[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in place of President Biden, who abandoned his reelection campaign on July 21st, is trying to run against former President Donald Trump as the ‘prosecutor versus the convicted felon.’ Referring to her prior jobs as San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general, Ms. Harris said at a campaign rally in Wisconsin on July 23rd that “In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Kamala Harris thinks that touting her experience as a prosecutor in the bluest of states California is a key to beating Donald Trump, whom she is attacking as a convicted felon and lawbreaker. But her too clever by half strategy is likely to boomerang on her when the veil obscuring her soft-on-violent crime, pro-illegal immigrant record as a prosecutor in ultra-liberal California is removed.
Indeed, Kamala Harris’s record set an example for Manhattan’s left-wing, progressive district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and other George Soros-backed prosecutors. And Harris is using Bragg’s success in getting Mr. Trump convicted on concocted charges after a trial presided over by a biased judge as a linchpin of her presidential campaign. But this case was a farce from the get-go.
Bragg upgraded a time-barred misdemeanor of falsifying internal business records to a felony involving alleged interference with a federal election. Donald Trump’s conviction will likely be overturned on appeal, even if it has to go all the way up to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Bragg has let violent criminals loose on the streets of New York, either declining to charge them at all or downgrading bail-eligible felony charges to non-bail-eligible misdemeanors.
What’s more, Bragg seems to have a special fondness for illegal immigrants. The Manhattan district attorney’s office announced earlier this year, for example, that five of the seven illegal immigrants from Venezuela who were arrested and arraigned after an attack on two New York City police officers were released on their own recognizance.
The Biden-Harris administration’s border czar, Kamala Harris, likewise showed a special fondness for illegal immigrants while serving as California’s attorney general, which she has carried forward to this day.
Back in 2015, California’s then-chief prosecutor told KCBS-TV in Los Angeles that “An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal. I know what a criminal looks like who’s committing a crime. An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.” Harris should have brushed up on immigration law before making such a ludicrous statement. An immigrant illegally crossing the U.S. border has committed a federal misdemeanor, which would be punishable with jail time if our immigration laws were properly enforced.
Instead of making sure that illegal immigrants caught committing another crime in this country were turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for processing and possible removal, then-Attorney General Harris ran interference for the illegal immigrants. For example, she approved the decision of a San Francisco sheriff not to hand over to ICE an illegal immigrant, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, who had previously been deported five times. Harris, who has denounced ICE for years, defended San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy.
After his release, this illegal immigrant found a gun that he claimed he accidentally fired in a shooting in San Francisco that ended up killing 32-year-old Kate Steinle. Although Lopez-Sanchez was eventually acquitted of murder, Ms. Steinle would not have lost her life in 2015 if this illegal immigrant had not been released from detention in the first place.
In October 2015, then- Attorney General Harris doubled down on sanctuary protection for illegal immigrants by writing a letter to U.S. senators opposing a bill entitled the Stop Sanctuary Policies and Protect Americans Act.
Then-Attorney General Harris also gave more priority to going after what she considered to be Islamophobia and hate crimes than worrying about the devastation suffered by the victims of Islamist terrorist attacks, including in her own state.
For example, on December 2, 2015 Islamist terrorists killed fourteen unarmed innocent people and wounded twenty-two others at an office party in San Bernardino. Two weeks later, then-Attorney General Harris convened interfaith, community leaders and law enforcement officials to address “heated rhetoric” and hate crimes against Muslims.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations was represented at the gathering. Hussam Ayloush, Executive Director of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations)-LA, said afterwards that “Attorney General Harris has exemplified leadership by initiating this meeting with Muslim community and civil rights leaders to address the spike in hate crimes against American Muslims and other minorities.” He added that “Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric by certain public figures has made Muslim communities an easy target for hate crimes. Muslim and civil rights leaders present at last night’s meeting welcomed the Attorney General’s promise to pursue such crimes with the full force of the law.”
Ayloush is the same man who in 2004 compared the tactics used by the Department of Homeland Security in combating terrorism in the U.S. to those used by the former Soviet Union’s KGB. And he is the same man who, two months after the horrific massacres, rapes, and kidnappings by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists on October 7, 2023, compared Israel to Nazi Germany. Ayloush said that “for 75 years, every single day for the Palestinian people had been October 7” and that Israel “does not have the right to defend itself, as an occupier to defend itself from the occupied.”
CAIR’s links with Islamist jihadist groups have been well-publicized for a long time. Even Chuck Schumer back in 2003 noted that CAIR co-founders Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad have “intimate links with Hamas” and later remarked that “we know [CAIR] has ties to terrorism.” In 2007, the Justice Department named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in an alleged criminal conspiracy to support both Hamas and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.
Yet California’s then- Attorney General Kamala Harris had the audacity in 2015 to invite the hate group CAIR to participate in what was billed as a gathering to address “hateful rhetoric.”
As California’s chief prosecutor, Kamala Harris pursued another major priority of hers – going after fossil fuel companies with a vengeance, including Exxon for supposedly misleading the public about the risks posed by climate change. As Politico reported, Attorney General Harris even “sued the Obama-Biden administration over an environmental assessment clearing the way for hydraulic fracturing off the coast of California.”
Harris has remained so hostile to the fossil fuel industry that her opposition to fracking places her even more to the left than President Biden.
When it came to going after truants’ parents and black men on marijuana charges, Kamala Harris was a tough prosecutor. But when it came to prosecuting those accused of more serious crimes to the fullest extent of the law, Ms. Harris opted for plea deals rather than going to trial. While she was serving as San Francisco’s district attorney, her office “won a lower percentage of their felony jury trials than their counterparts at district attorneys’ offices covering the 10 largest cities in California,” according to a report in the San Francisco Weekly. “The general decline in felony trial convictions has included more failures in murder cases specifically, according to records released by the D.A.’s office in response to a request from SF Weekly.”
Finally, Kamala Harris does not believe in law and order when the lawlessness is on the Left. She has supported reductions in funding for the police. And while railing against the January 6th rioters as insurrectionists, she made excuses for the rioters, looters, vandals, and those who attacked federal court facilities during the summer of 2020 mayhem, triggered by George Floyd’s death.
Once Kamala’s true dismal record as a prosecutor in ultra-liberal California is exposed to the voters, she will have to find something else to use in her campaign against Donald Trump.