Two Truths And A Lie: Separating Fact from Fiction on Kamala Harris’ Prosecutorial Record

Vice President Kamala Harris is using her time as a prosecutor as a centerpiece of her campaign for president. She was the elected District Attorney in San Francisco from 2004 to 2010, followed by a further six years as California State Attorney General from 2011 to 2017, before leaving the office for her Senate seat. But Harris’ characterization of her career has bounced all over the place depending on her audience.

When she was running for the Democratic nomination in the 2019 presidential primary, she said of her time in law enforcement, “I have also worked my whole career to reform the criminal justice system, understanding, to your point, that it is deeply flawed.” Five years later, in her recent and only interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris pointed to her prosecutorial experience as a qualification for the job, saying “I’m the only person in this race who actually served a border state as attorney general to enforce our laws.” She’s repeatedly pointed to her law enforcement bona fides on the campaign trail against Republican nominee Donald Trump.

But what was Harris’ actual record as a prosecutor, and what can it tell us about how she might govern if elected to the highest office in the country? Can you tell which two of the following statements about her record are true, and which one is false?

A.  Before running for President in 2024, Harris characterized herself as a “progressive prosecutor.”

B. Harris repeatedly advocated for implicit bias training and other DEI policies in the law enforcement offices in which she worked, even in districts where high violent crime rates should have been first priority.

C. As an advocate for a generally forgiving approach to prosecution, Harris extended second chances to people regardless of their political views. 

Let’s take these statements one at a time:

A. Truth!  Before running for President in 2024, Harris characterized herself as a “progressive prosecutor.”

Harris had reason to characterize her record as “progressive.” In her time as San Francisco DA and then California AG, she refused to enforce federal immigration laws by encouraging law enforcement to ignore ICE detainers, declined to pursue the then-expected death penalty even for cop killers, and used the law to aggressively pursue those with whom she disagreed politically.

She was even an early advocate for “sex changes” in California’s prisons, later bragging to media outlets about getting the California Department of Corrections to reverse their decision and pay for “transgender surgeries” for inmates: “When I learned about what they were doing, behind the scenes I got them to change the policy.”

B. Truth! Harris repeatedly advocated for implicit bias training and other DEI policies in the law enforcement offices in which she worked, even in districts where high violent crime rates should have been first priority.

One of Kamala’s first prominent prosecutorial jobs was developing policy recommendations for the Cook County State Attorney’s office. Among the recommendations in the report put forward by the team she co-chaired for the crime-wracked district of Chicago? The report made 23 recommendations, including concerns about racial injustice, recommendations to prosecute the police for alleged misconduct, and increasing diversity in the office and trainings for attorneys about their own “implicit bias,” a term for ferreting out supposedly unconscious racial bias.

Absent from the report’s 12 pages? Any mention at all of the city’s sky-high crime rate and ongoing gang violence, let alone a plan for solving those issues.

Harris continued to push for DEI policies when she became Attorney General in California, where she implemented the first certified implicit bias training course in the country and bragged about partnering with radical academics to train cops out of their alleged racism.

C. Lie! As an advocate for a generally forgiving approach to prosecution, Harris extended second chances to people regardless of their political views.      

While Harris was soft on border violations and other crimes, she was a tough prosecutor in one respect: going after any potential lawbreaking by her political opponents.

During her tenure as California AG, Harris required non-profit organizations to disclose the names of any donors who gave more than $5,000, chilling speech and potentially opening the door to political intimidation. Harris’ donor disclosure policy (not backed by any state statute) was later struck down by the Supreme Court in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, in which the court ruled that it violated the First Amendment rights of donors and nonprofits. Chief Justice Roberts described Harris’ speech-threatening policy in the majority opinion as “a dragnet for sensitive donor information from tens of thousands of charities each year.”

Donor intimidation isn’t the only way Harris aggressively used her powers as AG to go after those who disagreed with her politics. When journalist David Daleiden published videos of Planned Parenthood executives discussing the sale of fetal body parts, Harris spared no expense in having his home raided for evidence and attempting to throw him in jail, one of only a small handful of times California has ever attempted to prosecute solely for a violation of the state’s law against one-sided recording. Planned Parenthood was a major donor to Harris’ campaign, and court documents show the organization had in-person meetings with her office before the case was filed.

Bottom line:  During her time as a prosecutor, she embodied the Left’s ideal of a “progressive prosecutor,” aggressively pursuing crimes that violated her ideology and declining to seek convictions on those that she “agreed” with on ideological grounds, such as illegal immigration. While Harris’ characterizations of her law enforcement record have changed based on her audience at the time, that record speaks for itself.