AOC’s Top Staffer Quits, Another One Shifts Roles

Big shake-ups in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional staff are coming.

Chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti and communications director Corbin Trent will be leaving ‘The Squad’s unofficial leader, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office. Ironically enough, chief of staff Chakrabarti is leaving to go work for a nonprofit organization called New Consensus, which focuses on climate issues including the promotion of the Green New Deal.

From ‘The Intercept’:

Ocasio-Cortez asked Trent to move to the campaign, she told The Intercept. Trent is “shifting to our campaign side so we can work on some ambitious comms projects we’ve been looking forward to working on,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a text message. Ocasio-Cortez is facing one Republican opponent, Scherie Murray, a businesswoman from New York who immigrated to the U.S. from Jamaica as a child.

Chakrabarti’s last day is Friday, August 2, and Trent’s transition timeline is still unclear, Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept. Trent told The Intercept he expects to continue serving as spokesperson through the end of August. Trent, who has been directing communications for the Ocasio-Cortez campaign part time since 2018, will now do so full time. Ariel Eckblad, Ocasio-Cortez’s legislative director, will take over as chief of staff.

A tweet cited in the article by ‘The Intercept’ from the chief of staff Chakrabarti states:

“Everything I tweeted 2 weeks ago was to call out the terrible border funding bill that 90+ Dems opposed. It gave Trump a blank check to continue caging people in horrendous conditions. Our Democracy is literally falling apart. I’m not interested in substance-less Twitter spats.

This tweet was in response to someone else’s tweet where they specifically brought up Rep. Davids. Why did you leave that out?

I’ve known Rep. Davids for a long time, consider her a friend, and encouraged her to run for Congress back in the fall of 2016. I’m glad she did.”

SEE TWEET FROM @saikatc BELOW:

Everything I tweeted 2 weeks ago was to call out the terrible border funding bill that 90+ Dems opposed. It gave Trump a blank check to continue caging people in horrendous conditions. Our Democracy is literally falling apart. I'm not interested in substance-less Twitter spats.

— Saikat Chakrabarti (@saikatc) July 13, 2019

Apparently, there were some tensions between Chakrabarti and some of the more moderates in the Democrat party.

This comes at a time when AOC and ‘AOC+3‘ battle it out with Nancy Pelosi and President Trump respectively. AOC’s squabble with Pelosi has of late been showcased as ‘nothing major’ by the Democrats, as they clearly don’t want to give Republicans fuel to add the fire of speculations that radical leftists are taking over the party.

It will be interesting to see if Ariel Eckblad takes a different approach when taking over as chief of staff.