Top White House officials attempted to force Karine Jean-Pierre out of her job in late 2023, according to a new report. The so-far failed coup attempt involved Anita Dunn, who is Joe Biden's top communications chief and technically Jean-Pierre's superior.
The details of how this went down are something and speak to the severe dysfunction present in the Biden administration. Wokeness inevitably leads to destruction.
De facto White House communications chief Anita Dunn, 66, the wife of Biden personal attorney Bob Bauer, told colleagues she had decided to call in prominent Democrats to explain to Jean-Pierre, 49, that the time was ripe to move on, sources told The Post.
“There were a number of people she asked to engage Karine,” said one source who heard of the strategy directly from Dunn, whose role as senior adviser has been filled during the past three presidencies by Jared Kushner (Donald Trump), Valerie Jarrett (Barack Obama) and Karl Rove (George W. Bush).
The source also told The Post that Dunn had claimed White House chief of staff Jeff Zients knew about and supported the cloak-and-dagger scheme to push Jean-Pierre out of the West Wing.
“There was an effort to have some outside folks who Karine knows and trusts talk to her about why leaving last fall would have made a lot of sense for her and her career,” the source said, calling it an “effort to encourage her to move along.”
The long and short of it is that Dunn and others had prominent Democrats meet with Jean-Pierre in an attempt to seed her departure. I guess they were trying to do some kind of Jedi mind trick, suggesting to her with a wink and nod that if she moved on, she'd advance in her career. We can safely assume Jean-Pierre didn't take the offer, given she remains in her position today despite often being described as the worst White House press secretary in history.
Frustration around Jean-Pierre's performance has been palpable for a long time. She's prone to verbal miscues and seems to have no ability to think on her feet, instead choosing to read canned answers from a binder that are often not directly related to the questions being asked. Rather than formulating good spin in response to the bad policies of the Biden administration, Jean-Pierre is prone to telling egregious lies that then become news stories themselves. A press secretary is supposed to be slicker than that.
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Putting all that aside, though, here's what is most striking to me about this report: If they want Jean-Pierre gone so badly, why hasn't she just been fired?
The answer to that question is obvious. Firing the "first black, lesbian, immigrant" press secretary would be bad optics for a president who has made DEI a centerpiece of his administration. Jean-Pierre is protected not by her stellar performance on the job, but by the identity boxes she checks. They can't fire her without being eviscerated by the far left and its adherents in the mainstream press.
A second source told The Post that “Jeff and Anita were trying to find Karine a graceful exit” because of the ugly optics of removing her against her will.
“There’s a huge diversity issue and they’re afraid of what folks are going to say,” added this source, who said they learned of the effort from multiple people briefed by Dunn and confirmed at least one person from outside the administration did speak with Jean-Pierre.
Biden went woke instead of hiring a press secretary based on merit, and now he's stuck with her during the most contentious presidential election campaign in history. That's another self-inflicted wound committed in his dogged pursuit to please his left flank.