Special: Turnover in VP Harris's Office and Fmr. Pres. Trump's COVID Test

- Good evening and welcome to the Washington Week Extra. I'm Yamiche Alcindor. We're continuing the conversation we had on the show. Still with us to talk politics, Eugene Daniels, White House Reporter, and co-author of, "Politico Playbook." Sahil Kapur, National Political Reporter for NBC News. Seung Min Kim, White House Reporter for the Washington Post, and Jonathan Martin, National Political Correspondent for the New York Times. Now let's start with Eugene, and it has to be, what in the world is going on in the Vice-President's office? There are, we've seen resignations from key people, the communications director, her senior spokesperson. What more do you know about what's going on?

- Yeah, we broke that story about Symone Sanders. Probably the most visible, and people have seen her over and over on television. They know who she is. And so that one was kind of a really big blow for everybody, right? You had, Ashley Etienne, who was the communications director, announced that she was leaving, but it really was the Sanders' one that kind of kicked things off. You all saw two other resignations that are happening in the coming weeks. People point out, they start acting absolutely abnormal where, it's a year into the administration. Some of these folks, especially Symone Sanders, worked on the campaign. She was one of the first hires when the Biden campaign started. So, she was like exhausted. And there's a lot of burnout, but it also comes after all of these stories that I've written, others have written about the issues in the office, right? Complaints about infighting, talking about discord. And so, we have a story coming out tomorrow at Politico, where we're looking at kind of a step back at, this is a reset. The White House doesn't wanna look at it as a reset, there's a conversation of whether or not to call it a reset.

- Very Washington.

- Very Washington DC. And, I think you've talked to allies outside and what they're hoping is that with folks leaving, it gives them a chance to kind of retool, and make the office look a little different and work a little differently. They had two fixers come in earlier this year, kind of secretly a little bit, but then people started finding out to look at restructuring and how management works in the office. And they say that's because one, this is the first vice presidency to operate in a pandemic in a very long time. There're different levels of scrutiny on Vice President Kamala Harris, because of obvious reasons. She's the first woman, she's the first woman of color in that role. And so this is an opportunity for them to maybe change the office a little bit, based on those things. They were surprised by how much scrutiny she's gotten, how much bad press she's gotten over the first year. And so I think this is an opportunity and especially the outside allies who are constantly pushing and telling them, now that you know how bad the press can get, what people are expecting, this is not just a normal vice presidency. The office needs to look a little, and work a little bit differently.

- Talk a bit more about what the discord is really about. You've been breaking these stories, writing these stories. I feel like for a lot of people, it's like, okay, but what is actually, what is the issue there? Why is it not, why are things not going smoothly for her? I mean, she obviously was handed some tough issues but-

- I think that's where it started, right. It started with all of these really tough issues. Handling immigration from the Northern Triangle countries, trying to stem that. So she's not the border czar, like Republicans have tried to paint her, but tied to immigration. Voting rights, which you, is dead in the water, says you, that cover Congress know very well. And so that's kind of where the bad stuff started, but the discord within the office, we broke a story in the summer that talked about how folks were unhappy with how the office was being run. Felt like, some folks felt like they weren't being listened to. And there was a frustration because of how much it's surrounding this historic vice presidency of exactly them not, them feeling like they're not aggressive enough. Are we aggressive enough in batting down the conversations that are being started on the right? And, it's, they're not, they haven't been. And Kamala Harris, even as a Senator is someone who kept her head down. She like didn't want, didn't really engage with the press that much, and has focused on just doing the work, right. That is what you hear often from former aides, is that she keeps doing the work and she has proven over and over again, that if she just does that everything kind of changes, but this is a completely different world as the vice-president, and we're in a completely different political environment. And so, that office as they change is going to be something we're gonna be watching and reporting on.

- And Sahil, you covered her in 2020, covered her campaign. Do you see sort of connections to what you saw on the campaign trail to what's happening now that she's Vice President?

- One of the struggles with Kamala Harris's 2020 campaign that she had was that she didn't always seem sure of her political instincts. And sometimes this came out in ways that harm her on the campaign trail. The best example of this, I would say is the issue of healthcare, where she came out early for Medicare for All, an early co-sponsor of the Bernie Sanders bill. But as it became clear that the politics of that were more complicated than they were among the most passionate, progressive voters. She kind of backpedaled away from that. And it led a lot of voters that I spoke to at rallies to say, "Who is she? What does she stand for? I don't really have a great sense of her." Now on Capitol Hill, Democrats have mixed views of her situations. A lot of them say that the narrative about her is unfair. That, she's engaged in the work, that she's privately very accessible, and that she gets a bad rep. Some of them see sexism in it, but a number of them also say that she doesn't have a huge presence on that.

- [Yamiche] Yeah.

- She doesn't have a long standing relationships, there aren't big cohorts, or constituencies on Capitol Hill that she can talk to in a way that President Biden cannot. So, and there's no doubt that she has a tough set of issues as well, immigration, as well as voting rights. I asked, White House I said, "Why do you keep giving her these issues?" And they said, "Well, she wanted voting rights."

- [Eugene] Yeah.

- [Seung Min] Yeah.

- [Yamiche] Yeah.

- [Jonathan] Yeah.

- [Yamiche] Do you wanna jump in because you-

- I was so excited.

