Shapiro says Harris’ vetting team asked whether he was ‘an agent of the Israeli government’

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro speaks to supporters at a rally announcing his reelection bid in Philadelphia on January 8, 2026. (Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

A number of forces on the left questioned Josh Shapiro’s ties to Israel during Kamala Harris’ rushed running mate selection process in 2024. In his new memoir out next week, the Pennsylvania governor says the former vice president and her vetting team were among them.

So much so, Shapiro writes in a copy obtained by CNN, that Dana Remus, a former White House counsel under President Joe Biden who became a senior member of Harris’ VP vetting team, asked him, “Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?”

“Was she kidding?” Shapiro writes. “I told her how offensive the question was.”

“‘Well, we have to ask,’” Remus, a former White House counsel under President Joe Biden, said, according to his book. “‘We just wanted to check.’ She added: ‘Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?’”

Shapiro’s anger was clearly rising.

“If they were undercover, I responded, how the hell would I know?” he wrote. “I calmly answered her questions. Remus was just doing her job. I get it. But the fact that she asked, or was told to ask that question by someone else, said a lot about people around the VP.”

Shapiro, an observant Jew and a proud Zionist, was critical of some protests proliferating on college campuses as tensions rose following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the Israeli military’s response, warning that some of those demonstrations seemed to tip into antisemitism. Despite his condemnation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, some voices on the left called him “Genocide Josh,” which they didn’t do with other politicians.

Shapiro spent time in high school working on an Israeli kibbutz and as a volunteer on an Israeli army base. He also wrote an op-ed in college saying Palestinians “do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States,” and had a brief stint in the Israeli Embassy’s public affairs division at the beginning of his career.

His staff has previously downplayed the volunteer work in Israel and work at the embassy, and he has said that his writing as college student does not reflect his current views.

Harris had her own questions in their interview at the Naval Observatory, which Shapiro writes that he was heading to when he got the call. He writes that she asked him whether he would apologize for statements he made condemning the campus protests at the University of Pennsylvania.

“‘No,’ I said flatly,” he writes. But he says he told her he felt he could still make the case for her, even in places like Dearborn, Michigan, where there is a sizable Arab American population and where the state’s “Uncommitted” movement during the 2024 Democratic primary took off.

“She heard me and expressed how bad she felt that I had been getting hammered with the antisemitic attacks that she had witnessed throughout the process,” Shapiro writes.

Days after Harris became the nominee in 2024, a top aide opted not to answer directly when asked whether the vice president still considered herself a Zionist.

The New York Times first reported on the details from the memoir.

Shapiro spokesman Manuel Bonder pointed out that this material is only one chapter of a larger memoir prompted by the firebomb attack on the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg last year on the first night of Passover.

​​“Gov. Shapiro wrote a very personal book about his faith, his family, and the people of Pennsylvania he has learned from and fought for throughout his life in public service,” Bonder said Sunday.

A spokesperson for Harris did not respond when asked for comment. Remus could not be reached for comment.

Deborah Lipstadt, the former U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism during the Biden administration, wrote in a social media post that the more she reads about Shapiro’s “treatment in the vetting process, the more disturbed (I) become.”

“The questions to him, I repeat, are why they needed a Special Envoy on antisemitism. These questions were classic antisemitism,” she wrote.

Aaron Keyak, who is the former deputy special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism at the State Department during the Biden administration and currently sits on the Combat Antisemitism Movement board, called the questioning “an antisemitic inquiry” in a statement.

“I have heard from too many being asked similar questions over many years and I can speak from personal experience,” he added.

Harris and Shapiro have known each other for 20 years, since they were part of the same fellowship for up-and-coming politicians, but they were never close. That relationship only got rockier over the vetting process, with aides at the time complaining about each other. Harris took some shots at him in her post-election memoir; he responded that she was lying.

With both now looking at potential 2028 presidential runs, another moment clearly reverberated for Shapiro too.

“Could she win Pennsylvania without me? she asked. Maybe, I said. I didn’t really know,” he writes.

Harris picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz instead. She lost Pennsylvania by about 120,000 votes.

By Edward-Isaac Dovere