PRESIDENT KLAIN’S SUCCESSOR NAMED: Jeff Zients to replace Ron Klain as President Biden’s chief of staff.

Former Obama administration official Jeff Zients is reportedly a likely replacement for Ron Klain as President Biden’s chief of staff.

Politico, citing three unnamed sources, reported Sunday that Zients, a close Biden confidant who ran the White House’s COVID-19 response, is widely expected to step into the role.

Klain, 61, is believed to be stepping down from the job, and has apparently been saying he’s been ready to leave since the 2022 midterms.

Zients, 56, would step in as Biden is marred by scandal over classified documents found at the Biden family’s personal residence. On Saturday, a lawyer for Biden announced federal investigators had found more classified docs — some dating back to Biden’s long Senate tenure.

Wikipedia notes that Zients “served as Counselor to the President and the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator from January 2021 to April 2022.” So how did he do? When Zients announced he was stepping down, Ed Morrissey wrote:

Zients was an odd choice from the start. By appointing Zients to that position and Xavier Becerra to run Health and Human Services, Biden picked two men without any medical background to run his administration’s policies for the worst pandemic in a century. Under their management, COVID-19 policies became even more politicized than before, especially when it came to schools and interventions. That politicization infected even the supposedly hard-science bastion of the CDC, which calculated its guidelines on political lobbying from teachers unions until this day.

How bad was Zients? Last January, lefty Website The American Prospect ran the headline and subhead, “Fire Jeff Zients. Biden’s COVID czar has gone from ‘Mr. Fix-It’ to grim reaper, steering the administration’s pandemic response to catastrophic lows.”