Kamala Harris is losing her ninth staffer since June in deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh, who is moving to the Defense Department.
Singh worked with the vice president for over two years, joining the then-senator’s team in March 2020 during the presidential campaign to run communications after working on the campaigns of Michael Bloomberg and Corey Booker.
Staffers in the vice president’s office have been jumping ship after a year full of messaging blunders and a barrage of personal attacks on the VP, combined with viral rumors of toxicity within the office and tensions between Harris’s and President Biden’s offices.
The vice president’s office could employ up to around 50 staffers at any given time.
Of the four-person senior press shop that began with Harris, only one remains – Herbie Ziskend. Ziskend will be promoted to senior advisor for communications, according to an email sent to an internal email shared with DailyMail.com.
Singh’s departure follows that of communications director Ashley Etienne and senior adviser and chief spokesperson Symone Sanders, both of whom left at the end of 2021.
Ernesto Apreza, Harris’ senior adviser for public engagement, will become deputy press secretary. Assistant press secretary Rachel Palermo, who worked on the transition team after serving on Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, will serve as deputy communications director.
The shakeup of the vice president’s press team comes under the direction of new communications director Jamal Simmons. The reset came as both the president and vice president sought to step up public engagement to battle low poll numbers.
President Biden sent Harris on a high-stakes trip to Munich at the end of February as world leaders met to attempt to divert Russia from invading Ukraine. Then last week, she visited Poland and Romania to reassure the U.S.’s commitment to their security after an awkward back-and-forth over providing MiG-29 jets to Ukraine.
Harris then spoke at her party’s winter meeting in Philadelphia late last week, where she told Democrats they must ensure Americans they ‘got what they ordered.’
‘Our task is to show people that, in many ways, they got what they ordered,’ the vice president said Saturday. ‘A lot of what they demanded they got and so let’s get out there as we do and remind them…because we know that they will show up again.’
In February, the vice president lost the head of her speechwriting team, Kate Childs Graham.
It follows a string of farewell messages as staffers leave the office, many of them vacating public facing roles in the press office.
The year began with a slew of reports that Harris was planning to meet negative coverage head on, with a busier media schedule and a campaign schedule that her supporters say will better suit her political skills.
This is an excerpt from Daily Mail.
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