A quantity of forces on the left questioned Josh Shapiro’s ties to Israel throughout Kamala Harris’ rushed running mate selection process in 2024. In his new memoir out subsequent week, the Pennsylvania governor says the former vp and her vetting team have been amongst them.
So a lot so, Shapiro writes in a replica obtained by NCS, that Dana Remus, a former White House counsel below President Joe Biden who turned a senior member of Harris’ VP vetting team, asked him, “Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?”
“Was she kidding?” Shapiro writes. “I told her how offensive the question was.”
“‘Well, we have to ask,’” Remus, a former White House counsel below President Joe Biden, mentioned, in response to his guide. “‘We just wanted to check.’ She added: ‘Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?’”
Shapiro’s anger was clearly rising.
“If they were undercover, I responded, how the hell would I know?” he wrote. “I calmly answered her questions. Remus was just doing her job. I get it. But the fact that she asked, or was told to ask that question by someone else, said a lot about people around the VP.”
Shapiro, an observant Jew and a proud Zionist, was important of some protests proliferating on faculty campuses as tensions rose following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, assault and the Israeli army’s response, warning that some of these demonstrations appeared to tip into antisemitism. Despite his condemnation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s authorities, some voices on the left called him “Genocide Josh,” which they didn’t do with different politicians.
Shapiro frolicked in highschool engaged on an Israeli kibbutz and as a volunteer on an Israeli military base. He additionally wrote an op-ed in faculty saying Palestinians “do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States,” and had a quick stint in the Israeli Embassy’s public affairs division at the starting of his profession.
His employees has beforehand downplayed the volunteer work in Israel and work at the embassy, and he has mentioned that his writing as faculty scholar doesn’t mirror his present views.
Harris had her personal questions of their interview at the Naval Observatory, which Shapiro writes that he was heading to when he received the name. He writes that she asked him whether he would apologize for statements he made condemning the campus protests at the University of Pennsylvania.
“‘No,’ I said flatly,” he writes. But he says he instructed her he felt he may nonetheless make the case for her, even in locations like Dearborn, Michigan, the place there’s a sizable Arab American inhabitants and the place the state’s “Uncommitted” movement throughout the 2024 Democratic major took off.
“She heard me and expressed how bad she felt that I had been getting hammered with the antisemitic attacks that she had witnessed throughout the process,” Shapiro writes.
Days after Harris turned the nominee in 2024, a top aide opted not to answer directly when asked whether the vp nonetheless thought-about herself a Zionist.
The New York Times first reported on the particulars from the memoir.
Shapiro spokesman Manuel Bonder identified that this materials is just one chapter of a bigger memoir prompted by the firebomb attack on the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg final 12 months on the first evening of Passover.
“Gov. Shapiro wrote a very personal book about his faith, his family, and the people of Pennsylvania he has learned from and fought for throughout his life in public service,” Bonder mentioned Sunday.
A spokesperson for Harris didn’t reply when asked for remark. Remus couldn’t be reached for remark.
Harris and Shapiro have recognized one another for 20 years, since they have been half of the identical fellowship for up-and-coming politicians, however they have been by no means shut. That relationship solely received rockier over the vetting course of, with aides at the time complaining about one another. Harris took some shots at him in her post-election memoir; he responded that she was lying.
With each now potential 2028 presidential runs, one other second clearly reverberated for Shapiro too.
“Could she win Pennsylvania without me? she asked. Maybe, I said. I didn’t really know,” he writes.
Harris picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as a substitute. She misplaced Pennsylvania by about 120,000 votes.