Michael LaRosa, a former aide to both Joe and Jill Biden, on Monday blasted Biden administration staffers for "serving a cult" and bullying anyone who deviated from their agenda.
"Inside the White House, the Regina Georges of Biden's circle ruled like mean girls and policed loyalty," LaRosa wrote in a Fox News op-ed. "Staff weren't serving a president and first lady—they were serving a cult. You never knew when Regina was in charge or when the Bidens were. It was all blurred."
LaRosa said he wanted to be "taken seriously" and to contribute "candid and thoughtful analysis" to the Biden administration. "But the president's bullies didn't see it that way," LaRosa lamented. "To them, I had taken off the team jersey by pointing out missed opportunities and mistakes, so they came for me."
"The example they tried to make of me was meant to serve as a warning to any Democrat who raised concerns ahead of 2024," LaRosa's op-ed goes on. "The same bullies who claimed to serve a president who despised bullies were sending me a message: shut up or we'll humiliate you."
This isn't the first time LaRosa has blasted former colleagues in the Biden administration. In February, he told an interviewer that allegations of a full-scale "cover-up" of Biden's cognitive decline are "a little harsh" but admitted that staffers engaged in "a lot of gaslighting" to downplay concerns about the former president's health.
"The president's team was scared to death of impromptu, unscripted, unrehearsed, unpracticed, unchoreographed anything," LaRosa went on.
LaRosa's latest revelations come as former vice president Kamala Harris has also lashed out at Biden's White House team in her forthcoming book 107 Days, according to excerpts published this month. "Getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible," Harris writes in her book, saying that "it seemed as if [Biden aides] decided I should be knocked down a little bit more."
"Their thinking was zero-sum," Harris says of Biden aides: "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."
Biden administration aides have responded to Harris's claims by accusing the former vice president of scapegoating Biden to cover up her own failures. "Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job," one of a dozen former Biden aides interviewed by Axios said. "She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration's key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was."
LaRosa's op-ed points to deep divisions between Biden advisers. Harris's book "says what insiders whispered for years," LaRosa wrote.
