Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from producer Raymond Rapada. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren PROGRAMMING NOTE: We’ll be off next week for the holidays but back to our normal schedule on Tuesday, Jan. 2. We hope absence makes the heart grow fonder. Casual readers may have been surprised to see the DailyMail publish a piece on Thursday that devoted 2,387 words and eight pictures to MICHAEL LAROSA, the former press secretary for first lady JILL BIDEN. After all, East Wing officials typically aren’t the subject of lengthy profiles — or, in this case, quasi hit pieces — especially those who have been out of government for 18 months. But for those who have been in and around President JOE BIDEN’s White House, the piece — which suggested LaRosa was pushed out of the Biden administration after he broke security protocols by inviting someone to his hotel room during an official overseas trip — was hardly a surprise. Amid the high-intensity work atmosphere of the White House where staffers are dealing with some of the most consequential global issues, LaRosa has occupied an outsized space in staffers’ minds. Animosity between White House aides and LaRosa has long been brewing, as West Wing Playbook wrote about in June. But aides have increasingly felt like LaRosa goes out of his way to unnecessarily shiv the administration. They’ve gripped about how often reporters call him for comment. And they’ve grown frustrated with LaRosa’s public critiques of Biden staff. “This whole idea that he was this very senior insider and was like very close to the president or First Lady, and focused on the campaign and political strategy, that could not be farther from the truth,” a person who worked with LaRosa at the White House told the DailyMail. Other unnamed White House staffers told the conservative-leaning, gossip-heavy website that LaRosa would disappear from work for hours and complained that he leaked information to reporters about the Biden cat, ASHLEY BIDEN’s Covid diagnosis and a trip to Ukraine. The Biden White House insisted in a statement that it did not authorize staffers to participate in the piece. “We gave a comment defending our colleague Anthony Bernal in response to an inquiry that came from the DailyMail to the general press inbox. As West Wing Playbook knows, having White House officials quoted on background in an unauthorized way does not mean the White House spent time on something,” a White House official said. We’ll let you be the judge. The piece quoted multiple Biden staffers who characterized LaRosa as a short-tempered, unreliable colleague who has oversold his White House connections to boost his own profile (totally uncommon for ex-government officials in D.C.). And as the White House press corps poured over the story, some members of it noted that it wasn’t hard to read between the lines about where the information was coming from. Only so many people would know the details around the first lady’s travel protocols or how the press first found out that the president’s daughter had Covid. Some members of the press also said it was revealing that White House aides took issue with LaRosa for talking to the media given that his job as press secretary fundamentally was to share basic information with reporters. Multiple reporters remarked about how rare it was to see as many as six Biden aides quoted in a single piece. “It’s interesting that this is the kind of story they spend their time on when they publicly complain that reporters don’t cover policy matters,” said a White House reporter. Reporters who have covered the Biden administration said they had been approached by White House staffers with negative stories about LaRosa. Some reporters also felt like the DailyMail unfairly played up LaRosa’s sexuality. The headline of the piece says LaRosa was “‘forced out’ of White House after he ‘tried to take gay dates’ to his room on secure floor of hotel where president was staying during NATO summit in Madrid.” “I felt that it dripped with homophobia,” said a reporter assigned to cover the White House. Look, we get it. This is navel gazing at its finest. Guilty! But the entire episode does to a degree puncture the notion that Biden aides are head down, ignoring the dramas that captivate the Twitterati, whether or not they formally helped with the DailyMail item. MESSAGE US — Are you TED VERITY, editor of the DailyMail? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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