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Gillibrand Aide Abbas Malik Fired in Senate Sexual Harassment Scandal

Posted on | March 14, 2019 | Comments Off on Gillibrand Aide Abbas Malik Fired in Senate Sexual Harassment Scandal

Democrat Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand aide Abbas Malik (right, in Army uniform).

Initial reports about the sex scandal in Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s office did not name the perpetrator, but we now know that it was Abbas Malik, an Army veteran hired as Gillibrand’s military adviser and personal driver. A female staffer alleged that Malik — who was a decade her senior and married — repeatedly made unwelcome advances. She also said the male aide regularly made crude, misogynistic remarks in the office about his female colleagues and potential female hires. The female staffer said Malik retaliated against her when she reported his harassment, and she resigned because Gillibrand’s chief of staff, Jess Fassler, failed to take action. Politico “interviewed more than 20 former Gillibrand staffers” who corroborated Malik’s pattern of harassment, Marc Thiessen notes:

One former staffer said that “Malik often called her fat and unattractive to her face and made light of sexual abuse.” Others said Malik “regularly made misogynistic jokes, frequently appraised what they wore, disparaged the looks of other female staffers and rated the attractiveness of women who came in for interviews.” If a reporter could dig this information up, then her office could have done so, too. Only after Politico contacted Gillibrand’s office about the additional allegations against Malik did the senator finally fire him.
The fact is, while publicly positioning herself as a champion of harassment victims, Gillibrand apparently allowed a serial harasser to torment her female staff. And when a woman on her staff risked her own career to report the abusive conduct, “I was belittled by her office and treated like an inconvenience,” the woman told Politico. “She kept a harasser on her staff until it proved politically untenable for her to do so.”
Why did Gillibrand fail to act? Politico reported that “Malik had spent years by Gillibrand’s side as her driver — the senator officiated at his wedding — while the woman was a more recent hire and had significantly less stature in the office.” She apparently did not take action because she liked him personally. The hypocrisy is rank. Gillibrand is pushing legislation, the Military Justice Improvement Act, that would make independent prosecutors, rather than military commanders, responsible for handling allegations of sexual misconduct in the military, because of “the bias and inherent conflicts of interest posed by the military chain of command’s sole decision-making power.” Yet when faced with such allegations in her own office, she had no concern about bias and inherent conflicts of interest.
Gillibrand is a political opportunist who has seized on the #MeToo movement to advance her political career.

Abbas Malik was finally fired from his job after reporters began asking questions, but unfortunately, Gillibrand will remain in the Senate, because New York is a state completely controlled by Democrats. That such a hypocrite as Gillibrand think herself qualified to be president — Jess Fassler had been “tapped to serve as her presidential campaign manager” — tells you a lot about what’s wrong with the Democrats.



 

Category: Democrats, Scandal, Senate, Sex Trouble

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