ANALYSIS
October 28, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — If Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is elected president of the United States on November 3, given his age, general frailty, and evident cognitive deterioration, he may run the country for not even a full single term.
And in that case, vice president Kamala Harris will take over.
Indeed, President Donald Trump was not alone in suggesting that the real reason House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) introduced a 25th Amendment commission on removing a “mentally unfit” president was to ensure a smooth transfer of power from Biden to Harris, should the Democrats win.
Harris, 56, is primarily defined as the first black person (she is, in fact, biracial: her mother was from India and a member of the Brahmin, or top Hindu caste, and her father is from Jamaica) and third woman to run for vice president for a major party.
But a quick survey of Harris’s 27-year-long political career in California and steady rise in the Democratic Party reveal a ruthlessly ambitious political opportunist whose principles appear to shift according to her political debts, with the exception of abortion, where she is completely in lockstep with Planned Parenthood.
Here are 12 highlights from that career that demonstrate there is good reason to fear a Harris administration:
1. Her pro-abortion record. Harris voted twice against the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would require abortion facilities to transfer babies born alive to a hospital. She opposed the confirmations of Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. She also opposes the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits direct federal funding of elective abortions, and she wants to “codify” Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 pro-abortion Supreme Court ruling that essentially imposed abortion on all states.
2. Harris used her office on behalf of Planned Parenthood. Most egregiously, during her 2016 run for Senate, Harris’s office conducted a raid on the apartment of David Daleiden, the lead investigator for the Center for Medical Progress, which exposed Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in aborted baby body parts.
In 2017, the state of California charged Daleiden and undercover investigator Sandra Merritt with multiple felonies. Daleiden announced this May he is suing Planned Parenthood, Harris, and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra for conspiracy to violate his First and Fourteenth Amendment civil rights. In October, CMP released a video describing how Harris allegedly colluded with Planned Parenthood to weaponize California’s video recording law against the pro-life citizen journalists.
Harris’s Senate campaign website included her endorsements of and by Planned Parenthood, and as a senator, she has earned 100 percent ratings from Planned Parenthood and NARAL and their endorsements as vice presidential candidate.
3. Her pro-LGBTQ, anti-marriage, anti-democracy stance as state attorney general. In late 2010, Harris ran for California attorney general and won. Fellow San Franciscans Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer endorsed her. Harris pledged not to defend California’s new constitutional amendment, Proposition 8, passed by voters in 2008, that stated that marriage can only exist between a man and a woman. In 2013, she filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, arguing that California’s marriage amendment was unconstitutional.
4. Her affair with Willie Brown. In order to understand Harris’ rise to power and anything about California politics, one has to know about Brown, one of California’s most influential politicians. Brown was a “kingmaker” who sat in the state assembly for 30 years, 15 as speaker, and distributed lucrative patronage appointments to political allies and his string of mistresses. His signature piece of legislation was the 1975 law that decriminalized sodomy and bestiality in California.
Brown accrued such power that the assembly eventually passed a law enacting term limits and a broader distribution of control, which forced him out in 1994, the same year Harris became his “steady.” She was 29 and he was 60 and still married, although estranged from his wife, the mother of their three children.
When Harris first started dating Brown, she took a leave of absence from her job as deputy district attorney for Alameda County, and Brown appointed her to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, a position that paid $72,000 annually. She resigned a few months later and went back to her job as a prosecutor.
Later in 1994, in his “rush to hand out patronage jobs while he retains his powerful post,” Brown named Harris, described by many as his “girlfriend,” to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a position with an annual salary of $97,088 (about equal to that of a full-time state senator) with the obligation to attend two meetings a month, the LA Times reported at the time. Harris kept her position until 1998 and missed about 20 percent of the meetings, according to the Washington Examiner.
Brown took Harris to all the high-society events in San Francisco and gave her a new BMW. They broke up at her initiative after he was elected mayor of San Francisco in 1995, and Brown’s wife, Blanche, held the Bible for his swearing in.
