Months before Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) shocked her party by endorsing Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, her own campaign staff was quietly working to contain the influence of the man to whom she would later get engaged.
More than a dozen former campaign aides and others familiar with the campaign told the Washington Post that the congresswoman's senior staff held a meeting without her during the Democratic Senate primary to figure out how to limit the role of Jason Turkish, a disability lawyer and top donor who by early June was secretly engaged to the congresswoman and had become her most important adviser.
“He was not a calming presence, in a way that in hindsight should have been more alarming,” said Caitlin Legacki, a former top adviser to the campaign. “It was very strange. I have never seen anything like it.”
Staff set two guardrails. Turkish could not be the last person to speak with Stevens before an interview or public event, and he had to route any concerns through campaign manager Sam Barrett rather than lower-level staff. Stevens’ schedule was sometimes rearranged so that a staffer would be the last one to talk with her.
Aides told the Post that Turkish berated staff, saying that in one instance he allegedly summoned a senior digital staffer to his law office and yelled at her over fundraising emails, and he allegedly told a press aide she was “not serving Haley well.”
He also reportedly sent Stevens lists of hurtful tweets about her, and staff worried that she strayed from talking points when he spoke to her right before events.
One former aide said staff even redirected cameras or repositioned Stevens at events so Turkish couldn’t draw press attention.
“It did not work in the sense that he had any less influence on Haley,” Legacki said.
Stevens lost the primary to progressive Abdul El-Sayed and initially endorsed him. Turkish then endorsed Rogers last week, and Stevens followed on Sunday, appearing with Rogers and Turkish at a Black church. One friend said Stevens had assured her just the night before that she would “never” rescind her El-Sayed endorsement.
Stevens called suggestions that Turkish influenced her “absurd.” In a post on X, she described them as “sexism dressed up as political analysis.” She told the Post she was “made miserable” by the staffers quoted and said Legacki “was fired” over “undisclosed conflicts.” Legacki left the campaign after it emerged she was also working for Palantir.
Turkish declined to address the specific claims but gave the Post emails showing that staff kept consulting him through the summer.
“There were good days and bad days, but we lived it together, and we wouldn’t trade it for anything,” he said.
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