The Patriot Post® · Harris's Real Record as Prosecutor
Have you heard? The 2024 presidential election is a contest between “the prosecutor” and “the felon.” That deft bit of marketing will undoubtedly help Democrats in some ways, but there are plenty of reasons why it shouldn’t. Primarily, that would be the not-so-small matter of Kamala Harris’s actual record as a prosecutor.
Back in 2019, when Harris was struggling to get out of low single-digit support during her abortive run for the Democrat presidential nomination, former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard fired the final torpedo at her campaign, specifically targeting her record as district attorney and California attorney general:
She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. And she fought to keep a bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.
Harris responded by claiming her work in California became a “national model,” but the damage was done and her campaign was effectively over.
So why would her campaign now play up her supposed record as a tough prosecutor at a time when Democrat district attorneys, often funded by socialist billionaire George Soros, are reducing charges and letting criminals go free at alarming and dangerous rates?
The exception to that rule is the answer to my rhetorical question: Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. Despite his Soros backing and record of being soft on crime in New York, he was unbelievably tough on one man, weaponizing the justice system against Donald Trump by charging him with 34 fabricated felonies precisely so as to set up the “convicted felon” narrative for Democrat electoral gain.
Democrats want voters to believe that Harris will be every bit as tough on wrongdoers like the Bad Orange Man.
During her sole interview as the Democrat standard-bearer, she crowed about being the “only person in this race who prosecuted transnational criminal organizations who traffic in guns, drugs, and human beings.”
Hmm, who trafficked human beings? According to San Francisco-based veteran columnist Debra Saunders in 2010, it was arguably Harris:
Harris was in charge when her office aided and abetted in a dangerous misinterpretation of the city’s 1989 sanctuary city law. City officials refused to notify federal immigration officials when police arrested juvenile offenders — or offenders who claimed to be juveniles — on felony charges.
Under her watch (for lack of a better word), the city flew drug offenders to Honduras. When federal authorities stopped this practice in 2008, the city sent eight Hondurans who had been convicted to group homes, from which they escaped.
To Gabbard’s point about cash bail hurting poor people, National Review’s Noah Rothman writes of Harris’s push for cash bail by using sob stories about criminals who faced tough consequences for their crimes. “Cash-bail reforms were already gaining steam,” Rothman said, “and the experiment has had decidedly mixed results. In the years since, sympathetic stories like those Harris promulgated have been buried under an avalanche of preventable disasters. In city after city, violent recidivist offenders have been set free to attack law-abiding citizens and law enforcement alike as a result of cashless-bail reforms.”
The tough prosecutor once wanted “more police officers on the streets” and called herself the “top cop.” She wrote a book titled Smart on Crime. But that was so 2009.
After Michael Brown in 2014 and especially after George Floyd in 2020, Democrats cast police as racist jackboots. A faithful progressive, Harris has, on numerous occasions, implied or alleged racism on the part of the police. No one, she insisted in 2018, should fear police action “because of his race.” By 2020, she was advocating bail money for BLM rioters in Tim Walz’s Minnesota, calling the idea of more police “just wrong” and declaring, “We can’t just speak the truth about police brutality in our nation — we must act to change our systems of justice and demand accountability.”
As a prosecutor, she both opposed and supported capital punishment, and she always struggled to bridge the divide between leftist criminal justice policies and being the “tough on crime” prosecutor she wants everyone to think she was.
According to the left-wing Marshall Project, “Harris proposed creating a federal sentencing review unit that would consider early release for people who have served at least 10 years of sentences of 20 years or more.” She has also called for “a national standard for police use of force” and “a new federal board with the power to review police shootings.” What could go wrong?
As The Heritage Foundation’s Zack Smith puts it, supported by examples, “The truth is that Harris’ record shows that she is soft on crime and committed to coddling criminals at the expense of victims and our communities.”
Just be careful about saying so. The “fact-checkers” are on Harris’s side.