Biden worries the secret service may be loyal to Trump, according to a new book

According to a new book that gives a look at the White House of President Joe Biden, Biden actively distrusted the Secret Service to the point that he could not speak freely in front of the agents and he believed that the agency lied about what happened when Biden’s German shepherd. Major bit agent.

At The Struggle of His Life, out January 17, writer Chris Whipple details how Biden showed his friends around the White House and pointed to the spot where Major allegedly bit a member of Biden’s security team. “Look, it’s the Secret Service never up here. It didn’t happen,” Biden said.

The book, obtained by Vox before publication, offers a West Wing account of Joe Biden’s first two years in office and puts the most positive spin on Biden’s efforts to deal with multiple crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But it also captures the insecurity of an administration that is still worried about whether Donald Trump will try to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. Then there’s Biden’s concern about Trumpists on the Secret Service detail.

In a statement, Robyn Patterson, a spokeswoman for the White House told Vox, “We appreciate that there will be no shortage of books written about the administration containing various claims. We do not plan to engage in confirmation or denial when it comes to the specifics of these claims. The authors do not provide an opportunity to verify the material contained here.

Whipple spends much of the early part of the book focusing on concerns about the transition of power in the fall and winter of 2020. As part of the transition process, Biden’s team is actively planning the possibility that Trump will use the US military to help. annul the election. These concerns have also been shared by other top officials, and it has been reported by other historians of the Trump Administration that Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi have shared their concerns about Trump. But as Whipple reports, Pelosi didn’t just talk to Milley about the same concerns; he also acted as an intermediary between Milley and the Biden team during the transition as well. Biden’s concerns about a peaceful transition of power were ubiquitous before he took office, so his advisers blame him, in part, for contributing to the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Trump’s disbelief is so strong that Biden tries to erase the memory of the former president’s presence from the White House whenever possible. According to Whipple’s account, this included efforts to remove the Resolute desk, which Biden believed was defiled by Trump’s use, from the Oval Office and replace it with a desk used by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It collapsed, and Roosevelt’s desk remained in Hyde Park, New York.

Biden may not have reached Roosevelt’s desk, but he is trying to pass some of the most ambitious first-term legislation since the New Deal. While Whipple doesn’t cover the Capitol Hill negotiations in the detail of other recent books, he gives the reader a glimpse into the Biden administration’s long and gradual process of persuading Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to support social spending. Inflation Reduction Bill. There have been many stumbles along the way, from the public war of words between Manchin and the White House in late 2021 to more personal ones like Biden mispronouncing the name of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema at the signing ceremony of the Inflation Reduction Act. It even noted Biden’s small point domestically, when all the progress of the agenda on Capitol Hill seemed to be stuck in the fall of 2021 and he told a friend that he was worried “not afraid”.

Whipple, who previously wrote a book about the position of White House chief of staff, also details the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and the Biden White House’s efforts to prevent Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and help Ukrainians defend themselves. In an excerpt from the book previously reported by Politico, Whipple captures the back-and-forth blame game through the total withdrawal of Afghanistan, which led to 13 American deaths after the bombing died at the entrance to the Kabul airport. He described how Secretary of State Tony Blinken blamed the bad judgment of the intelligence community, CIA director Bill Burns resigned, and current chief of staff Ron Klain pointed the finger at the past administration after Leon Panetta – his predecessor in Barack Obama – moved to cable television. to compare the withdrawal to the Bay of Pigs debacle during the Kennedy administration.

Whipple’s treatment of Ukraine is more interesting. He noted the Biden administration’s efforts to convince Russia not to invade and Biden’s strong opposition to Putin afterward, which Whipple even compared to Winston Churchill fighting Adolf Hitler during World War II. He recounted the moment when the United States knew that Putin was going to attack. On the eve of the attack, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to reiterate his warning about what Russia claimed were military exercises near the Ukrainian border. Shoigu’s horrified response was simply “Yes, the force will never be there again. I can guarantee that.” In less than a week, the Russians attacked.