Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) lashed out at her former staffers Friday, accusing them of hacking her phone, mismanaging funds and destroying electronic devices as part of an effort to sabotage her tenure in Congress.
“I knew that they were sabotaging the office for a while,” the South Carolina Republican told the Daily Mail. “I didn’t know to the extent that they were doing it.
“They were signing my name on documents they didn’t have permission to do — one of them submerged their electronic devices under water so we couldn’t access their files. They deleted files, some of them deleted files off our server, so there’d be no documentation for the new staff that were coming in,” the 46-year-old alleged.
The 46-year-old congresswoman’s office has been plagued by staff departures since her October 2023 vote to oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
Between December 2023 and February 2024, nine of Mace’s staff members left her office, the outlet reported.
Former employees have described the work environment in Mace’s office as “toxic,” even alleging that the congresswoman would openly discuss her sex life with her ex-fiancé.
In January, her former chief of staff, Dan Hanlon, launched a short-lived bid to primary her in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District but ended his campaign two months later.
Mace claimed that it has been difficult to keep new staffers from quitting because of the actions of some disgruntled employees.
“We had another former staffer that would leak the names of the new employees we were hiring so that negative stories could be written about them,” she told the Daily Mail.
“We even had interns quit because old staff threatened the interns, threatened that they would never get a job on the hill if they worked in my office.”
Mace further alleged that a former staffer hacked her devices and was able to track the whereabouts of her and her two children for months.
“Literally, they could see where I was at all times. They could see my kids’ calendars, my doctors’ appointments, my medical information,” the South Carolina Republican said.
“The stories I have from some of my former staff are horrific, and were a massive invasion of my privacy.
“We’re finding thousands of dollars in bills they didn’t pay … paperwork that didn’t get filed that was supposed to,” she claimed, telling the outlet that she was furious when she found out that former staffers had left nearly $1 million in budgeted money for her office unspent.
“That money could have also gone toward salaries, bonuses – especially if you’re entry-level, it’s really hard to get by in DC,” she argued. “It was really outrageous.”
Money left unspent by congressional offices is remitted back to the US Treasury Department.
Two former staffers denied several of Mace’s claims, telling the Daily Mail that the congresswoman failed to approve hundreds of thousands of dollars in office spending and that the personal calendars of members of Congress are routinely shared with staff.
“No one hacked her accounts. She set them all up,” one of them said.
“This seems to be stemming from paranoia and trust issues,” another ex-employee shot back.
“She’s clearly unwell and I hope she gets help.”
The former staffer added that the allegation that a device was submerged in water was simply a case of water spilling onto a computer.
As for the congresswoman’s claim that aides signed her name on documents without permission, the ex-staffer said Mace directed her team to use a signature stamp “for clerical tasks that she didn’t want to be bothered with.”
Mace, the first Republican woman elected to the House of Representatives from South Carolina, has served in Congress since 2021 and is up for re-election in November.
