Pennsylvania Congressman Tim Murphy, an anti-abortion Republican, announced his resignation after the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that he encouraged his mistress to have an abortion. But according to Politico, it wasn’t really his flagrant hypocrisy that worried his party so much as stories of alleged verbal abuse and harassment that would potentially come to light in a House Ethics Committee investigation into his office.
At the heart of the allegations are Murphy’s Chief of Staff Susan Mosychuk, who was reportedly close to Murphy. According to the accounts of former Murphy staffers, she allegedly mistreated employees:
According to these aides, Mosychuk regularly engaged in brutal verbal abuse of lower-ranking aides, from calling aides “worthless” and their work “garbage” to asking derisively, “Do you or do you not have a fucking college degree?”
Ex-staffers said Mosychuk kept white noise machines throughout Murphy’s congressional office so constituents waiting in the front room couldn’t hear her screaming. If Mosychuk was angry at staffers, she would make them take the stairs instead of the elevator, so they couldn’t ride with her, according to one former employee who witnessed it.
Mosychuk would even call staffers out of their bathroom breaks to demand they return to the office, or yell at them for taking too long to use the restroom. Many younger aides did not take lunch breaks, eating at their desks because they were scolded for leaving. One new employee quit after just a couple days because he was dressed down for using a paper clip instead of a staple on a briefing packet, multiple sources said.
Senior party leaders feared that Mosychuk’s alleged mistreatment, which was an open secret for years, would be exposed in a House Ethics investigation into outside income that she may have earned on top of her salary.
“I know what these people are like. To call them creeps is an affront to creeps.” Murphy’s former district director Nick Rodondo, said on KDKA, describing it “one of the worst places I have ever worked in my life.” Another employee described Murphy’s office as “a culture of abuse and a culture of corruption.”
Read the rest of the account here.