GOP Rep. Mace claims ex-staff sabotaged her office, mismanaged $1 million

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) claims her former staff sabotaged her office and mismanaged $1 million of the office budget.

Between December 2023 and February 2024, nine of Mace's staffers left her office, the Daily Mail reported Friday. In December, Mace fired her chief of staff, Dan Hanlon, who then briefly ran against her in the primary election before dropping out. Following Hanlon's firing, both Mace's deputy chief of staff and legislative director resigned.

"I knew that they were sabotaging the office for a while. I didn't know to the extent that they were doing it," Mace told the Daily Mail.

"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," she added. "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."

"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," Mace went on. "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."

She also claimed that another former staffer hacked her devices and tracked her for nine months.

"Literally, they could see where I was at all times. They could see my kids' calendars, my doctors' appointments, my medical information," said the mother of two. "The stories I have from some of my former staff are horrific, and were a massive invasion of my privacy."

Mace further claimed that staffers had mismanaged funds.

"We're finding thousands of dollars in bills they didn't pay. Paperwork that didn't get filed that was supposed to," she went on, further asserting that her staff didn't use nearly $1 million from her office budget.

"It was $400,000 in 2022 and close to half a million in 2023," Mace said. "It's our job to manage our office, be fiscally responsible, but to use everything we have to communicate our constituent services."

Some of her ex-staff, however, have suggested that her claims are embellished. Two former staffers said that, in 2022, Mace failed to approve a $400,000 mailing program before the deadline. 

They also said that Mace's personal devices had not been hacked and that it is standard for Congress members to share their personal calendars with staff. 

"She had a personal calendar, a political calendar, and official calendar. All three of those calendars were managed and shared with senior staff so that we could go about the daily operations. No one hacked her accounts. She set them all up," the former staffers told the Daily Mail. "She routinely would try to revoke access, be like 'you can no longer see my calendar' for a couple of weeks. And you know what, we couldn't do our jobs."

A former aide said regarding signing Mace's name on documents, "she's talking about the run-of-the-mill, every office has hand stamp of a member. This is a stamp that she had directed our team to use for clerical tasks that she didn't want to be bothered with."

The person added that the "submerged" device claim came from a staff member who spilled water on their computer, then took it to the tech team.