January 19, 2026

JOSH SHAPIRO: Team Kamala Asked If I Was an Israeli Double Agent.

“Had I been a double agent for Israel?” wrote Mr. Shapiro, describing his incredulous response to a last-minute question from the vetting team. He responded that the question was offensive, he wrote, and was told, “Well, we have to ask.”

“Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?” the questioner, Dana Remus, a former White House counsel, continued, according to Mr. Shapiro, who recounted, “If they were undercover, I responded, how the hell would I know?”

Mr. Shapiro wrote that he understood that Ms. Remus was “just doing her job.” But the fact that he was asked such questions, he wrote, “said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”

It certainly says something about Dana Remus. It also speaks volumes about former Attorney General Eric Holder, who ran the search committee to vet potential running mates for Kamala Harris. And that in turn speaks volumes about Holder’s former boss Barack Obama, who kept trying to cut deals with Iran and repeatedly involved Rob Malley in those efforts, who had to quit Obama’s initial campaign when his contacts with Hamas got exposed in early 2008.

It also has something to say about the progressives that control the Democrat Party of today. This query relies on an old and bigoted trope about Jews being inherently disloyal to their own countries, a claim that long predates the establishment of the state of Israel. In Germany, political leaders blamed Jews for the collapse in World War I that led to their defeat, using the same ugly claim, which got amplified and then industrialized by the Nazis. No one asks that question about being an Israeli double-agent out of the blue without having bought into that anti-Semitic mindset.

Jim Geraghty adds:

Occam’s razor would suggest that either A) the Harris campaign foresaw insurmountable obstacles from having a Jewish, pro-Israel running mate at a time when the Democratic grassroots were growing vehemently anti-Israel, and needed an excuse to conclude Shapiro had flunked the vetting process or B) the Harris campaign was full of paranoid antisemites who believed that every American Jew they encountered was secretly working for the Mossad.

Shapiro writes, “The fact that she asked, or was told to ask that question by someone else, said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”

Our Audrey Fahlberg asked the very good question of how Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, up to his eyeballs in fraud scandals involving state spending, managed to come through the Harris campaign’s vetting with no red flags. The paranoia about Shapiro’s alleged dual loyalties are even more absurd in light of Walz’s 30 visits to China, one funded by the Chinese government, status as a visiting fellow at the Macao Polytechnic University, a Chinese state-run institution of higher education, and so on. And one of the few decisions of the Harris campaign that we can be 100 percent certain was made by the candidate was the selection of Walz over Shapiro. (Selecting Shapiro wouldn’t have won the race for Harris, but she might have at least kept Pennsylvania in the Democratic column.)

Geraghty’s post is aptly titled, “Kamala Harris’s Presidential Campaign Was Run by a Bunch of Lunatics.”

Agreed. Why is the Democratic Party such a cesspit of antisemitism?

Exit question:

Of course, perhaps Walz was similarly vetted, with the goal of taking the “Quality Learing Center” nationwide:

 

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll