‘Morning Joe’ Stunned Into Silence After Reading Kamala Harris Excerpt Blaming Biden’s Ego

BRZEZINSKI: “‘The Atlantic’ has published an excerpt from former Vice President Kamala Harris’s forthcoming new book entitled, ‘107 Days.’ And in it, Harris details the challenges she faced when Joe Biden dropped out of the race, and she was suddenly tapped to run for president. In it, she writes, ‘During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps. “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision. I was well aware of my delicate status. Lore has it that every outgoing chief of staff always tells the incoming president’s chief of staff, rule number 1: Watch the VP. I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. When the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more. Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands.’”
SCARBOROUGH: “Well, um —“
BRZEZINSKI: “That is from Kamala Harris’s new book.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Yeah.”
BRZEZINSKI: “Let’s —“
SCARBOROUGH: “I have just to say so, Willie, or whoever — who — who wants to take the jump ball here. Rev, I’ll go to you. So you know politics. I mean, you’ve run for president. A couple things here. I can understand everybody wringing their hands saying, ‘Why didn’t we step in? Why didn’t we intervene?’ I can understand the vice president, Vice President Harris doing that. But people that know Joe Biden and Jill Biden, no. Speaking of jump balls, nobody was going to take that ball from their hands. They were determined. I mean, I talked to a lot of people. I know a lot of people around the Bidens, and the further you get away from it, the further you realize that Joe Biden and Jill Biden were not going to be talked out of anything until the pressure was overwhelming. That’s number one. Number two, vice presidents are treated badly by the president’s staff. Ask Joe Biden. There were times he was treated absolutely horrifically by Barack Obama’s staff. Just no respect. And sadly, that happened. So people that may be saying, ‘Oh, well, Kamala Harris is bitter.’ No, you know, this unfortunately is a dynamic that happens in every White House.”
BRZEZINSKI: “There’s a whole show about it.” [crosstalk]
SHARPTON: “No, there’s no doubt about it. One of the reasons I wanted to take the jump ball on this is I remember at the beginning I was among those saying to Biden when he won the nomination, we want to see a black woman on the ticket.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Right.”
SHARPTON: “He’d already committed a black woman in the Supreme Court, which he did.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Right.”
SHARPTON: “But our argument was, well, suppose you don’t get elected, we want to see one on the ticket. And to our surprise, he chose Kamala Harris, who had debated him pretty viciously, according to some feeling during the thing.”
SCARBOROUGH: “She suggested he was racist.” [crosstalk]
BRZEZINSKI: “She is good on the debate stage.”
SHARPTON: “And to his credit, he felt she was the best candidate.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Yeah.”
SHARPTON: “So she came in to a staff that already was saying, ‘Why did he pick her? She ambushed us.’ So she was not in a position to really counsel that you ought to step aside when they never really, the staff —“
SCARBOROUGH: “Right.”
SHARPTON: “— acclimated to her. And I think that anyone that got to know President Biden, as I did, know that it was him and Jill that were going to make the final decision.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Right.”
SHARPTON: “So here’s somebody that already was a sort of in the midway house that was —“
SCARBOROUGH: “Right.”
SHARPTON: “— going to jump over the staff and go. I think that she was in a very peculiar position. Though, the — the — the public would say, ‘Why didn’t you say something?’ I don’t think she was in a position.”
SCARBOROUGH: “She just wasn’t.”
SHARPTON: “I think at the end, I don’t think she was reckless. I think she did what she could do.”
SCARBOROUGH: “And by the way, Joe Biden and Jill Biden weren’t listening. They weren’t going to — if she said — if she went in — she could go in and say it all the time. They weren’t listening. I will say, John, as we talk about Kamala Harris, there’s also just the truth. Too early on, she did herself no favors. I mean, she — she had a terrible time with her staff the first year or two. It was — the — the — the White House was having to do triage on her staffing problems, everybody leaving. So she had a rocky start, but she certainly — she certainly leveled out and started doing, I think, very well.”
BRZEZINSKI: “And — and stepped up during the campaign in an unbelievable way.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Oh, by the way, that’s the thing that’s always forgotten. She was like — you know, I remember calling her one time, going — I — I wasn’t sure you’re up on stage. You look like a Vita, you know, when she was going like 15,000 people events and they’re all screaming and going crazy. And I was like, never saw that coming.”
LEMIRE: “Yeah, she found her voice in the vice —“
SCARBOROUGH: “She sure did.”
LEMIRE: “— in the vice presidency. People around Biden even gradually admit that around when the Dobbs decision came down —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Yes.”
