"But I didn't make policy," she added.
Acknowledging that "we did not get everything right," Jean-Pierre said unequivocally, "I was very proud of everything that I did."
"I woke up every day as a Black woman who is queer... No one had ever seen someone like me at that podium standing behind that lectern," she said. "It was an honor and a privilege."
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Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, called Jean-Pierre's interview "one of the most disgusting things you'll see today, but also extremely revealing."
"She uses the identity card to make genocide apologism permissible," Parsi wrote on Sunday. "In Jean-Pierre's world, her identity gives her the license to support genocide without regret."
Jean-Pierre is making the media rounds as she promotes her new book, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, in which she explains her decision to exit the Democratic Party.
As Washington Post book critic Becca Rothfeld noted in a scathing review, Jean-Pierre did not cite the Biden administration's steadfast support for Israel's decimation of Gaza as among the reasons she ditched her former party.
"Jean-Pierre's central complaint boils down, more or less, to a vague sense of personal grievance. The Democrats were mean to [President Joe] Biden, her boss; they were mean to her personally," Rothfeld wrote. "Jean-Pierre sums up her complaints when she writes that she's 'exasperated with the shady way Democrats do business'—but not, we may presume, with the business itself."
Part of that business under the Biden administration was providing material and diplomatic support to Israel as it waged all-out war on the Gaza Strip following the deadly Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.
As chief spokesperson for the Biden White House, Jean-Pierre stood before the press and the global community and defended the administration's support for Israel's assault while criticizing international efforts to pursue accountability for Israeli leaders, as well as efforts by US lawmakers to halt the flow of weaponry used to massacre Palestinians indiscriminately.
"We strongly oppose this resolution," Jean-Pierre said last November when asked about a Sen. Bernie Sanders-led push to block US bomb sales to Israel.
"We are very committed to Israel's security," Jean-Pierre added. "That has been ironclad."
