As top staffers from Vice President Kamala Harris’ office continue to make unusual departures prompting questions about her leadership capabilities, a new book from a former staffer describes a brief experience of working with the now Vice President.
As per reports from The Washington Examiner, Chris Whipple, a long-time aide to Harris has described his experience working for Harris as “really unnecessary gamesmanship” accusing her behavior with staff stemming from “deep, deep insecurity.”
Whipple, who has reportedly spent hours working for Harris claims in his upcoming book that she “refused to do the kind of preparation that you need to do before going public on a hardcore policy matter. And then she became incensed and outraged when things wouldn’t go the way she thought they were supposed to. There was a lot of magical thinking.”
Within her first 18 months in the Vice President’s office, top staffers including her chief of staff, communications director, press secretary, and other aides have all made unusual departures.
Similarly, many of her former aides have made similar allegations of poor treatment of staff.
“I think it’s helpful for people to know that this is not new, and it will inhibit any administration that she is the leader of,” said the former staffer, according to The Fight of His Life, a book about the first years of President Joe Biden’s presidency.
Harris and her office have neglected these claims alleging that she was targeted because of her “race and gender” one aide disputed the defense saying that “When somebody raises an issue about Kamala, everybody’s like, you don’t want to see black women succeed. That’s completely backward. Everybody who goes to work for Kamala, by definition, wants to see her succeed. That’s why you take these jobs,” the aide noted.
Whipple cites another former aide in the book, Gil Duran who worked for Harris when she was the Attorney General of California. Duran claimed that he frequently dealt “with her dysfunction.” Duran is a public critic of Harris since the early days of the Biden administration. He went on to describe Harris as “impossible to manage” in Whipple’s book.
“The amount of stress she created by constantly being impossible to manage and taking out all her stresses on staff — usually women, or people who were not in great positions of authority — was just kind of unbearable,” Duran claimed.
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H/T: Katherine Doyle, Washington Examiner