LEMIRE: “— that’s when she really stepped up —“
SCARBOROUGH: “She did.”
SHARPTON: “Right.”
LEMIRE: “— and then ran as good of a campaign as she could have. Most people —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Yeah.”
LEMIRE: “— believe it was 107 days —“
BRZEZINSKI: “And the debate —“
LEMIRE: “Yeah.”
BRZEZINSKI: “— with Trump, my God!”
LEMIRE: “And then — and had a strong debate performance. She also writes in the book. Certainly there’s as we just — as Mika just read questions there about Biden’s decision to run. But she also addresses the other part. Like, did she think he was capable of holding the office? And she says this. ‘Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience, a deep conviction. On his worst day he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best.’ But she does say, ‘But at age 81, Joe got tired. I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believe that, I would have said so.’”
BRZEZINSKI: “Mm-hmm.”
LEMIRE: “‘As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.’”
SCARBOROUGH: “Mike, I do — I do want to circle back on that point, too. She’ll probably be criticized for saying that. You — I’ve talked time and again about the hours that I spent with Joe Biden and the fact that he knew more about foreign policy than anybody that I’ve been — you know, been around. If he hadn’t, I would have said so on the show. Like I just would have said so. You also know people that sat with him in the sit room. You know people that were around him and listened to him talking for hours. Now, I will say when I saw him, he was slow. He was, you know, plotting. He was — his neck was stiff. Everything was really stiff. And you’re like, ‘Eh,’ walks around slowly. But when he sat down, may have spoken more quietly and more haltingly. But man, I never once saw him where he blanked out. Never once saw him where I will just say a lot of people in this administration, I haven’t seen a lot of people in this administration that could have kept up with him on foreign policy, especially when he started talking about foreign policy. Because he’d been doing it for 40, 45 years.”
BRZEZINSKI: “Yep.”
SCARBOROUGH: “So again, that’s — that’s the — I — I — I think that’s the — the big lie that that came out of the whole Biden campaign.”
BARNICLE: “It’s still going on.”
SCARBOROUGH: “And I will say —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Yeah.”
SCARBOROUGH: “— this is — and Mark Halperin has said this too because we had a debate about it. Biden was never as bad as his opponent said he was, and was never as good as his staffers in the White House at the time said he was. There’s always a truth somewhere in the middle.”
BARNICLE: “Look, he’s going to be 83 years of age in a couple of months, all right? You can’t confuse age with intellect. He still had the intellect. He still had the ability to do the job. Was he slower moving physically? Yes, he was 80, 81, 82 in his — in his presidency. That’s all for presidents. That’s — that’s all for —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Well, our president right now —“
BARNICLE: “— that’s all for anyone. And with regard to what Kamala Harris said about, you know, her internal dealings with this — with the Biden staff, I do know and I have heard repeatedly that any time anyone from Ron Klain on down —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Mm-hmm.”
BARNICLE: “— who would say something negative about Kamala Harris, Joe Biden would say, ‘Hey, no!’ And he would shut — just shut it off, and — and defend her —“
SCARBOROUGH: “Right.”
BARNICLE: “— and protect her, and talk glowingly about her. Every time.”
BRZEZINSKI: “Yeah.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Because he knew —“
BRZEZINSKI: “I experienced that too.”
SCARBOROUGH: “— Willie, what it was like —“
GEIST: “Yeah.”
SCARBOROUGH: “— when Barack Obama’s staff —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Yeah.” [crosstalk]
SCARBOROUGH: “Again, I — I — I don’t know if any —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Eight years.”
SCARBOROUGH: “— vice president was ever treated as badly other than maybe LBJ with Kennedy’s people than Joe Biden was with Obama’s staff members.”
GEIST: “And who all then backed Hillary Clinton after —“
SCARBOROUGH: “Right.”
BRZEZINSKI: “Yeah.”
GEIST: “— Obama was — was — was finished.”
BRZEZINSKI: “And did the exit interview with Hillary.” [crosstalk]
GEIST: “Yeah. Did all — all those things. So —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Set her up.”
GEIST: “— she inherited a situation after the debate when it became undeniable, on June 27th of last year, that something was not right, that perhaps Joe Biden wasn’t up to the job, that would have been difficult for anyone no matter what political candidate it was. And maybe she wasn’t the best. And maybe there — if there had been an actual primary process, she wouldn’t have been —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Right.”
GEIST: “— the nominee. We’ll never know.”
BRZEZINSKI: “Right.”
GEIST: “But that would have been for anyone a difficult process, 107 day to Election Day.”
BRZEZINSKI: “Bracing and difficult. And she stepped up for sure.”