Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was already irritated by what he describes as “unnecessarily contentious” questions from the team vetting him to be Kamala Harris’s running mate when a senior aide made one final inquiry: “Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?”
The question came from President Biden’s former White House counsel Dana Remus, who was a key member of Harris’s vice-presidential search team.
Shapiro, one of the most well-known Jewish elected officials in the country-and one of at least three Jewish politicians considering a run for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination-says he took umbrage at the question. “Had I been a double agent for Israel? Was she kidding? I told her how offensive the question was,” Shapiro writes in his forthcoming book,Where We Keep the Light,a copy of which The Atlantic obtained ahead of its release on January 27.
The exchange became even more tense, he writes, when Remus asked whether Shapiro had ever spoken with an undercover Israeli agent. The questions left the governor feeling uneasy about the prospect of being Harris’s No. 2, a role that ultimately went to Minnesota Governor Tim walz. After Harris and Walz lost to Donald Trump, many Democrats were critical of her decision to bypass Shapiro, the popular governor of the nation’s largest swing state. In his book,Shapiro says that the decision may not have been fully hers; he says he had “a knot in my stomach” throughout a vetting process that was more combative than he had expected. Shapiro wrote that he decided to take his name out of the running after a one-on-one meeting with Harris that featured more clashes, including about Israel.
The account highlights some of the fault lines that Democrats are navigating as thay try to put the 2024 campaign behind them and chart a path back to the White House. With his book, Shapiro aims to showcase why Democrats lost and how his brand of consensus-building politics can usher them back to power. But before the consensus building, it seems, Shapiro felt compelled to do some score settling.
Harris,after all,had written a surprisingly candid account of her truncated and,ultimately,tortured selection process for a running mate,and it did not make Shapiro look good. When my colleague Tim Alberta first informed Shapiro of Harris’s description of their meeting in her book, 107 Days, he grew uncharacteristically sharp-tongued. “That’s complete and utter bullshit,” he told Alberta. “I can tell you that her accounts are just blatant lies.” Shapiro is more measured in Where We Keep the Light, taking pains not to attack Harris herself and instead blaming her staff for probing him in a way that at times felt gratuitous.
“Remus was just doing her job,” Shapiro wrote about the Israeli-spy inquiry. ”I get it. But the fact that she asked, or was told to ask that question by someone else, said a lot about some of the people around the VP.” (Remus and an aide to Harris did not respond to a request for comment.) In a statement, Shapiro’s spokesperson Manuel Bonder didn’t address the apparently unpleasant vetting process, and would onyl s
Josh Shapiro’s vetting for the vice presidency was marked by a tense, direct conversation with Kamala harris, according to Shapiro’s forthcoming memoir.The meeting, which took place shortly after Shapiro spoke with a lawyer who couldn’t confirm whether he’d ever communicated with an Israeli intelligence agent, revealed a clash in approaches from the start.
Before meeting Harris at the Naval Observatory, Shapiro inquired about the number of bedrooms and the possibility of borrowing art from the Smithsonian. Harris’s team reportedly viewed this as premature presidential maneuvering. Shapiro dismisses this as simple “small talk” that was “analyzed, misrepresented, and picked apart.”
The conversation itself, held in a sparsely furnished dining room, lacked typical pleasantries. Both Shapiro and Harris described it as blunt, a stark contrast to the usual effort to build rapport between potential running mates. A key point of contention arose when Harris pressed Shapiro to apologize for his comments regarding protests at the University of Pennsylvania, where demonstrators critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza had, in some instances, intimidated Jewish students.
Shapiro stated he “flatly” refused to apologize. He claims Harris’s team repeatedly challenged him on past positions, seeking public reversals. Shapiro maintained he wouldn’t apologize for his beliefs or long-held stances,arguing he wouldn’t simply echo harris’s views.He believed the vetting process focused too much on his ideology and worldview, rather than substantive policy differences.
Shapiro assured Harris’s team he respected the vetting process but wouldn’t compromise his principles. He then questioned Harris about her vision for the vice presidency, but details of her response were not provided.
