Reuters reported last week that, in response to “Democratic anxieties rise over [President Trump] making strong gains[,]” Vice President Kamala Harris “is shifting her campaign strategy to win over more men [‘of all races’] and Republicans.” Therefore, “Harris is going back to her prosecutorial posture of July … to demonstrate strength to [counter] Trump’s strongman image.”
In fact, in July, Roll Call forecasted that Harris’s presidential campaign “will echo her time in the Senate, where she carved out an opposition to [Trump] with a prosecutorial bent[,]” by “leverag[ing] her experience as a prosecutor and California attorney general for her positions on criminal justice matters and an assertive courtroom style to create some of her most high-profile moments in the Senate, scrapping with Trump administration officials and nominees to make bigger points.”
More recently, Harris sought to expand her “strongman” bona fides in the controversial 60 Minutes interview with Bill Whitaker by asserting, in response to why she owns a Glock, “My background is in law enforcement … ”
One would assume her “law enforcement background” claim harkened to the opening narration for Law and Order: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.“
Harris, who graduated from law school in 1989, although she did not pass the California bar exam until 1990, was not inspired by Law and Order, which began its 20-year run that year. (In February 2022, it was renewed for a twenty-first year, which continues to date.) Instead, according to Daily Mail reporter Charlie Spiering in Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris in the White House, it was the Hindu culture of goddesses, which was “strong in [her mother’s] household,” that “inspired her to become a prosecutor.”
Indeed, Harris was “steeped in the Hindu tradition” and a “frequent visitor” to the Shiva Vishnu temple in Livermore, California, where, reported her mother, “She perform[ed] all rituals and [said] all prayer … ” Specifically, it was Parvati, the benevolent goddess wife of the god Shiva, who, when angry transformed into the terrifying and vengeful goddess Kali, whose story she often heard as a child, that motivated Harris’ career choice.
“Parvati and Kali can coexist in one woman” (a duality, it would seem) she related to an audience in 2004 to portray herself (in Spiering’s words) as “beautiful but deadly.” By 2024, when Harris used “duality” in every interview, she had long since abandoned talk of Parvati/Kali, her Indian heritage, or tales of Hindu goddesses.
What then, as Roll Call put it in July, of “her experience as a prosecutor and California attorney general … and an assertive courtroom style.” Despite an exhaustive search, including numerous public records requests to her former employers and pleas to the vice president herself and to her campaign, former Department of Justice Assistant Attorney Jeff Clark has not uncovered, identified, or received any information, let alone a single transcript, to demonstrate Harris’s purported strong background as a district attorney, city attorney, or attorney general.
In fact, akin to her claim that she “did fries” at McDonald’s, there is zero evidence Harris ever “first-chaired” a civil or criminal bench or jury trial, presented or cross-examined a witness, or gave an oral argument. At best, Harris has only done nine civil or criminal cases over a 10-year span. In one, she voir dired prospective members of a jury in a criminal trial. Moreover, given the extent of Westlaw’s records, it is clear that, in her time as California Attorney General, Harris never argued for “the people” in a federal district court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, or the Supreme Court.
Not even when, for example, as I discussed last month, Harris challenged the landmark freedom of association ruling in NAACP v. Alabama at the 9th Circuit in a case clearly destined for Supreme Court review did she argue the case. Not many lead attorneys forgo such an opportunity. Certainly, I did not when one of the civil rights cases of the nonprofit, public-interest law firm I led was reviewed thrice at the high court or in the several instances when a grant of certiorari seemed possible, as when I represented Bobby Unser.
Therefore, Roll Call’s characterization of Harris’s “experience as a prosecutor and California attorney general” must be limited to her work in the office, including supervision of attorneys who actually presented and refuted evidence through witnesses and otherwise, briefed and argued cases, and took matters on appeal. Furthermore, Roll Call’s reference to her “assertive courtroom style” must be reframed because Harris was never in the courtroom. Her “assertive … style” only manifested itself at a microphone to manipulate her issue du jour.
An assertive Harris, as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general candidate, bragged of assigning “my homicide prosecutors, my gang prosecutors,” whom she instructed “look really mean,” when arraigning parents of truant students under a law she pushed as San Francisco district attorney. Harris became even more assertive on the matter as attorney general. In fact, in her inaugural address, she threatened parents with the “full force and consequences” of that law. Harris was mum, however, when one of the hapless victims of her dragnet was Cheree Peoples, a black mother of a daughter afflicted with sickle cell anemia whose truancy occurred while she was hospitalized.
In fact, when Peoples expressed shock to police as they arrived to arrest her, accompanied by the news media, she was told, “Go talk to Kamala Harris.” Peoples, forced to fight against California’s “top cop” and her hundreds of investigators, law enforcement officers, and lawyers, lost her job, her home, and nearly her daughter. Finally, in August 2015, charges against her were dismissed. However, by then, Harris was seven months into her campaign for election to the Senate.
In 2020, “mostly peaceful” protests and riots broke out across the country, resulting in “looting, arson, and vandalism,” $2 billion in property damage, and at least six deaths following the death of George Floyd on May 25. One protest led by, according to then-Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, “the likes of Antifa,” occurred from May 29 to June 3 across from the White House in Lafayette Park, which falls under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Park Police. Forty-nine Park Police were injured.
At the time, I was running the Bureau of Land Management for former President Donald Trump from its new headquarters in Colorado. I feared for the safety of BLM’s nearly 300 law enforcement rangers and special agents because they have responsibilities, over 245 million acres of federal land, similar to the Park Police. On June 5, I gathered them in a virtual meeting, told them of my concerns, urged that they follow their superior training, including de-escalating conflict, and assured them that, at the end of the day, “I have your back.” I was told by longtime BLM employees, including Rangers, that my assurances were unprecedented. I thought them essential.
Imagine my horror less than two weeks later, when on June 17, Harris, speaking as “someone who made a very conscious decision to become a prosecutor,” told Stephen Colbert, “Everyone beware because [the protestors are] not going to stop … And they should not.”
If Harris was not exactly putting her money where her mouth was, she was urging others, including her millions of followers on X, to do so by donating to the Minnesota Freedom Fund to bail out “those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.” Incredibly, she did so the day after rioters set historic St. John’s Episcopal Church ablaze blocks from her office. Harris helped raise $35 million for the outfit, up from $100,000 in 2018, to bail out and defend hardened, violent, and murderous criminals.
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Despite the assertions of Harris and her campaign or the propaganda from Roll Call, the Hill, and the corporate media, Harris has not earned the right to say she was in “law enforcement, a “top cop,” or “a 20-year prosecutor” who “tried just about every crime you can imagine,” let alone possessed of an “assertive courtroom style” or “a prosecutorial bent.” Similar to so much else about Harris, as another famous Oakland, California, resident, Gertrude Stein, put it, “There’s no there there.”
One other thing, as a fan of Law and Order, I say: She’s not John James McCoy.
William Perry Pendley, a Wyoming attorney and Colorado-based public-interest lawyer for three decades with victories at the Supreme Court, served in the Reagan administration and led Trump’s Bureau of Land Management.