An account of the terrors of working for Vice President Kamala Harris during the days she was a U.S. senator has resurfaced.
Terry McAteer, whose son worked briefly for Harris in a long-ago summer internship, wrote an op-ed for The Union in 2019 when Harris was in the midst of her failed campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
This is not exactly a startling revelation.
In 2021, as Harris’s staff was heading for the exit one after the other, Politico wrote a piece describing the vice president’s office as a hotbed of dysfunction.
“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” Politico quoted what it said was a “person with direct knowledge of how Harris’ 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***,” the person said.
That has not stopped some from gushing over Harris, including Hollywood elites like Drew Barrymore.
During an April appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” Harris was raved over by the celebrity host, who leaned into a nickname the vice president’s step children created as a play on Kamala: Momala.
But that’s not how McAteer described Harris in his 2019 op-ed, writing “there is another side of Kamala Harris which the general public does not know.”
He summed up how she interacts with her staff, from his son’s experience.
Harris “vocally throws around ‘F-bombs’ and other profanity constantly in her berating of staff and others. The staff is in complete fear of her and she uses her profanity throughout the day,” McAteer wrote.
“As Attorney General, Senator Harris instructed her entire staff to stand every morning as she entered the office and say, ‘Good Morning General,’’ he wrote.
During the internship, he wrote, Harris never introduced herself to McAteer’s son.
His son, he wrote, “was also given instructions to never address Harris nor look her in the eye as that privilege was only allowed to senior staff members,” he wrote.
“I don’t know about you but this is not the workplace of someone who respects her staff. For a woman of color to have employees stand when she enters the room smacks of a bygone era that we, as Americans, deplore and find demeaning,” he wrote.
“Finally, what is up with the ‘don’t look her in the eye’ instruction? I know I wouldn’t want to work in that hostile environment!” he wrote.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
