WASHINGTON, DC- And just like that, the savior of the Democrat Party, Kamala Harris, is being touted as a “tough on crime” prosecutor whom her campaign claims “put murderers and abusers behind bars.” This is part of a $50 million ad campaign being run in a number of battleground states, the Washington Free Beacon is reporting.
While that may play with some voters, a deeper examination of Harris’s history shows quite the opposite, especially when she served as San Francisco’s district attorney. During her tenure, Harris granted a number of “lenient plea deals” and recommended probation for a number of career criminals. Among those was a serial domestic abuser who later killed his girlfriend. There was also a career felon who shot and killed a newspaper editor in Oakland, and there are many others, the Free Beacon reported.
Harris has been accused by Republicans of being soft-on-crime, an accusation that is supported by her activities during the George Floyd “summer of love” riots when she pushed for people to donate to the Minneapolis Freedom Fund to bail out criminals who, among other things, burned down a police precinct in Minneapolis.
In the latest example of gaslighting to paint Harris as “tough on crime,” she recently told a campaign rally in Wisconsin that she “took on perpetrators of all kinds” as San Francisco district attorney and later on as California’s attorney general.
“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,” Harris said.
The latter statement was a shot at the lawfare directed at former President Donald Trump, who has been targeted in politically-motivated cases by Democrats in New York, Washington, DC, and Georgia. Trump was convicted by a partisan New York City jury earlier this year for campaign finance violations relative to a non-disclosure agreement with porn actress Stormy Daniels. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg twisted New York law like a pretzel to resurrect a federal regulation over campaign finances which the Federal Election Commission ruled was not a violation.
The facts, however, do not comport with Harris’s rhetoric. For example, in 2005, Harris made a deal with a man named Dwayne Reed, who had been charged with murdering the California secretary of state’s son during a robbery. Despite Reed having six prior felony convictions, Harris agreed to release him in exchange for his testimony against his accomplice in the murder-robbery, news reports at the time said. He was released two days later. Eight months after testifying against his accomplice, Reed murdered another man.
One year earlier, Harris’ office offered a plea deal to Scott McAlpin, a domestic abuser who had been charged with stalking and terrorizing a woman for three years, SFGATE reported at the time. Eight months after the deal, McAlpin killed the woman, Anastasia Mainitchenko and stuffed her body in the trunk of his car. McAlpin had been arrested just days before that murder in San Francisco, and in interest of full disclosure, her office opposed his release.
One of Harris’s former homicide prosecutors, Jim Hammer, slammed Harris in a September 2006 column, accusing her of lacking the “guts and willingness to go after tough cases.” He noted that in the case of McAlpin, Harris’s predecessor, whom she accused of “being soft on crime, had demanded six years in prison for the same defendant over one of his earlier crimes.”
“Ask any experienced gang or homicide detective and they will tell you that prosecuting a few key suspects can have a disproportionate effect on reducing crime,” Hammer wrote. “Prosecuting a suspect in a tough case and taking him to trial, even if you lose, sends the message that sooner or later he or she will get caught…tough decisions by the district attorney can help reduce crime.”
In 2006, Harris’s office gave a man named Devaughndre Broussard probation in the “brutal assault and robbery of a metro train passenger.” Just about one year later, Broussard killed Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, who was investigating a crime syndicate implicating Broussard’s family, the Free Beacon said.
“He should have gone to state prison,” said the father of Broussard’s previous assault victim at the time. “Blame it on Kamala Harris.”
The Free Beacon reached out to Harris and her campaign for comment on the above cases, but the request was not answered.
Harris can claim to be “tough on crime” but actions speak louder than words. While now her campaign claims she supports the police, in 2020, she was a “defund the police” zealot, calling for financial resources to be diverted away from the police and suggesting that policing need to be “reimagined.” She also said in an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on June 17, 2020 that the violent riots against so-called “racial injustice” were “not going to stop” after that year’s general election, Fox News reported at the time.
“They’re not going to stop,” Harris told Colbert. “This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop and everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that on both levels. They’re not going to let up and they should not and we should not.”
Harris has a long history of favoring criminals to the detriment of law enforcement. While she served as district attorney in San Francisco between 2004 to 2011, SFPD officers accused her of being “too low” to charge offenders in murder cases, and slammed her for offering “lenient plea deals” to offenders to avoid going to trial.
The most egregious act she took as district attorney was in 2004, when she rejected imposing capital murder charges on the suspect accused of murdering San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza, a decision that even alienated California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Harris was also slammed for her decision to charge a man, David Taylor, with voluntary manslaughter instead of murder in the case where he stabbed his 65-year-old mother to death while under the influence of drugs. That charge carried only a 12-year prison sentence, which angered San Francisco PD homicide investigator Maureen D’Amico.
“This deal was made without any input from me,” D’Amico said in 2006. “It was just [a] picture perfect investigation when everything was done right, done well. If (Taylor) gets out, goes back to crack cocaine, he is liable to flip out. This time it could be an innocent citizen.”
So Harris can bloviate about being “tough on crime” and claiming that Donald Trump is the same as one of the people she “prosecuted.” The fact of the matter is, Harris’s record is that of a progressive anti-police, pro-criminal zealot and no amount of attempting to rewrite history can change that.
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