Kamala Harris was all smiles when she arrived at Joe Biden’s former Delaware campaign headquarters on Monday.
She was there to lift the spirits of blindsided staffers, who after 15 months of toiling to re-elect the president, suddenly found themselves working for her.
‘It is my great honor to have Joe’s endorsement in this race,’ she boasted to cheers from a crowd who were now on her payroll.
But as the assembled readily applauded, some must have harbored private concerns.
For, behind the recent public self-branding of Harris as a kindly, jovial ‘Momala’, she has earned a nasty reputation as an alleged ‘soul-destroying’ workplace ‘bully’.
Only four of the initial 71 staffers hired by Harris during her first year in office still remain in a job. The rest either quit or were fired, according to analysis by non-partisan watchdog Open The Books.
Behind the recent public self-branding of Harris as a kindly, jovial ‘Momala’, she has earned a nasty behind-closed-doors reputation as an alleged ‘soul-destroying’ workplace ‘bully’.
Kamala Harris was all smiles when she arrived at Joe Biden ‘s former Delaware campaign headquarters on Monday.
That translates to a 92 percent staff turnover rate – and, say critics, is a likely sign that the issues on Team Harris have more to do with her than anyone else.
During research for my recent Harris biography (‘Amateur Hour’, published in January), the horror stories I heard from many of her former employees and read about in numerous reports – shocked me.
As far back as the 2010s, when Harris served as California’s Attorney General, she was allegedly known for running a ‘toxic’ workplace.
Barbara O’Connor, a professor at California State University, Sacramento claimed that students who worked for Harris as interns frequently came back to her crying and saying that they ‘felt they weren’t valued.’
After Harris was elected in 2017 to represent California in the US Senate, working conditions reportedly did not improve.
Analysis showed her office had the ninth-highest staff turnover rate out of the 114 senators who served between 2017 and 2020.
Congressional sources told the Mail that she would berate subordinates in expletive-laden tirades.
Even those working for Republican lawmakers allegedly got caught in the crossfire.
In one instance, reported in my book, sources described how Harris lashed out at a room full of Senate staffers during the highly contentious 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh.
On September 28 of that year, as Kavanaugh’s nomination moved forward despite liberal outrage over allegations he’d sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford three decades earlier, Harris and her colleagues staged a walkout from the hearings.
Harris lashed out at a room full of Senate staffers during the highly contentious 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of U.S. Appeals Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
Barbara O’Connor (above), a professor at California State University, Sacramento claimed that students who worked for Harris as interns frequently came back to her crying and saying that they ‘felt they weren’t valued.’
Later, Harris was said to explode in anger outside the main Judiciary Committee room.
Witnesses recalled Harris cursing and ordering around staffers who did not even work for her.
‘Anyone who’s staff, get the f*** out of here!’ she allegedly yelled.
Harris’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment on these allegations.
Years later, amid the dramatic and rapid collapse of Harris’s 2020 presidential bid, this allegedly troubling behavior began to be leaked to the public.
In a sensational resignation letter shared with the New York Times in November 2019, Harris’s then State Operations Director Kelly Mehlenbacher slammed her boss, saying: ‘I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly.’
She continued: ‘It is not acceptable to me that we encouraged people to move from Washington, DC to Baltimore only to lay them off with no notice.’
‘Morale has never been lower,’ she added, saying there was no ‘real plan’ for how Harris might win, but that she hoped her departure ‘might result in some serious consideration of […] our internal communications’.
In a sensational resignation letter shared with the New York Times in November 2019, Harris’s then State Operations Director Kelly Mehlenbacher slammed her boss, saying: ‘I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly.’
But as Harris’s failed campaign then descended into nasty blame-shifting and finger-pointing, Biden threw her a political lifeline, tapping her to be his running mate and effectively saving her skin.
Just a few months into Biden’s administration, troubling stories about her management style surfaced once again.
In June 2021, Politico spoke to 22 individuals familiar with Harris’s VP office who all claimed that her team was experiencing ‘low morale, porous lines of communication and diminished trust among aides and senior officials.’
‘It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s***,’ one source said.
A Biden administration official claimed Harris was responsible: ‘It all starts at the top.’
That sentiment was shared by Gil Duran, an ex-aide to Harris who worked in her Attorney General’s office and quit after five months.
‘What is the common denominator through all this?’ he said, ‘It’s her.’
Harris’s then-press secretary, Symone Sanders, tried to defend her boss, accusing complaining staffers of being soft.
‘We are not making rainbows and bunnies all day,’ Sanders told Politico. ‘What I hear is that people have hard jobs and I’m like “welcome to the club”.’
Just five months later, Sanders, a political veteran who had once worked for infamously cantankerous Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (no relation), left Harris’s office as well.
‘I’m so grateful to the VP for her vote of confidence from the very beginning,’ Sanders said.
‘We are not making rainbows and bunnies all day,’ Sanders (above, right) told Politico. ‘What I hear is that people have hard jobs and I’m like ‘welcome to the club’.’
But then the dam broke.
Multiple staffers who worked for Harris before she was Vice President told the Washington Post in December 2021 how she’d reportedly refuse to prepare for public appearances and blame her aides when she then underperformed.
‘It’s clear [with Harris] that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,’ one ex-aide said. ‘With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.’
In the summer of 2021 – and reported by CNN – Harris was said to have been ‘prepped extensively by her team’ on how she could respond to questions about why she’d not yet visited the southern border, despite her role as White House ‘border czar’.
But when the time came to deliver her answer, Harris botched her interview with NBC’s Lester Holt.
‘We’ve been to the border,’ she told Holt in June of that year.
‘You haven’t been to the border,’ he replied.
‘I haven’t been to Europe,’ Harris clapped back with an awkward laugh. ‘I don’t understand the point that you’re making.’
The flippant response resulted in one of the most damaging public appearances of her entire White House tenure. She didn’t do another one-on-one interview for nearly a year.
‘I haven’t been to Europe,’ Harris clapped back with an awkward laugh. ‘I don’t understand the point that you’re making.’ (Above) Harris’s interview with NBC News in June 2021
A Biden administration official claimed Harris was responsible: ‘It all starts at the top.’ That sentiment was shared by Gil Duran (above), an ex-aide to Harris who worked in Harris’s Attorney General’s office and quit after five months.
At other times, and perhaps as a result of the Holt disaster, Harris reportedly began to over-prepare for some events.
In April 2022 – having been invited to a salon-style dinner at the home of David Bradley, a heavyweight DC media mogul – she was said to be so anxious about that she held a ‘mock dinner’ with staffers who acted out the roles of dinner guests, Axios reported.
Speaking exclusively to the Mail, political strategists who have previously worked for Harris say the root of her problems is that she overly relies on a trusted, though under-qualified inner circle that includes her sister Maya Harris and brother-in-law Tony West, a former Obama Justice Department official.
Neither are professional political strategists.
Team Harris appears to now be leaking to the media that attempts are underway to bring former Obama adviser David Plouffe and ex-Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on board.
But, in truth, I’m told the efforts appear to be more wishful thinking to reassure donors rather than a reality.
On Monday, Harris announced that Biden campaign chief Jen O’Malley Dillon would remain on duty – as would senior Biden advisor Julie Chavez Rodriguez who previously worked for Harris in her Senate office and on her 2020 presidential race.
In a May interview on actress Drew Barrymore’s talk show, Harris played the magnanimous boss.
‘It’s really important to be around people who love you, who are about you and who are going to be honest with you,’ she said.
As she now prepares to tackle the monumental task of running a presidential campaign in just four months, the question for Harris will surely be whether she’s prepared to listen to that honest feedback.
