Josh Shapiro Reveals Harris Asked if He’d Been ‘a Double Agent for Israel’ During VP Vetting

Josh Shapiro Reveals Harris Asked if He’d Been ‘a Double Agent for Israel’ During VP Vetting

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has completed a memoir, Where We Keep the Light: Stories from a Life of Service, scheduled for release on January 27. The popular Democrat has recently launched his reelection campaign and is widely expected to seek his party’s presidential nomination in 2028.

The New York Times obtained an advance copy and offered readers a sneak preview. Among the many topics Shapiro explores in the book is the vetting process he underwent in the summer of 2024, when he was among several candidates under consideration to serve as former Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate.

First, the popular Democrat, who happens to be Jewish, noted that Harris’s vetting team “focused on Israel to an extent he found offensive.” According to Shapiro, former White House counsel Dana Remus wanted to know if he’d ever been “a double agent for Israel?” When he replied that “the question was offensive,” he was told, “Well, we have to ask.”

Next, she asked, “Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?”

Shapiro replied, “If they were undercover, how the hell would I know?”

At the time of the vetting, anti-Israel protests were sweeping college campuses across the country, and Shapiro had been openly critical of what he saw unfolding. When Harris asked whether he would be willing to apologize for statements he had made — particularly about what he observed at the University of Pennsylvania — he declined. “I believe in free speech, and I’ll defend it with all I’ve got,” he explained. “Most of the speech on campus, even that which I disagreed with, was peaceful and constitutionally protected. But some wasn’t peaceful.”

Shapiro wrote that after former President Joe Biden withdrew from the race, he wondered if “there would be a process the party would engage in to replace him? Did I want to be part of that?”

His wife, Lori Shapiro, was traveling at the time. When he approached about throwing his hat in the ring, she told him, “I am in a Canadian Walmart right now. Maybe not the ideal time for this conversation. I don’t think we are ready to do this. It’s not the right time for our family. And it’s not on our terms.”

As it turned out, there was no primary process. And before too long, he wound up on Harris’s short list of potential running mates.

According to the Times’ account of the memoir:

He also had reservations about the vice-presidential search process from the start, and says that he ultimately decided to withdraw himself, after meeting with Ms. Harris at the end of the process. He asked to be connected with Ms. Harris to share the decision, he wrote, but says he was told “the VP would not handle bad news well and that I shouldn’t push.”

During the vetting, he wrote that he was pressed on areas of disagreement with Ms. Harris, including “energy, cutting taxes, supporting law enforcement,” and how the coronavirus pandemic had been handled.

Mr. Shapiro, a relative moderate with a record of appealing to crossover voters, suggested that Ms. Harris’s team was out of touch with the politics of the most crucial battleground state on the map.

Shapiro wrote that although the “sessions were completely professional and businesslike,” he “just had a knot in my stomach through all of it.”

The Times noted that in her own 2025 memoir, Harris expressed concern about “the attacks he’d confronted on Gaza and what effect it might have on the enthusiasm we were trying to build.” She was also wary of Shapiro’s “sharp criticism” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — which strikes me as ironic — given her own viral snub of Netanyahu the very week she launched her 2024 presidential campaign.

Harris also wrote about “a nagging concern that he [Shapiro] would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership.” Additionally, she worried that he “had been getting ahead of himself, already thinking about decorating the vice president’s residence with the work of Pennsylvania artists, and wrote that he had mused about wanting to be in the room for every decision.”

I don’t doubt that she was being candid. She was unwilling to risk being eclipsed by her vice president.

After Harris’s memoir was published, Shapiro told The Atlantic that her words were “blatant lies.”

In his own book, he handled the daylight between them more “diplomatically.” He wrote:

If we had door A and door B as options, and she was for door A and I was for door B, I just wanted to make sure that I could make the case for door B, and if I didn’t convince her, then I’d run right through a brick wall to support her decision. She was crystal clear that that was not what she was looking for.

During one meeting with Remus, the topic of the Shapiros’ finances was addressed. He wrote, “She said that she knew we didn’t have a lot of money, and that Lori was going to have to get all new clothes and pay for people to do her hair and makeup.” Remus’s comments left him “a little slack-jawed.”

Later, at home, he recalled his teenage son saying, “It doesn’t seem like you want to do it.”

The Times wrote, “Soon after … he tried to communicate that view to Ms. Harris’s team.”

“Shapiro, who is Jewish, details a contentious vetting process in which 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” https://t.co/MIJ0VLmOye via @NYTimes

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) January 19, 2026

Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.

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