ABC NEWS
Gov. Josh Shapiro alleges in memoir that Kamala Harris’ team asked him if he had ever been an Israeli agent
Oren Oppenheim
January 19, 2026

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, in a forthcoming memoir, claimed that the running mate vetting team for Vice President Kamala Harris during her 2024 run for the presidency asked him if he was ever an agent of the Israeli government, ABC News has confirmed. The New York Times first reported Shapiro’s claim. Shapiro writes in his memoir “Where We Keep the Light,” which is set to be released on Jan. 27, that he was asked at the last minute by Dana Remus, a former White House counsel and member of the vetting team, if he had ever been an agent for Israel. He said that he told Remus he found the question offensive, according to excerpts reported by The New York Times. He wrote that he was also asked by Remus if he ever spoke with an undercover Israeli agent, to which Shapiro said he responded in part that if they had been undercover, “how the hell would I know?” READ MORE

NATIONAL REVIEW Kamala Harris’s Presidential Campaign Was Run by a Bunch of Lunatics And what, exactly, spurred the Harris campaign’s suspicion that Shapiro had dual loyalties and had secretly been an agent of the Israeli government? And if an agent of any foreign state is undercover . . . how do you know? Occam’s razor would suggest that either (1) 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 (2) the Harris campaign was full of paranoid antisemites who believed that every American Jew they encountered was secretly working for the Mossad.

JEWISH INSIDER Jewish leaders condemn ‘classic antisemitism’ in Josh Shapiro’s account of Harris VP vetting “The more I read about [Shapiro’s] treatment in the vetting process, the more disturbed I become,” Deborah Lipstadt, who served as the State Department’s antisemitism envoy under President Joe Biden, said in a post on X. “These questions were classic antisemitism.”  Shapiro suggests in the book that he was being treated unfairly as a Jewish contender for the role of vice president: “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,” he writes.