In 1998, Terence Hallinan, San Francisco’s district attorney who was infamous for physical violence in his youth, recruited Harris to serve as an assistant district attorney. In 2000, Harris warred with a co-worker and quit, taking a job at the San Francisco city attorney’s office with Louise Renne, who had been appointed by then-mayor Dianne Feinstein.
In 2004 she ran for district attorney for San Francisco, and her campaign relied heavily on the wealthy San Francisco elite she’d met through Brown, who organized his own, separate fundraising for her. Harris said that she didn’t ask for his help and referred to her affair with the notorious womanizer as “an albatross hanging around my neck.”
Brown also stepped in to help Harris in 2016, when she successfully ran for a seat in the United States senate, discouraging a run by former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who would have been a formidable opponent. Harris had two years earlier married lawyer Douglas Emhoff, who has two adult children with his first wife.
When Harris declared her intention to run for Democratic presidential nominee, Brown penned an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle admitting he “may have influenced her career” with his appointments and that he helped her in her first race for San Francisco DA, but that he also helped the “careers of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other politicians.”
However, Harris was the “only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I ‘so much as jaywalked, while she was D.A.,” he wrote. “That’s politics for ya.”
5. Harris refused new DNA testing for man on death row who claims innocence. During the July Democratic nominee debates, Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard famously accused Harris of blocking “evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so.”
A Breitbart News fact check rated Gabbard’s statement as “mostly true.” As state AG, Harris refused “to allow newly available DNA testing” for Kevin Cooper, a black man who has been on death row in San Quentin since his 1985 conviction of the brutal murder of two adults and two children in a home invasion. There is strong evidence suggesting that law enforcement and a criminalist planted, tampered with or tossed away critical evidence in an attempt to frame Cooper during an investigation and prosecution that involved “abject racism,” according to a 2018 New York Times analysis.
Gov. Jerry Brown in late 2018 and Gov. Newsom in early January 2019 approved DNA testing, and Cooper, who has always maintained his innocence, has since been waiting for the results, the Los Angeles Times reported in June.
6. Harris never brought one priestly sexual abuse case to prosecution. In a “shocking display of inaction,” Harris “never prosecuted a single case forward against an abusive priest” in her time as district attorney for San Francisco from 2004 to 2011, and as California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017, according to Peter Schweizer’s January 2020 exposé Profiles in Corruption. Moreover, “her office would strangely hide vital records on abuses that had occurred despite the protests of victim groups,” he noted.
Schweizer suggests that the reason for Harris’s failure to prosecute priestly abuse cases was her large political debt to powerful Bay Catholics, who donated to her 2004 campaign for San Francisco district attorney, as her opponent Hallinan had been “aggressively … pursuing abuse cases against the Church,” according to the American Spectator. Hallinan’s “gathering of incriminating documents drove Catholics afraid of his investigation into Kamala Harris’s arms.”
Her campaign received “high-dollar donations … from those connected to the Catholic Church institutional hierarchy” and $50,950 from “Catholic board members of various organizations in the Bay Area and their family members.”
7. Harris claimed she didn’t know of sexual harassment suit against longtime staffer. An alleged champion of the #MeToo cause, Harris claimed she had no knowledge of the situation when her longtime staffer Larry Wallace resigned in December 2018 over revelations that his executive assistant had sued him two years earlier for sexual harassment.
Wallace was director of the Division of Law Enforcement when Harris was state attorney general, and as senator, she hired him in March 2017, two months before the California Department of Justice reached a $400,000 settlement with the plaintiff, who, “as part of the deal, had to resign her position, agree never to seek employment at the California Department of Justice, and — most importantly — sign a nondisclosure agreement,” the Washington Examiner reported at the time. The story broke just months after Harris made “grandstanding broadsides against the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh,” according to the Examiner.
Harris appears to temper her enthusiasm for the #MeToo cause to suit her circumstances. In April 2019, before Biden entered the Democratic nomination race, she was asked about allegations by women that the former vice president had inappropriately touched them. “I believe them, and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it,” Harris said.
When Tara Reade, a former Biden aide, alleged that Biden sexually assaulted her when he was a U.S. senator — an allegation Biden emphatically denies — Harris, then a potential vice presidential candidate, said Reade “has a right to tell her story … And I believe that and I believe Joe Biden believes that, too,” the U.K. Independent reported. However, there is no evidence that since being named Biden’s running mate, Harris has encouraged Reade to do so.
