Rep. Michele Bachmann's former New Hampshire staff issued a joint statement Monday morning to "clarify some of the confusion" surrounding the five staffers' exits, in which they lashed out at her national campaign for being "rude, unprofessional, dishonest, and at times cruel."
The statement said the staffers held no ill will toward Bachmann, but said she was "sequestered behind a wall of pretense, guarded by political operatives consumed by their own egos."
"The manner in which some in the national team conducted themselves towards Team-NH was rude, unprofessional, dishonest, and at times cruel," the statement said. "But more concerning was how abrasive, discourteous, and dismissive some within the national team were towards many New Hampshire citizens. These are our neighbors and our friends, and some within the national team treated them more as a nuisance than as potential supporters."
The statement, which confirmed that her entire New Hampshire team had departed, will likely add fuel to the resignation story. When the story broke on Friday, Bachmann and her top aides spent the day denying that staffers had quit, though her former state campaign manager Jeff Chidester said publicly that he had already quit a week prior.
Bachmann's October trip to New Hampshire appears to have been the breaking point, as the statement explained: "several incidents happened that concerned some members of Team-NH. Those incidents will remain private, but they were serious enough for some members to depart the campaign."
The staffers also said that they were asked to temporarily "go off payroll" for a month in the middle of September, a sign of the money problems in the Bachmann campaign, which spent $6 million last quarter and raised $4.1 million.
Read the staffers' full statement below:
