The White House is facing questions over a new memoir from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates that criticizes President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. Gates writes Obama never believed in his own policy of escalating the Afghanistan War with a surge of 30,000 troops. Gates also calls Biden, “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney defended Biden.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney: “The president and the rest of us here simply just disagree with that assessment. As a senator and as a vice president, Joe Biden has been one of the leading statesmen of his time, and he has been an excellent counselor and adviser to the president for the past five years. He’s played a key role in every major national security and foreign policy debate and policy discussion in this administration, in this White House.”

As it faced questions over Biden, the White House allowed news crews to take pictures of his weekly lunch with President Obama for the first time. In his book, Gates also reports that both Hillary Clinton and Obama admitted that their opposition to a U.S. troop surge in Iraq in 2006 was “political.”