Karine Jean-Pierre, who served as former President Joe Biden’s press secretary from 2022 to 2025, has stoked the ire of Democrats after she revealed, in a press release for her forthcoming book, that she has left the Party.
Legacy Lit announced Wednesday that it will publish Jean-Pierre’s Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines in the fall. The press release said that Jean-Pierre has chosen “to embrace life as an Independent.”
“Jean-Pierre didn’t come to her decision to be an Independent lightly,” the publisher says. “She has served two American presidents, Obama and Biden. In 2020, she joined Biden’s campaign as a senior adviser, becoming [Kamala] Harris’s chief of staff and then, two years later, White House press secretary. She takes us through the three weeks that led to Biden’s abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision.”
Democrats were quick to criticize Jean-Pierre for the announcement. Newsweek reports that Tim Wu, who was a special assistant to Biden from 2021 to 2023, wrote in a since-deleted post on the social platform X, “From WH policy staff perspective, the real problem with Karine Jean-Pierre was that she was kinda dumb. No interest in understanding harder topics. Just gave random incoherent answers on policy.”
And Axios quoted an unnamed “former Biden communications official” as saying, “The hubris of thinking you can position yourself as an outsider when you not only have enjoyed the perks of extreme proximity to power—which...bestows the name recognition needed to sell books off your name—but have actively wielded it from the biggest pulpit there is, is as breathtaking as it is desperate....It’s difficult to see how this is anything but a bizarre cash grab.”
Independent is scheduled for publication on October 21.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
