(TheConservativeNews.org) – Ron Klain will leave his post at the White House in the coming weeks, according to several news reports on Saturday.
Klain, a longtime Biden hand who has served as his chief of staff since the president took office, is expected to leave his position shortly after the upcoming State of the Union address on February 7.
“Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff who has steered President Biden’s administration through two years of triumphs and setbacks, is expected to step down in coming weeks in the most significant changing of the guard since Mr. Biden took office two years ago,” the New York Times’ Katie Rogers and Peter Baker reported Saturday.
The report noted that the move comes as the 80-year-old president is expected to announce in the coming months that he will run for a second term in office.
Klain’s role in the White House, viewed as key to negotiating deals with Congress, given his history of having worked with Biden on Capitol Hill, was critical to Democrats’ legislative victories over the last two years. Navigating slim majorities in both chambers until the midterm elections, Klain helped Biden notch passage of an impressive litany of progressive Democrat priorities, including an infrastructure package, a bill pushing through an effort to bring back semiconductor chip manufacturing, the confirmation of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and a major Democrat-heavy spending plan at the end of 2022.
While Biden’s initial attempts at major big-picture legislation failed—his original Build Back Better bill did not make it through Congress—with Klain’s help, he broke most of it up into pieces and passed much of Biden’s agenda piecemeal.
The report of Klain’s departure comes as the administration gears up to face mounting legal and political scrutiny over the next two years after Republicans won control of the House of Representatives and Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate Biden over classified documents that were found in one of his private offices and in his home.
Classified documents connected with Biden were first found in his private office at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., on November 2, less than a week before the 2022 midterm elections. Since then, Biden’s attorneys have located more classified documents at Biden’s home in Wilmington on three separate occasions: an unspecified number found in the garage on December 20, one document found in Biden’s study on January 11, and five more found in the study on January 12.
The report said that some of the top choices to replace Klain included Labor Secretary Martin J. Walsh; former Gov. Jack A. Markell of Delaware, now serving as ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Steven J. Ricchetti, the counselor to the president; Jeffrey D. Zients, the administration’s former coronavirus response coordinator; Susan Rice, the White House domestic policy adviser; and Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture.
