Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said she left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent, citing frustration and disillusionment with how Democrats treated Joe Biden after his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race.

The revelation comes from her upcoming memoir, Independent, which is scheduled for release later this year.

‘IT WAS HORRIBLE’: Former Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre blasts the Democratic Party in her new memoir, saying she thought Biden had been betrayed in the 2024 race despite giving “50 years of his life to serving the American people.” pic.twitter.com/jlzkbGcEbU

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 19, 2025

In excerpts obtained by Newsweek, Jean-Pierre described her reaction to the phone call in which then-President Biden informed his staff that he was ending his re-election campaign.

The decision came in July 2024, following weeks of pressure from within the Democratic Party after his debate performance against Republican nominee Donald Trump.

“Biden seemed to be totally at peace with his decision, but I was stunned, my feelings a blur,” Jean-Pierre wrote.

“I was angry and sad. I was enraged and heartbroken that this man had given more than 50 years of his life to serving the American people, and in the end he’d been treated poorly by members of his own party. It was horrible.”

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Jean-Pierre, who served as White House Press Secretary from May 2022 until early 2025, said she had spent years defending Biden’s leadership and abilities from behind the briefing room podium.

She acknowledged that she never expected him to withdraw from the race and felt betrayed by how quickly party leaders moved to push him aside.

“The Democratic Party had defined my life, my career,” she wrote.

“Everything I’d done to make people’s lives better had been connected to it. The party was the vehicle that allowed me not just to have a front seat to history, working first on [Barack] Obama’s presidential campaign then in his administration, but also to make some history of my own as the first Black woman and openly queer person to ever be a White House press secretary. Never had I considered leaving the party until now.”

According to Jean-Pierre, the turning point came shortly after Biden’s announcement.

She recalled planning to make her first television appearance since his withdrawal on The View, the ABC daytime talk show.

During that time, she began to reconsider her relationship with the Democratic Party and what she described as its culture of political conformity.

“Now the cloud of unease hovering over me solidified into an idea about how I could possibly do something different,” Jean-Pierre wrote.

“How I could channel my disappointment into some kind of concrete action that would allow me to fight for what I believed in without giving blind loyalty to a party I felt no longer deserved it.”

In the book, she recounted the moment she decided to change her political registration.

“‘You know what? I’m going to become an independent. I don’t think I can stomach being in the Democratic Party anymore,’” she wrote.

Jean-Pierre accused party operatives and strategists of orchestrating what she called a “firing squad” against Biden in the final weeks of his campaign, saying Democrats turned on him despite his decades of public service.

Karine Jean-Pierre’s new memoir “Independent” drops a bombshell: she’s leaving the Democratic Party, calling out their “firing squad” betrayal of Biden in 2024. After decades of service, she can’t stomach blind loyalty anymore. pic.twitter.com/uu6w5wolvc

— 𝐃𝐔𝐓𝐂𝐇 (@pr0ud_americans) October 19, 2025

She said that pressure from within his own party ultimately forced Biden to step aside.

Jean-Pierre publicly announced her decision to leave the Democratic Party in June, coinciding with the promotion of her memoir.

Before joining the Biden-Harris administration, she worked as a senior advisor for MoveOn.org, served in the Obama White House, and appeared as a political analyst on MSNBC.

She also played key roles in multiple Democratic presidential campaigns, including Barack Obama’s and Kamala Harris’s.

Her departure marks one of the highest-profile defections from the Democratic Party since Biden’s withdrawal.

In Independent, Jean-Pierre writes that her move is not about abandoning political engagement but about reclaiming her own values after what she viewed as a profound betrayal.