Democrats and Biden administration alumni are going scorched earth on a former White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, with the flood gates opening shortly after she announced she would be leaving the Democratic Party at the same time she’s hawking her new book. 

In a video message touting her tell-all book “Independent” — due to be released in October — Ms. Jean-Pierre said she’s parting ways with the Dems because she wants Americans to see past the red-blue divide. 

“What I have decided to do — and I really have thought long and hard about this — is to follow my own compass,” she said in a video posted to her personal Instagram page. “We need to stop thinking in boxes and think outside of our boxes and not be so partisan.”

Her fellow Biden White House alumni did not hold back on their disdain for Ms. Jean-Pierre. While some talked off-the-record with reporters and others took their criticisms to social media, what was most notable about the reactions was that few came to Ms. Jean-Pierre’s defense. 

One top Biden appointee, Tim Wu, who led technology and competition policy at the National Economic Council, went public with his assessment of Ms. Jean-Pierre on Thursday. 

“The real problem with Karine Jean-Pierre was that she was kinda dumb,” Mr. Wu writes on X. He says she had “no interest in understanding harder topics” and instead “just gave random incoherent answers on policy.”

In a follow-up post, Mr. Wu said that a good White House press secretary would “meet with policy staff and try and understand what the Administration is doing and why,” though Ms. Jean-Pierre seemed to have little interest in doing so. 

Just hours after the slights were posted, Mr. Wu deleted them.

Some of the harshest criticism of the former press secretary emerged from a reporter whose book with CNN’s Jake Tapper, “Original Sin,” blew the lid off the Biden team’s cover-up of their boss’s shortcomings, Alex Thompson of Axios. Despite mentioning her only in passing in his new book, Mr. Thompson on Thursday cited “more than two dozen” Biden White House officials critical of Ms. Jean-Pierre.

Ms. Jean-Pierre “was one of the most ineffectual and unprepared people I’ve ever worked with,” one unnamed White House official reportedly told Mr. Thompson. “She had meltdowns after any interview that asked about a topic not sent over by producers.”

“The amount of time that was spent coddling [Ms. Jean-Pierre] and appeasing her was astronomical compared to our attention on actual matters of substance,” another is quoted as saying.

“She didn’t know how to manage a team, didn’t know how to shape or deliver a message, and often created more problems than she solved,” another official said.

A close professional associate of Ms. Jean-Pierre’s, Symone Sanders-Townsend, had a less direct response to her former colleague’s announcement on Wednesday. During the 2020 election, Ms. Sanders-Townsend served as a senior advisor to President Biden while Ms. Jean-Pierre was working as Vice President Harris’s campaign chief of staff. 

After their victory, both went to work in the White House, though they swapped bosses, with Ms. Sanders-Townsend joining the vice president’s office and Ms. Jean-Pierre taking over as deputy press secretary for the president. 

“A lot of group chats were revived today,” Ms. Sanders-Townsend wrote on X after the news of the book broke, insinuating that Ms. Jean-Pierre’s former colleagues were gossiping about her. In response to Ms. Sanders-Townsend’s post on Wednesday, Mr. Biden’s director of White House political affairs, Emmy Ruiz, simply wrote, “I have no public comment at this time,” as a tongue-in-cheek jab at her former colleague. 

Ms. Sanders-Townsend, however, did post on social media Thursday to criticize former colleagues who were belittling Ms. Jean-Pierre’s intelligence. 

“I think Democrats going on the record or on background to call Karine ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’ have crossed a line,” she wrote on X. “You can have a valid criticism about how she did the job, but let’s not walk down the road of disrespect.”

It isn’t just former White House officials who are criticizing Ms. Jean-Pierre’s performance as press secretary and her sudden conversion to the religion of non-partisanship. 

A former legislative director for Senator Fetterman, Tré Easton, said online that while Ms. Jean-Pierre was “piss poor” at her job, it was also the fault of the Biden administration for putting Black women — like Ms. Harris and Ms. Jean-Pierre — in public facing roles only to turn on them. 

“Increasingly obvious that Biden saw much utility in having black women be his first line of defense. Harris learned that loyalty demanded is not loyalty reciprocated,” Mr. Easton writes. “KJP learned that as long as the audience of one is pleased, you can as be piss poor at your job as you like!”