A noted conservative legal group led by former Trump administration officials has launched a series of investigations into Vice President Kamala Harris after she was essentially anointed the 2024 Democratic Party nominee after President Joe Biden quit his reelection bid earlier this week.
Kamala Harris’ history of controversial legal actions while she served as the attorney general of California is coming back into the spotlight as her campaign for the presidency gains momentum. From arresting parents whose kids frequently skipped school to backing a bail fund that released dangerous Black Lives Matter protesters from prison in 2020, Harris’ methods in dealing with criminal matters are being closely examined again, Fox News reported on Thursday.
America First Legal (AFL), a nonprofit conservative legal watchdog group, launched seven investigations into Harris’ prosecutorial background on Thursday afternoon. The group alleges that Harris “has proven to be the most radically progressive Vice President in American history.”
“A lot of her tough-on-crime reputation goes to her prosecution when she was San Francisco DA, individuals who use marijuana and other sorts of things,” Dan Epstein, president of AFL, told Fox News Digital. “Our investigation, however, makes it very clear that Kamala Harris does not believe much in terms of statutes passed by legislatures, including the Federal United States, Congress, as well as the state of California.”
Fox added:
Through public records requests to the California Attorney General’s Office, AFL is investigating Harris for failure to comply with federal donor privacy laws; failure to enforce federal immigration laws; failure to pursue equal justice; failure to disclose conflicts of interest; failure to address evidence of misconduct; the nature of probes by the California Fair Practices Commission; and potential cover-up of misconduct evidence.
“And so those are really our probes of her not following the rule of law and bending it for a political objective,” Epstein added. “We also probe numerous kind of potential ethics issues and failures to disclose conflicts of interest, allowing her own staff as attorney general to engage in fraud and not kind of overseeing that.”
At the outset of her legal career, Harris had a romantic relationship with then-California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who is said to have aided her in obtaining powerful roles at the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission. The AFL is currently looking into whether Harris benefited from unfair political favoritism and if she acted correctly in abstaining from conflicts of interest or if she informed the appropriate authorities about her potential biases.
During her 2020 presidential campaign, launched in January 2019, Harris faced criticism over her prosecutorial record. Tough-on-crime prosecutions disproportionately affect low-income families and minorities, entrenching them in the prison system. Harris faced significant criticism for her approach to managing cases of students skipping school. She backed a truancy law enacted in 2011, which permitted school district attorneys to file charges against parents if their kids frequently missed school without a legitimate excuse, Fox reported.
In 2019, Molly Redden from HuffPost shared in her piece, “The Human Costs of Kamala Harris’ War on Truancy,” the impact of the truancy program on certain families. Cheree Peoples, a black mother, was one of those affected. She was arrested in April 2013 following her child’s absence from school for 20 days.
Harris later walked back her crackdown on truancies in a 2019 podcast, saying it “never was the intention” to criminalize parents and describing the California law as one with “unintended consequences,” Politico reported at the time.
Additionally, she was also accused of being overly severe towards minor drug offenders while serving as the district attorney of San Francisco and subsequently as the attorney general of the state. Critics on the liberal side claimed that her strategies led to the widespread incarceration of Black men instead of concentrating on rehabilitation and improvements in the criminal justice system.
