When Kamala Harris’s campaign team was haggling with Joe Rogan over the conditions that would be placed on a prospective interview, they relayed that the nominee wanted to avoid answering questions about marijuana legalization, likely because of her record of prosecuting San Franciscans for possession during her time as district attorney.
“I think they had requirements on things that she didn’t want to talk about. She didn’t want to talk about marijuana legalization, which I thought was hilarious,” Rogan said on his Tuesday episode.
His guest, comedian Adrienne Iapalucci, asked why the Harris-Walz campaign would have drawn a red line over discussing the legalization of marijuana.
“Because of her prosecuting record,” Rogan said of Harris, who previously served as California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney before becoming a senator and later vice president. “She put a lot of people in jail for weed.”
Harris’s record on marijuana possession has been met with backlash from the progressive left over the years.
When Harris ran for president during the 2020 election cycle, then-Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard slammed her opponent on the issue during the second primary debate. Gabbard attacked Harris for jailing 1,500 people, especially black men, over weed use.
“Now, Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president. But I’m deeply concerned about this record,” the former Democrat noted. “There are too many examples to cite, but 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.”
In an attempt to court black voters, the Harris campaign rolled out a slate of policy proposals — including marijuana legalization — last month. The vice president’s social-media post in which she wrote, “No one should go to jail for smoking weed,” was ridiculed online due to her record.
However, Harris denied she ever jailed “thousands of black men” for weed use.
“It’s just simply not true,” she told radio host Charlamagne Tha God in October. “What public defenders who were around those days will tell you is I was the most progressive prosecutor in California on marijuana cases and would not send people to jail for simple possession of weed.”
The Harris campaign initially contacted Rogan’s team to set up an interview after it was reported the podcast king was in talks to interview president-elect Donald Trump. Harris ultimately declined, with a spokesperson saying the campaign couldn’t fit the interview into the vice president’s busy schedule.
Rogan previously revealed he was open to still conducting the interview, but he didn’t want to compromise his podcast in doing so. The Harris campaign wanted the interview to be limited to one hour, when his episodes normally last between two to four hours, and requested that he travel to Harris for the interview. Rogan always records the show in his Austin studio.
“They had, I don’t know how many conversations with my folks, but multiple conversations giving different dates, different times, different this, different that, and we knew that she was going to be in Texas, so I said, ‘open invitation,'” Rogan said on Tuesday.
Harris briefly traveled to Houston for a campaign rally on October 25, the same day that Rogan interviewed Trump for nearly three hours. Since its release that night, the Rogan-Trump episode has racked up nearly 50 million views on YouTube.
After it was apparent Harris was not showing up, the Trump campaign jumped on the opportunity to get vice president-elect J. D. Vance on the most popular podcast. Rogan endorsed Trump the night before Election Day.
Following the presidential election, a campaign official suggested Harris was afraid of stoking progressive backlash by appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience. That was reportedly the reason why the negotiations for the interview failed.
“There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash,” Jennifer Palmieri, senior adviser to second gentleman Doug Emhoff, told the Financial Times on Wednesday.