8. Harris jailed 1,560 people for pot-related offenses but now supports decriminalization. After Harris admitted during a February 2019 radio interview that she smoked pot and was in favor of legalizing marijuana because it “it gives a lot of people joy,” the Washington Free Beacon reported that when she was California’s attorney general, “at least 1,560 people were sent to state prisons for marijuana-related offenses between 2011 and 2016,” according to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reports. Harris said during her debate with Vice President Mike Pence that a Biden administration would decriminalize marijuana at a federal level in the United States.
9. Harris’s 2010 San Francisco “police crime lab scandal.” In Harris’s last year as San Francisco district attorney, a state judge ruled that she and her staff failed to inform defense lawyers, as required by law, that evidence from a police-run city lab “might have been tainted,” the Washington Post reported January 2019, adding that Harris said she took full responsibility and “made ‘no excuses’ for the failure.”
As a result, San Francisco prosecutors dropped “an estimated 1,000 drug cases,” which came “on top of about 550 cases that were already dismissed or not charged because the lab was unable to test those cases,” Associated Press reported in April 2010. (This was the basis of Biden’s claim in the July Democratic primary debates that under Harris’s watch, a federal judge freed 1,000 inmates from prison.)
10. Harris claimed she didn’t know her office tried to keep prisoners in jail to fight fires. As state AG, Harris said she didn’t know that her staff lawyers “argued against releasing nonviolent prisoners from overcrowded prisons in 2014,” according to the Washington Examiner.
“Her team argued in court that prisoners needed to remain in prison because California couldn’t spare them. They needed the incarcerated to stay incarcerated lest the state run out of forced labor to fight forest fires.” The judge ruled against the request, but Harris’s ignorance of what her department’s action added to the picture that she was using her job and “the statewide recognition that comes with it” as a stepping stone to “hop from California to Washington,” the Examiner noted.
11. Harris allegedly covered up reportedly lucrative wiretapping operation. In 2014, Harris allegedly “covered up a wide-ranging surveillance scheme in which a single Riverside County judge ordered hundreds of wiretaps” that resulted in “44,000 people and over 2 million conversations” being tapped, Big League Politics reported in January 2019. “A federal judge said legal standards ‘could not have been met’ with regard to the Riverside County wiretaps,” which “coincided with a period of massive revenue gains for the state of California from civil asset forfeitures overseen by Kamala Harris’ office.
In 2014, Riverside County collected more than $3 million in civil asset forfeitures,” it reported. “In 2015, Kamala Harris’ attorney general’s office made the unprecedented decision to release California’s Electronic Interceptions Report as a ‘locked’ PDF not available to members of the public, according to documents obtained by Big League Politics,” it added.
12. Harris paid thousands into slate mail scheme of Brown protégé, Democratic California representative Maxine Waters. Harris paid $63,000 over two campaign cycles into the Waters campaign’s technically legal but highly controversial scheme in which candidates pay for placement on a “slate mailer” announcing Waters’s endorsement, the Washington Free Beacon reported in 2017.
Harris paid $33,000 to Waters’ campaign in 2010 when she was running for state AG, and $30,000 in May 2016 when she was running for senate, for her name to appear on Waters’s endorsement mailers. The “slate mailer operation, which legally allows Waters to bypass campaign contribution limits from other political committees, pulled in more than $300,000 for Waters’ campaign during the 2016 election cycle.”
A July 2018 complaint the government watchdog National Legal and Policy Center filed with the Federal Election Commission alleges that the Democratic State Central Committee of California (DSCCC) violated federal election law in 2016 when it paid the Waters campaign a further $35,000 to include Harris’s name on a Waters slate mailer, because “it is not legal for such payment to be made by a third party like the DSCCC.”
California-based writer Mary Rose contributed to this report.
Oct. 28, 2020 correction: This report originally stated that “Brown also stepped in to help Harris in 2016, when she successfully ran for a seat in the California senate” whereas it was the United States senate. This has now been corrected.