Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, widely considered a top Democratic contender for the 2028 presidential race, was asked by a member of Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 vetting team if he had ever been an agent of the Israeli government, according to his upcoming memoir, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post.
Shapiro, one of three finalists to serve as Harris’s running mate in the 2024 presidential race, detailed for the first time the extensive questioning and vetting he underwent in the condensed process and the doubts he had throughout the process.
As he was preparing to meet Harris for a face-to-face meeting in Washington, D.C., he writes, a member of Harris’s team called him with a question: “Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?” Shapiro said he found the question highly offensive.
“Well, we have to ask,” the questioner responded, according to Shapiro. He said she then added: “Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?”
“If they were undercover, I responded, how the hell would I know?” Shapiro wrote.
Biden’s largely unconditional support of Israel during the first year of its onslaught in Gaza — which came after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel — deeply divided Democrats ahead of the 2024 election. Harris’s team, reluctant to break with Biden while she still served as his No. 2, struggled to articulate how its approach to Israel would differ from Biden’s, even as it tried to court Arab American voters in Michigan and progressive younger voters while reassuring Jewish Democrats of its commitment to Israel’s security.
“Governor 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,” Shapiro spokesman Manuel Bonder said in a statement. “The 2024 election is one small part of his much broader story — and the Governor looks forward to sharing much more about this book and the stories within it very soon.”
A spokesperson for Harris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Shapiro said he underwent extensive questioning about his views on Israel, including his handling of campus protests. He was one of the most outspoken Democratic critics of what he considered antisemitism on college campuses as pro-Palestinian protesters set up encampments and called for their institutions to divest from Israel.
“I wondered whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running — or if everyone who had not held a federal office was being grilled about Israel in the same way,” Shapiro wrote.
Harris and Shapiro have each written about the experience in their memoirs in unusually blunt terms. In her memoir, “107 Days,” Harris wrote that she did not think Shapiro would be comfortable as a No. 2 and suggested he seemed overly confident about his ability to clinch the job. Harris wrote that Shapiro asked her residence manager about how many bedrooms were in the house and wondered aloud about whether the Smithsonian might work with him to loan Pennsylvania art for the residence.
Harris said during their interview, Shapiro was trying to understand what his role would be as vice president and “mused that he would want to be in the room for every decision.” She wrote that she told him bluntly that was an unrealistic expectation in part because “a vice president is not a co-president.”
In an interview with The Atlantic published in December, Shapiro said Harris told “blatant lies” about him in her book.
The post Gov. Shapiro, in book, says Harris team asked him if he was ever Israeli agent appeared first on Washington Post.
