A new book will soon be added to the growing pile reappraising former President Joe Biden’s time in office, this time coming from the inside.

Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre teased the release of Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines by announcing her departure from the Democratic Party. Henceforth, Jean-Pierre will think outside the box.

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It’s a strange approach for someone who served as a mouthpiece for the Biden administration at the time when the former president’s reelection campaign went up in flames in the aftermath of his debate with the predecessor who became his successor, Donald Trump.

Jean-Pierre comes from a partisan background as a Democratic communications professional and served in a White House role that now more closely resembles a campaign spokesperson’s job than that of a government official. She is likely to be independent in the same way as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Angus King (I-VT), both of whom caucus with the Democrats.

It is not clear how Jean-Pierre will treat Biden or portray the White House as “broken” in her book. But her job was to spin for Biden as his press secretary and she has been defensive of him since the administration ended. 

“I had never seen anything like it before. I had never seen a party do that in the way that they did, and it was hurtful and sad to see that happening. A firing squad around a person who I believe was a true patriot, a person who I believe did everything that he can for this country,” Jean-Pierre said in February of the Democrats’ successful campaign to push Biden out of the 2024 presidential race while he was in the depths of his post-debate doldrums.

Jean-Pierre had also led the charge in defending Biden’s fitness to run and serve as she swatted away questions about his age-related decline. “Don, you’re asking me this question,” she replied in 2022 when Don Lemon asked her on CNN about Biden’s ability to seek reelection. “Oh, my gosh. He’s the president of the United States. I can’t even keep up with him.”

If CNN’s Jake Tapper received criticism for co-authoring the bestseller Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again when he wasn’t on the cutting edge of the story before Biden dropped out, the reaction to Jean-Pierre writing an even subtly anti-Biden book at this point would be thunderous.

Democrats and the media have already started panning the new book. “As Biden’s press secretary, Jean-Pierre’s halting, ineffectual briefings exasperated reporters and routinely offered material for the Republican Party’s main account on X,” Politico reported. “She frustrated colleagues throughout the West Wing for focusing on raising her own profile while leaving the hands-on management of media relations and the White House press shop to other aides.”

“This paragraph is from the reporter. It is not attributed to anyone else,” responded conservative commentator Erick Erickson. “This is the reporter reporting something that was, again, obvious at the time and it could have been reported at the time.”

That could describe both Biden’s struggles as a communicator and Jean-Pierre’s performance as White House press secretary.

Jean-Pierre clearly did not relish viral exchanges with the likes of Fox News’s Peter Doocy as much as her predecessor, Jen Psaki, who is now an MSNBC personality. But Jean-Pierre’s briefings probably made less news outside the Beltway, which might have been to the White House’s benefit, and she took over the position as Biden’s political position was deteriorating.

“It wasn’t a straight line of decline; he had good days and bad,” Tapper and co-author Alex Thompson of Axios write of the aging Biden.

CREDIBILITY BONFIRE: HOW THE LEFTIST MEDIA COVERED UP BIDEN’S PHYSICAL AND MENTAL DECLINE 

A truly independent look at this time period from someone close to Biden’s inner circle could be illuminating, especially as Trump orders an investigation into the matter. The executive branch is challenging even for a fully engaged president to run. There are still many questions about how the White House operated outside Biden’s limited working hours and on his bad days.

We will soon see if Jean-Pierre does something in her book that she often did not do at the White House daily press briefings while Biden was still president: provide some answers.