Kamala Harris’ former staffers are still “traumatized” by their employment in the Senator-turned-Vice President’s California office and are “terrified” that she could be next in line to become president, reports the Washington Free Beacon, based on revelations made in a Business Insider report.
“It’s a nightmare scenario for some former Harris staffers who watched nervously as their former boss ascended the national political stage,” Business Insider reported based on interviews with a “dozen” of the vice president’s former staffers.
“Many of them remain loyal Democrats and fans of Biden, but they didn’t want to see a boss with whom they’d had a bad experience become the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer,” Business Insider noted. “Biden, at 78, was already the oldest person to assume the US presidency. He’ll be a few weeks shy of his 82nd birthday on Election Day 2024, and there’s already speculation six months into his term over whether he’ll run for reelection.”
The Washington Free Beacon added that the staffers “spoke on condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships, adding that Harris’ job trajectory means it’s well within reason she could become the most powerful person on the planet,” and they do not want to be targets of wrath.
The staffers do agree, however, that Harris made her former workplace “toxic” with a “reactionary” attitude that fomented “a sense of paranoia in that office that you never knew when she was going to snap at you,” per the Free Beacon, with one former staffer even telling Business Insider that Harris sometimes made staffers “so stressed out that they were making themselves sick. Is that toxic? I don’t know.”
Another reportedly told Insider that they suffered a sort of post-traumatic stress episode from Harris’ emergence onto the national stage and that “they sought therapy to ‘resolve trauma from the on-the-job abuse’ after Harris was selected as Biden’s running mate in 2020.”
As The Daily Wire’s Tim Pearce reported in June, Politico did a similar expose on Harris’ behavior, chronicling the vice president’s “management style,” which reportedly became “abusive.”
“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” said one person with direct knowledge of how the vice president’s office is run. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s***.”
Harris’ former staffers told Business Insider that the Politico report made them feel “vindicated” and affirmed their experiences.
The Biden White House engaged in pointed damage control in reference to the Politico report, and commentators even went so far as to suggest that criticism about Harris’ management style is sexist.
“White House senior adviser Anita Dunn, for example, told Politico the complaints about Harris’ office were ‘not anywhere near what you are describing’ but acknowledged there could be ‘people whose feelings were a little hurt on her staff’ because many weren’t told about her last-minute trip to the southern border,” The Daily Wire reported.
This article has been revised to clarify that the words “traumatized” and “terrified” are attributable to The Washington Free Beacon, not to Business Insider.