Governor Josh Shapiro is spilling the tea on Kamala Harris’s vice presidential interview process, and it isn’t pretty.

When Harris became the anointed nominee, she had to find a running mate quickly. Josh Shapiro was seen as the front-runner for that role due to his position as governor of Pennsylvania, a swing state, and the perception of him as a more “moderate” Democrat. At the time that she picked her vice president, it was seen as political malpractice for Kamala Harris to choose Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro. After the election, when it was obvious that the choice of Walz did not help Harris at all, she tried to explain her reasoning behind not choosing Shapiro in her “107 Days” memoir.

Harris described Shapiro, one of three finalists for the post, as “poised, polished and personable.” But she was put off by his ambition — and his request to be in the room for every major decision — and worried he would not settle for the number-two job.

Harris twice describes Shapiro as “peppering” her and staff with questions, not just about details of the job but also life as vice president. He asked the residence manager a number of questions about the home, ranging from the number of bedrooms to “how he might arrange to get Pennsylvania artists’ work on loan from the Smithsonian.”

She also accused Shapiro of exhibiting a “lack of discretion” in the veepstakes, recalling that his official vehicles with Pennsylvania plates were filmed by CNN in front of the vice president’s residence, despite efforts by her staff to arrange for less attention-getting transportation.

Josh Shapiro was plenty mad at Harris for this characterization of him.

Shapiro, once on Harris’ shortlist for vice president, flew into a fury when he learned that the former veep, in her campaign tell-all, “107 Days,” described him as arrogant, domineering and captivated by VP perks during the vetting process.

“She wrote that in her book?” Shapiro asked The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta, who highlighted the scathing passages in a sit-down interview published Wednesday.

“That’s complete and utter bulls—t. I can tell you that her accounts are just blatant lies.”

Since then, Shapiro had appeared to move on, launching his reelection campaign and writing a memoir of his own, which will be released in just over a week. However, the New York Times got their hands early on the book – likely to review it – and discovered that Shapiro is still salty about how Harris and her team treated him – and he’s willing to spill the beans.

In Mr. Shapiro’s book, “Where We Keep the Light,” the governor is measured in describing his interactions with Ms. Harris herself. But Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, details a contentious vetting process in which Ms. Harris’s team focused intensely on his views on Israel — so much so that at one point, he wrote, he was asked if he had ever been an agent of the Israeli government, a question he found deeply offensive.

“Had I been a double agent for Israel?” wrote Mr. Shapiro, describing 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.”

Mr. Shapiro wrote that he understood that questioner 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.”

He was pressed on other questions about Israel, he wrote. “I wondered whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running — or if everyone who had not held a federal office was being grilled about Israel in the same way,” wrote Mr. Shapiro, an outspoken critic of what he saw as antisemitism on college campuses amid the Israel-Hamas war.

Just for the record, these were the people who were asking the questions.

https://t.co/vk926UOgXS pic.twitter.com/xzzjO7h9uE

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) January 19, 2026

I wonder if any of these people considered asking Tim Walz if he had ever been a double agent for China. *cough* The Atlantic also got an advance copy of the book, and apparently Shapiro DID identify who asked him this insane question.

The question came from President Biden’s former White House counsel Dana Remus, who was a key member of Harris’s vice-presidential search team.

The exchange became even more tense, he writes, when Remus asked whether Shapiro had ever spoken with an undercover Israeli agent. The questions left the governor feeling uneasy about the prospect of being Harris’s No. 2, a role that ultimately went to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. After Harris and Walz lost to Donald Trump, many Democrats were critical of her decision to bypass Shapiro, the popular governor of the nation’s largest swing state. In his book, Shapiro says that the decision may not have been fully hers; he says he had “a knot in my stomach” throughout a vetting process that was more combative than he had expected. Shapiro wrote that he decided to take his name out of the running after a one-on-one meeting with Harris that featured more clashes, including about Israel.

“Their discussion was especially tense when Kamala Harris asked Shapiro if he would apologize for some of his comments about protesters at the University of Pennsylvania, who had built encampments to decry Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and, in some cases, had intimidated…

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) January 19, 2026

Kamala Harris wanted to be president, and she swears she made the decision to pick Tim Walz. If she didn’t want to pick Josh Shapiro because she knew he is a smarter and more talented politician than she was, and she wanted Tim Walz because he would be a subservient little toady, then she should own that. If she didn’t want to pick Shapiro because he is Jewish and knew her voters would throw her to the wolves, then she needs to own that, too.

By telling this tale, Shapiro is definitely drawing a line between himself and Kamala Harris. Should they both decide to run for president in 2028, this story will certainly rear its head once more. Imagine that baggage getting unpacked all over a primary debate stage.

Featured image: Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) via former PA Governor Tom Wolf’s Flickr account, cropped, CC BY 2.0