Joe Biden believed Barack Obama couldn’t even swear properly, new book claims

She responded, “That’s a ridiculous assumption to make.”

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Jean-Pierre referred back to that exchange during her briefing with reporters at the White House on Tuesday, and provided updated comment, saying that administration officials had now “seen the context of the excerpt.”

She said the book was actually praising Biden for helping to push major legislation through Congress and unify global support around Ukraine.

It “seemed to be making the opposite overall point about how the value of his experience and wisdom resulted in rallying the free world against authoritarianism,” she said.

Jean-Pierre also said “there’s gonna be a range, always, a range of books that are about every administration” that would feature “a variety of claims.”

“That’s not unusual. That happens all the time,” she said. “And we’re not going to litigate here.”

Foer’s book also describes struggles by Vice President Kamala Harris to carve out a role for herself as Biden’s No. 2 that have been well-documented previously. But Foer suggests Harris may have hurt her own cause in that area, initially asking to be in charge of relations with Scandinavia because it was “away from the spotlight.”

The book reports that the vice president was initially excited about helping the administration tackle the root causes of immigration that have seen so many Central American migrants seeking asylum arrive at the US-Mexico border — but that she eventually began to accept conventional wisdom that it was a thankless assignment.

Foer’s book says Biden tried to treat Harris more respectfully than he felt Obama often had treated him as vice president, calling her “the vice president” instead of “my vice president.”

But, during his early days in office, as Biden was convening his team to combat the coronavirus pandemic, Biden joked that the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, should sit in the vice president’s seat.

The Last Politician describes the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. It says that when Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, relayed to the president that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country, leaving Kabul to fall to the Taliban, Biden declared in frustration, “Give me a break!”

It also reports that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally intervened to help many women whose work in Afghanistan made them potential targets for the Taliban. She directed a group of them to wear white scarfs so they could be identified by US Marines guarding the Kabul airport, and unilaterally contacted world leaders to find places for their eventual evacuation flights to land.

The book says Clinton’s call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky drew a personal rebuke from Sullivan, former close advisor to Clinton, who told her “What are you doing calling the Ukrainian government?”