WASHINGTON – President Biden on Wednesday appointed Keisha Lance Bothams, a former Atlanta mayor, as a senior adviser to the White House, further redeploying his senior staff amid a series of high-profile departures aimed at interim campaigns.
Dana Remus, the president’s chief attorney at the White House, has announced she will leave next month after watching Biden’s efforts to name a record number of judges in the federal bench, including the successful confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson in the Supreme Court. Mrs. Remus will be replaced by Stuart Delary, her deputy in the White House office.
Ms. Bothams succeeds Cedric Richmond as president’s ambassador to the community and business at a time when Mr. Biden is battling low approval ratings and his party faces the prospect of losing one or both houses of Congress in the fall election .
“Mayor Botams understands that democracy is about making the government work for working families, for the people who are the backbone of this country,” Mr Biden said in a statement. “Keisha,” he added, “is smart, honest, tough and has the integrity to represent our administration to the American public.”
Mr Biden’s staff at the White House has been relatively stable since he took office. He continues to be led by Ron Klein, chief of staff, and three longtime advisers: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricketti and Bruce Reed. None of its original cabinet members left the administration.
But the growing number of resignations in recent weeks has added to the West’s resentment as the president struggles to cope with inflation, the war in Ukraine and a series of other difficult issues that have led to about 40 percent of his approval.
The latest moves are part of a series of personnel changes. In addition to Mr. Richmond, President Jen Psaki’s spokesman and King Kovid Jeffrey D. Zients and several aides to Vice President Kamala Harris have recently left. Many Democrats speculate that there will be further changes, especially if the by-elections go badly as expected.
Mr Biden also sent Anita Dunn, a veteran Democratic communications consultant, back to the White House full-time. And he transferred John F. Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, to the National Security Council to help him monitor foreign policy announcements. Julie Rodriguez, director of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, will also become a senior adviser to Mr Biden, the White House said on Wednesday.
White House officials are preparing for the possibility of overt legal attacks by congressional committees if Republicans take control of the House of Representatives or the Senate. Republicans have already promised to use the commissions to investigate a series of actions by the Biden administration if they oversee the oversight of Congress next year.
With the departure of Ms. Remus, the task of responding to these investigations will be with Mr. Delary, who was the No. 3 employee of the Department of Justice during the Obama administration. He will be the first openly gay person to serve as a White House adviser.
Mr Biden called Mr Dellary a dedicated civil servant and praised Mrs Remus for providing him with legal advice since the start of his presidential campaign.
“I am extremely grateful for the service of Dana Remus, who has been an invaluable member of my senior staff for the past three years and has helped restore a culture of adherence to the rule of law,” the president said in a statement.
White House officials said Remus, who had a baby during the campaign, told the president she wanted to serve in the White House for about a year. In the end, she exceeded that term by several months.
It is not uncommon for senior White House officials to leave after more than a year, but presidents often want to do so early in the election year so that the new team can be in place before the vote, which could lead to changes in political dynamics. Washington.
Mr Richmond, a former member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, recently left the White House to join the private sector and serve as a senior adviser on the Democratic National Committee. Tensions between the party’s progressive activist wing and its leadership proved challenging during his time in the White House.
Ms. Bothams will take on the role of Mr. Richmond as head of the White House’s Office of Public Engagement.
Ms. Bothams served one term as mayor of Atlanta and drew national attention with her attitude toward the protests following the 2020 police assassination of George Floyd, which at times turned violent. She was an early supporter of Mr Biden at the 2020 primaries for the Democratic nomination, and he briefly considered her a possible vice-presidential candidate. She later resigned from a cabinet-level position in the administration.
Her appointment to White House staff was announced earlier by Axios, who quoted her as saying he planned to do “more listening than anything.”
“It’s important for people to feel that their voices are reflected and their voices are heard,” she told the newspaper.
Ms. Bothams was a judge and city councilor before being elected mayor in 2017, but chose not to run for a second term last year amid rising crime in Atlanta. Murders there rose by 58 percent in 2020, and the contenders accused her of not focusing enough on reducing crime.
She gained national notoriety by speaking directly to protesters following Mr Floyd’s assassination, expressing what she said was her own deep pain over his murder below the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer while arguing with violent protesters. and tells them to “go home.”
Mr Biden praised her approach. “We saw her standing up and talking in the summer of protests and pain,” he said during a fundraiser last year.
Ms Bothams told Axios: “We have had a very difficult time, especially for African-Americans in this country.”
“These challenges are still very fresh and real to me,” she said. “And I live it every day: I live it as a black woman, I live it as a mother of four, and I know where those challenges are, but I also know where the opportunities are.”
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