SCGOP wants Harrison staffers to resign after their old offensive tweets surfaced
South Carolina Republicans want two Jaime Harrison staffers, whose years old offensive tweets recently surfaced, to resign from their jobs in the campaign.
During a news conference Friday morning S.C. GOP Chairman Drew McKissick said sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic tweets sent out between 2010 and 2014 by Harrison Communications Director Guy King and Political Director Bre Maxwell, who are both Black, show that Harrison has poor judgment for hiring them.
“These are not isolated incidents, they are repeated over the course of years,” McKissick said. “They are not private, but public. And they were public when Jaime Harrison hired these people to work for his campaign as political director and his communications director.”
King and Maxwell apologized to their fellow campaign staffers for the tweets that date back to as recently as 2014, and campaign Manager Zack Carroll said the violations of the campaign’s social media policy were handled internally.
“This campaign isn’t about staff tweets from years ago, it’s about the issues of today,” Carroll said in an emailed statement to The State on Friday. “This race should be focused on how to get help to South Carolinians who are struggling to make rent, at risk of losing their health insurance, and getting their children safely back in schools during the worst pandemic in the last century.”
Harrison is in a close race against three-term incumbent Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. A poll this week had the race tied at 48%, and both campaigns have raised tens of millions of dollars allowing them to flood the airwaves with television ads.
King was in high school and college during the time he sent out the controversial tweets, one of which was an Usher song lyric and one was a quote about rape from the television show Boondocks.
“Whether the jokes were about rape in real life, or rape on TV shows or in songs or movies, it’s not okay, because y’all rape is not funny,” S.C. GOP spokeswoman Claire Robinson said.
In her tweets, which she sent between the ages of 27 and 29, Maxwell praised Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam and who has a history of denouncing Jews, and used a stereotype to describe Jewish people.
In a letter from Beaufort County Republican Party Vice Chairman Sherri Zedd, read during the news conference, Maxwell used anti-Semitic dog whistles when describing Jewish people as wealthy.
“Her admiration of for Louis Farrakhan, one of the biggest American anti-Semites, is also extremely troubling,” Zedd wrote.
This story was originally published September 18, 2020 at 1:08 PM.
