Karine Jean-Pierre details ‘campaign to push me out’ of White House — that the Post revealed

WASHINGTON — Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has come clean about the “campaign to push me out” as President Biden’s top spokesperson — tearing into her de facto former boss Anita Dunn in a newly released memoir, “Independent.”

Dunn’s failed coup was first reported by The Post in April 2024, though at the time the White House denied the account as “wildly false” and insisted the women had a good relationship despite tension over Dunn’s efforts to install fellow Biden spokesman John Kirby at the briefing room lectern.

Jean-Pierre, 51, writes that — despite public denials — Dunn, 67, was “orchestrating a campaign to push me out” after the women clashed in October 2023 over who should join Biden on a trip to Israel after Hamas’s surprise attack on Oct. 7.

“[Dunn] said that I shouldn’t travel. ‘It will be very dangerous,’ she said. ‘You’re a mother. You’re a woman.’ Another colleague, she said, a man who had experience in war-torn regions, could go in my place,” Jean-Pierre writes.

“I didn’t really respond as I left her office, but as soon as I returned to mine I immediately opened my laptop and sent an email to the chief of staff and the deputy chief of staff,” she goes on. “I cc’d her and wrote that I had just been told I shouldn’t go to Israel, one of the most important trips the president would likely take during his tenure.”

According to Jean-Pierre, “minutes after I hit send, [Dunn] swept into my office, bypassing my assistant, and flinging open my door. She proceeded to scream at me.

“‘You want to go on this trip? Fine!’ she yelled. ‘I don’t know why you want to do this, but it’s yours. Go!’ She turned around and left as quickly as she’d come, slamming the door behind her.”

The now-former Biden White House spokesperson writes that she “surmised” Dunn was upset because she “wasn’t able to control me.”

“Sadly, women sometimes undermine other women,” Jean-Pierre relates in the tome, out Tuesday.

“I wasn’t the only woman on the White House staff who had negative experiences with this person. She had spoken dismissively to female members of the administration, especially those who were also people of color. A white woman once said to me that it was uncomfortable being on emails with her and witnessing her tone and the way she addressed women of color.”

Jean-Pierre accuses Dunn of “planting” The Post’s story last year on her efforts to oust Jean-Pierre, though Dunn did not directly participate in that story and it was published after evidence suggested Dunn had resigned herself to Jean-Pierre remaining in her role after the senior communications adviser’s machinations failed.

“The main reason for the change in how she treated me, going from someone who backed my getting the press secretary job to basically strategizing for me to lose it, had to do with my independence,” she writes.

“What made it even worse was this person was a woman. What happened to women helping one another? I thought. What happened to the idea that once you made it inside the halls of power, you left the door ajar so you could usher your sisters in behind you?”

Dunn, who sources say viewed Jean-Pierre as incompetent and as a hindrance to Biden’s ultimately doomed re-election bid, did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.

Three women who worked in the Biden White House, however, denied Jean-Pierre’s suggestion that Dunn was unfair to fellow women, particularly if they were racial minorities.

“That is just such a pathetic attack when you have nothing else. Anita is a lot of things but she is not racist,” said one former official.

Another rattled off a list of women and minorities who worked under Dunn and said Jean-Pierre initially got her role because the elder party figure cared about diversity.

Dunn changed her tune “because of Karine’s performance and struggle to adapt to the role,” the second person said.

“This is Karine taking everyone’s response to her performance, which was live on television…. and trying to blame it on other people.”

A young black woman who worked with Dunn, meanwhile, praised her as “incredibly efficient” and “the adult in the room that we needed.”

“I have never felt more supported and uplifted than by Anita,” this person said. “She operates with a toughness that I think was needed more in the White House.”