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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti
- Two of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's top staffers are leaving her office, Ocasio-Cortez's outgoing press secretary Corbin Trent told The Intercept on Friday.
- Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti is leaving her office effective today to take a position at New Consensus, a think tank that focuses on climate action.
- The New York congresswoman also confirmed to The Intercept that Trent is moving over to do communications work for her 2020 re-election campaign.
- Ocasio-Cortez denied that the staff changes were in any way related to the public scuffle with House leadership, telling The Intercept that Chakrabarti and Trent's departures were planned long in advance.
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Two of progressive congresswoman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's top staffers are leaving her office, Ocasio-Cortez's outgoing press secretary Corbin Trent told The Intercept on Friday.
Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti is leaving her office effective today to take a position at New Consensus, a think tank that focuses on climate action and advancing the Green New Deal, a landmark climate resolution Ocasio-Cortez's office championed earlier this year.
"Saikat has decided to leave the office of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez to work with New Consensus to further develop plans for a Green New Deal," Trent said in a statement to The Intercept. "Saikat's goal has always been to do whatever he can to help the larger progressive movement, and we look forward to continuing working with him to do just that."
The New York congresswoman also confirmed to The Intercept that Trent is moving over to her 2020 re-election campaign at the end of this month "so we can work on some ambitious comms projects we've been looking forward to working on," she told the outlet.
The moves follow weeks of Democratic infighting. Tensions between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a group known as "the Squad," made up of Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts reached a high point last month, with Ocasio-Cortez accusing Pelosi of "singling out" women of color after Pelosi dismissed the group as "just four people" in an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
Chakrabarti also stirred up controversy with a series of tweets attacking moderate Democrats who voted for a border security bill opposed by progressive Democrats.
Read more: Democrats delete tweets attacking each other as members attempt to mend a racially-charged rift
In one tweet, which he later deleted, Chakrabarti raised eyebrows by writing, "instead of 'fiscally conservative but socially liberal,' let's call the New Democrats and Blue Dog Caucus the 'New Southern Democrats.' They certainly seem hell-bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did the 40s."
He later drew the ire of more members of caucus by accusing Rep. Sharice Davids of Kansas, one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress, of "enabling a racist system" by voting for the border security package in question.
In response, the Twitter account for the House Democratic Caucus, run by Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries, wrote of Chakrabarti, "who is this guy and why is he explicitly singling out a Native American woman of color?" in another since-deleted tweet.
In a closed-door caucus meeting, Pelosi reportedly told all members and their staff to "do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just OK," which many interpreted to be a thinly-veiled signal to several progressives including Ocasio-Cortez and Chakrabarti.
Ocasio-Cortez denied that the staff changes were in any way related to last month's public scuffle with House leadership, telling The Intercept that Chakrabarti and Trent's departures were planned long in advance.
Read more:
Meet the 'squad' - the Democratic women of color who Trump targeted with racist tweets