‘Soul-destroying’ bully: Kamala Harris’ former staff expose her ‘toxic’ behavior, only 4 out of 71 first-year staffers remain

According to the Daily Mail, 67 staff members of the original 71 in her initial wave of hiring either quit or were fired. As far back as 2010 when she was the California Attorney General, Harris has been known to have a "toxic" workplace environment. Congressional sources told the outlet that Harris would berate staffers with expletive-laden tirades and frequently lashed out at subordinates. She earned an alleged reputation as a "soul-destroying" bully in the workplace.

California State University professor Barbara O'Connor said that if students interned for Harris they would frequently come back crying and feel like they "weren't valued" in the office when she was a government official in California. Working for her in the Senate after her win in 2017 was not all much different, according to the outlet. She had the ninth-highest turnover rate out of the 114 Senate offices in the years 2017 to 2020.

Witnesses recalled Harris cussing out Senate staffers who didn't even work for her and ordering them around in one instance outside the main Senate Judiciary Committee room, "Anyone who's staff, get the f*ck out of here!" she reportedly yelled.

When she ran for president in 2020, the behavior was starting to get picked up in the press. In one resignation letter published in the New York Times in 2019, Harris' State Operations Director Kelly Mehlenbacher said of Harris, "This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly."

"Morale has never been lower," she wrote at the time. Harris soon dropped out of the presidential race, but Biden threw her a lifeline to be his running mate after he promised to have a black woman for his VP pick.

In June 2021, Politico spoke to 22 people familiar with her VP office. All of them roundly said that the team had "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 sh*t,' one source said at the time. Harris' office tried to tamp down the voice, but then more staffers came out to denounce her office and how she treated subordinates. In a following report at the Washington Post in December 2021, staffers told the outlet that she would allegedly refuse to prepare for public appearances and then blame staff when she did not do well.

"It's clear [with Harris] that you're not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work," one ex-staffer 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."