Joel Riethmiller

True Confessions: for the first year that I was in Congress, I had a bad habit of leaving things places, usually off the Hill. My purse. My coat. Etc. My chief of staff, @JedOber, invariably took his bike to whatever location and brought the items back to me. I didn’t ask him to. He just did it, often. I also had a worse habit of losing my temper on our internal staff Signal thread when I was stressed. Jed rightfully called me out on it a few x, and I would like to think I improved because of his comments. Thankfully, none of my staff went to the @nytimes about it. I am not minimizing the claims in the anonymously-sourced piece in today’s NYT, but I am saying that Congressional office teams are often like family members, in that they’ll take the brunt of a Member’s stress and mood. Should that be so? No, ofc not, just as you shouldn’t yell at your spouse because of a bad day at the office. But the work that has to get done in Congress requires a high level of trust between the Member and her team, and I would hope that staffers would see their way to talking directly to the Member, and not to a news organization.