Ex-Biden Official Who Resigned After Spat With Tara Palmeri Reportedly Returning to Team Biden

TJ Ducklo, the former deputy press secretary for President Joe Biden, is returning to the campaign team to serve as a senior communications adviser.

Ducklo previously had senior communications roles at Bloomberg, NBC News, the Motion Pictures Association of America, and was an advisor on Showtime’s documentary about the 2016 election, The Circus. He had a key role on Biden’s 2020 campaign as national press secretary, continuing to work on the campaign while he battled cancer, was hired after Biden won to serve as his deputy press secretary, but his tenure did not last even a month past inauguration.

In February 2021, Vanity Fair’s Caleb Ecarma (who was also previously with Mediaite) reported that Ducklo “made derogatory and misogynistic comments” during an off-the-record call with Tara Palmeri, then at Politico, over her reporting on Ducklo’s relationship with Axios reporter Alexi McCammond.

According to Ecarma’s report, Palmeri had contacted McCammond to inquire about the relationship and the potential conflict of interest since the White House was part of McCammond’s beat, and Ducklo called Palmeri back, threatening, “I will destroy you,” among other heated comments.

In the aftermath of the report, Ducklo apologized and was suspended from his White House gig before announcing his resignation shortly thereafter. The Nashville native has since returned to his hometown on to serve as a senior advisor for Mayor John Cooper, including his current role as the mayor’s chief communications officer.

Adam Friedman reported for the Tennessee Lookout on Friday that Ducklo would be leaving Nashville to rejoin the Biden campaign. The campaign has also confirmed to Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher that Ducklo will be returning as “Senior Advisor for Communications.” He is expected to start in that role in mid-July.

Ducklo’s return was heralded by other Biden alumni, like former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, now at MSNBC, who told Friedman, “T.J. has an incredible understanding of the media, which will be valuable to the campaign.”

Friedman’s report framed Ducklo’s time serving in local politics and his efforts to “make amends with Palmeri” as helpful prerequisites to his return to Washington, D.C.

Palmeri, now at Puck, is quoted in the Lookout article as saying that Ducklo did not “deserve to be canceled,” and had shared more of her thoughts in an article published last month, when rumors first surfaced that Ducklo would join the Biden-Harris 2024 re-election effort.

Describing their contentious phone call as “a verbal altercation with me that was unprofessional and deeply personal,” Palmeri wrote that “[f]or what it’s worth, I never wanted Ducklo to be fired from the White House.” She concluded with her thoughts about how the administration had handled the situation:

[A]s with all things in Washington, it often comes down to how you manage the scandal rather than the scandal itself.

I always thought that it could have been resolved if Ducklo and I had sat down together and a real apology was exchanged. Instead, Ducklo sent me a two-line email apology and Biden’s top advisor Anita Dunn called my editor to argue that I broke our “off the record” agreement by outlining the incident in an internal memo at the time. For a full month, I felt shunned by the White House, and by Dunn, who warned young press aides about reporters who break off the record, I was told, winking and nodding about what happened between me and Ducklo. “Reporters can’t be trusted,” Dunn said, according to a witness. (“Anita was emphatic to the team that TJ’s comments were totally inappropriate and that no staffer ever could behave that way under any circumstances, regardless of ground rules,” said Saloni Sharma, a senior advisor for communications in the White House.)