Kamala Harris, taking 'I don't recall' to new heights
MeToo loudmouth and Bay Area Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris of California has gotten herself into yet another scrap, this one claiming she knew nothing about a $400,000 payoff for a sexual harassment case brought on by one of her top staffers. How very ironic, given how she stuck it to spotless Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over sex harassment phony claims during his confirmation hearings and tried to make herself the figurehead for being sterling tough against sex harassment.
The hypocrisy is thick. According to Fox News:
A senior adviser to U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., resigned Wednesday over inquiries about a $400,000 harassment lawsuit against him while working at the California Department of Justice.
Larry Wallace resigned after the Sacramento Bee asked about the 2017 settlement, the paper reported.
"We were unaware of this issue and take accusations of harassment extremely seriously," Harris spokeswoman Lily Adams said. "This evening, Mr. Wallace offered his resignation to the senator, and she accepted it."
Seriously, she didn't know? And this was her director for the Division of Law Enforcement back when she was California's state attorney general, following her over from her D.A. job in San Francisco? Back when she was penning a vacuous ego-driven screed (note her face on the front cover) called Smart on Crime? And wouldn't the director of law enforcement be a kind of important position, given the crime emphasis she was using to sell herself to the public in order to get a leg up on the next rung of the political ladder? Her conspicuous ambition seems to be making her forgetful.
No idea, she says. And all the reported stories of what a pervert this guy was, about him making his female assistant act as a personal servant girl for errands, and worse, crawl under his desk to fix the printer, again and again, so he could get a gander at her butt, ignoring her when she asked to move the thing, and then tossing her to an unimportant division when she complained, Harris knew literally nothing? Despite being the state's top lawwoman with him her deputy?
Give us a break.
The estimable Philip Wegmann of the San Francisco Examiner points out that this is getting to be a pattern with Harris. Like Hillary Clinton in the midst of her scandals, Harris just doesn't recall. Here are two other examples he cites:
When her lawyers argued against releasing nonviolent prisoners from overcrowded prisons in 2014, then-Attorney General Harris said she didn't know. 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. Then the press caught wind and Harris swore she hadn't known what was done in her name.
...and this:
When Kevin Cooper, a black man on death row, begged California for a DNA test to exonerate him of hacking a white family to pieces in the 1980s, the state attorney general's office refused. There was evidence of a coverup. There was evidence of white cops framing a black man. There was evidence that could have been tested with advanced DNA testing.
Again the press investigated. This time it was the New York Times in 2018 with an in-depth spread that raised the prospect that California might execute an innocent man and that then-Attorney General Harris refused to allow the testing.
After publication, Harris was again oblivious, but this time horrified.
Wegmann cites two solid examples. And those examples of not recalling and being "shocked" as the news got out are just one small piece of a broader pattern of dishonesty in Willie Brown's former mistress's portfolio. Here's some other stuff, showing how generally deceitful she is, and how willing she is to defend deceit, from Reason:
When a judge removed the entire Orange County District Attorney's Office from a death penalty trial in 2015 – after it was revealed in a bombshell memo that the sheriff's department had been running an unconstitutional jailhouse informant program – Harris' office appealed the removal.
"The Attorney General believes the findings of the court regarding the discovery violations in this case are serious and demand further investigation," the California A.G.'s office said in a statement. "But, as the court found, 'there is no direct evidence that the District Attorney actively participated in the concealment of this information from the defense and the court.'"
In 2015, the California Attorney General did announce it was conducting an investigation into the affair, but that report has yet to be released. In the meantime, the jailhouse snitch scandal has tainted more than a dozen criminal cases, including several murder trials.
Harris' record as San Francisco D.A. has similar instances. In 2010, a California superior court judge excoriated Harris' office for failing to notify defense lawyers of known misconduct by a drug lab technician that later led the San Francisco police to shut down an entire section of the lab.
The judge wrote that an internal office memo showed that prosecutors "at the highest levels of the district attorney's office knew that Madden was not a dependable witness at trial and that there were serious concerns regarding the crime lab."
The judge wrote that Harris' office had some "duty to implement some type of procedure to secure and produce information relevant to Madden's criminal history." However, the judge's requests that prosecutors explain why nothing happened were met with "a level of indifference."
And here's the granddaddy of her instances of dishonesty (Reason mentions it too farther down in its piece), from the New York Observer:
The People (of California) v. Efrain Velasco-Palacios. In this unpublished opinion from the Fifth Appellate District, the California Court of Appeal reveals that state prosecutors and California Attorney General Kamala Harris continue to be part of the problem. Kern County prosecutor Robert Murray committed "outrageous government misconduct." Ms. Harris and her staff defended the indefensible – California State prosecutor Murray flat out falsified a transcript of a defendant's confession. Kern County prosecutor Robert Murray added two lines of transcript to "evidence" that the defendant confessed to an even more egregious offense than that with which he had been charged – the already hideous offense of molesting a child. With the two sentences that state's attorney Murray perjuriously added, Murray was able to threaten charges that carried a term of life in prison.
You wouldn't think prosecutors would make things up, given the rich material from defendants in front of them, but Harris's do. And Harris, being a loyal sort of person to people just as dishonest as herself, actually defended this liar.
Not surprisingly, she's got quite a few lies of her own, starting with her one about her vast army of fake Twitter followers culled. Harris knows how to do fake.
Now she wants us to think she had no idea about that $400,000 pervert at her side.
It's not likely that Democrats will give her the hook, but one can hope voters will.
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