- She's, unlike the last three vice presidents or even four vice presidents you can think of. So, Gore, Cheney, Biden, and Pence who all had discrete constituencies or relationships that they brought to the job that they were sort of let loose on. She doesn't necessarily have that because she's working with somebody who has so much more experience than her in Washington and around the world or both. So there's not many natural places that she can go, that there were for some of the folks who were previous vice president. And in that sense, she's more reflective of an earlier model of the job, which is like an understudy, someone who's younger generationally than the president, and somebody who is kind of the person there who is waiting, frankly for that job to come open. That's more the history of the job until fairly recently, which has been more anomalous. There is one post though, or one area that she's not focused on, which she does have experience in, which is criminal justice. And that will be fascinating to watch here as the next year or the next couple of years go on. They obviously could not get, a police reform compromise and negotiated in Congress. Is that something that she eventually does turn to here in the months and years to come, I'll be curious about?

- Yeah, and criminal just became tough for her because she was, in some ways already, running on her prosecutorial background. African-Americans, especially African-American men. They start saying, "Well, who are you, locking up?"

- Are you a cop, yeah

- Yeah, essentially.

- That's correct.

- [Eugene] Hold up, Kamala was the name that a lot of-

- Kamala didn't happen.

- Folks on the left and talked to her about it.

- And her advisors were saying, "Embrace it because if you're the nominee and the general, that's all upside for you, but obviously, the primary different story, you know.

- Yeah, I wanna come to you Seung Min about the story that I didn't want to talk that much about it on the show 'cause we had limited time. But this story of former president, Trump, testing positive, even Mark Meadows is saying, it was a fake positive, or a false positive before his first debate with president, Biden. What do you make of this? Are you like me to rethinking and going back and saying, what was he doing during that time?

- Well, I think on one hand, it is not a surprise that White House would conceal something as important as a Corona Virus diagnosis on the President of the United States' health. But you and I both know from covering the Trump White House, that it is stunningly reckless. What the White House was doing in covering up that diagnosis. And I know, we all kind of retrace our steps back to that week. I was there, I believe, you were there, as well, at that big Rose Garden ceremony where they celebrated the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. People were hugging each other. The only people who are masked were those reporters who were roped off in the back. They were hugging, kissing, no social distancing. They had indoor receptions inside. And, that event became a super spreader event, there were a number of people who got sick from that, from that Rose Garden ceremony. And, then he did a number of other things that week leading up to the debate. He held a ceremony with Gold Star Families. He prepped for the debate with a bunch of staff, and he did not wanna disclose it because as Mark Meadows said in his book, "Nothing was gonna stop him from participating in that first presidential debate." So, it was, it just, the lack of transparency, the level of recklessness from this White House it was clear to us at the time during the pandemic, but it is especially more clear now.

- I mean, in some ways it takes my breath away to think about the idea that this could have been going on. Sahil, I wanna, in some way, stick to the idea of Covid but move a little bit onto this other issue which is, and it marries the two issues that we were talking about on the show, which is abortion, and Covid. There's this issue being heard in the GOP about personal choice, when it comes to medical issues, the GOP on one side is saying, "We don't want to have masks or vaccines, but also we want to limit from many of the GOP, we wanna limit women's abilities to have abortions." How do they square those two things? What does it say that the party is successfully in a lot of ways, squaring those two things?

- By the way, firstly, I'll say, it might've helped Trump if he did skip that first debate- Great debate for him. But look for, for Republicans, I think the vast majority of Republicans are pro-vaccine, on Capitol Hill, are pro-vaccines, but anti-mandates

- [Seung Min] Right. That's how they square it. And on the issue of abortion rights. I think their view is, states and legislators should be able to make that decision. Now, there are exceptions people like Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, who would go much further, who would use scorched earth tactics to try to stop something and to just draw a line and to side with the passionate, conservative minority of this country that doesn't want these vaccine rules. They are pretty popular. Depending on what poll you see the numbers change, but people do want widespread vaccination and people see that as a good thing. I think there's a passionate segment of the Republican base that opposed to these kinds of rules and they will find an audience on, among lawmakers to carry that torch.

- Yeah.

- And you're talking about sort of a passionate side on the Republican side, but also Joe Manchin, Eugene, Joe Manchin came out and said, "I would side with Republicans when it comes to opposing vaccine mandates for private businesses." Famously, President Biden said that if you're a US Senator with 50-50, basically every Senator is President. Talk a little bit about Joe Manchin and his decision here, to side with Republicans on this issue.

- No, absolutely, I mean, John Manchin, as we all know, has been, people have talked about him as the other president Joe on Washington DC. And that's something that has been frustrating. A lot of people on the left, a lot of other democrats as we move toward conversations about infrastructure, about the President's Build Back Better Agenda. But on this issue this is another thing where he has proven that he will buck his party when he feels like that is necessary. And you talked to some liberals this week and they said, "Once again, he shows us that he's a conservative democrat instead of moderate." That was trying to push us to, people trying to control, reporters' language. And so conservative democrat is what they have started to call him. I think the... Tim Kane today said that, eventually, he feels like all of the democrats will be together on that issue. They don't want mandates, but they wanna push the mandates, but more importantly, they add the testing part of it, right. And so they, they feel like there's a messaging issue where you have Republicans saying they don't want vaccine mandates when it's a vaccine requirement mandate, call it what you want, but also a testing requirement and mandate. And those are the kinds of things that the Democrats have not been able to message that well yet.

- Yeah, well, it's something that we're definitely gonna keep watching Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, all those senators are really gonna be just an interesting thing to watch when we look at all of the different things that are ahead debt ceiling, BBB, of course, that being The Build Back Better act. It's so hard to say, but we're saying it every night and we will be saying it in every night. Well, that's it. Thank you. We'll have to leave it there tonight. Thank you so much to Eugene, Sahil, Seung Min and Jonathan for joining us and sharing your reporting and make sure to sign up for the Washington Week Newsletter on our website, we will give you a look at All Things Washington. I'm Yamiche Alcindor, thank you for joining us. Good night from Washington.