. 

In a statement released Wednesday night, Biden said, “Ron has been invaluable to me over the many years that we have worked together, including as we rescued the American economy from one of the worst downturns in our history in 2009 and later overcame a daunting public health emergency in 2014.” 

He added, “His deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff as we confront this moment of crisis and bring our country together again.”  

Klain said that being named to this position was the “honor of a lifetime.”  

Klain was Biden’s chief of staff in 2009 during the H1N1 pandemic, in which more than 60 million Americans became ill with the swine flu, as it was called. 

In a quote that has come back to haunt him during the COVID-19 pandemic, Klain said of the swine flu pandemic, “It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck. If anyone thinks that this can’t happen again, they don’t have to go back to 1918, they just have to go back to 2009, 2010 and imagine a virus with a different lethality, and you can just do the math on that.”

Klain also served as chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore.