Recovering Nancy Mace staffers help launch primary campaign against her: former chief Dan Hanlon files paperwork to run with help of several former colleagues in the South Carolina Republican’s office

Nancy Mace’s former chief of staff, Dan Hanlon, officially filed paperwork Friday to run against her in her South Carolina primary following a mass exodus from her office.

Several former Mace employees are advising Hanlon on the campaign, DailyMail.com has learned.

Hanlon owns property in South Carolina County, although he is not from the region. He served as Mace’s chief of staff until he was essentially “demoted” to senior adviser and later ousted by Mace following her vote to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker.

When Mace finally fired him, a slew of senior staffers followed him out the door.

Hanlon joined Mace’s office in 2021 after working in the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget.

The GOP congresswoman, an almost ever-present face on cable news networks, now has a bare-bones four-person staff in Washington, D.C., multiple sources confirmed to DailyMail.com.

The rift between Mace and Hanlon widened after former chairman Kevin McCarthy called out Hanlon at his farewell press conference.

Several former Mace employees are advising Hanlon on the campaign, DailyMail.com has learned

McCarthy called Mace’s superior when he realized she would vote to impeach him, claiming he had not kept his word to her.

“So I call her chief of staff… I said, ‘Can you please tell me I don’t understand? Where have I not kept my word?’ McCarthy explained. “The Chief of Staff said, ‘You kept your word 100%. ”

“I’m biting my lip,” McCarthy added. ‘I make people say things that aren’t true. But it’s not right. It is not good. Her chief of staff told us all that we have kept all our words. And he said he told her that too.”

The night McCarthy made the comment, Mace and her supervisor went together to a “see and be seen” bar on Capitol Hill, Bullfeathers, to demonstrate that they were not letting the ousted speaker come between them. But a source familiar with the relationship told DailyMail.com that Mace began to “frozen” that night and became “distrustful” of him.

Former staffers describe the notoriously volatile Mace as a “narcissist” and a finger-in-the-wind politician who will say or do whatever is necessary to attract media attention.

“It all started with media attention,” the source said. ‘We were free to determine the legislative agenda. She was pretty hands-off during the process, which is pretty cool for a staffer. She was more focused on reaching Fox News.”

Mace said she voted out McCarthy because he didn’t keep the promises he made to her — mainly a vote on her bill to eliminate a backlog of rape kits.

But a former aide said Mace voted McCarthy out of office just a week after the bill came out of the Judiciary Committee. The bill has now languished under Speaker Mike Johnson, with no plans to bring it to a vote.

“She deliberately killed that good piece of legislation that could have disappeared from the House.”

The staffer told DailyMail.com after Mace voted to oust McCarthy, Mace’s enemies within her own party piled up.

“We all realized then together, everyone on the staff, that after the speaker’s vote, we had to start looking for new jobs, knowing that she had made a lot of enemies on the Hill and that we weren’t really going to be able to get our legislation passed. finished.’

‘We couldn’t do everything, sometimes it had to be a member-to-member conversation.’

It came after several of Mace’s employees accused her of fostering a toxic work environment and three sources told DailyMail.com that she often made explicit comments about her sex life in the office.

The congresswoman recently endorsed Donald Trump for president even after he backed a primary challenger against her in 2022. Reports emerged that during the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, she suggested leaving the office to be punched in the face by rioters so she could become “the face of anti-Trump Republicans.”