Kamala Harris’ record as vice president and in California statewide office show a long history of scandal and management failings that are certain to draw scrutiny in presidential race.
Before she was Joe Biden’s understudy the last four years, Kamala Harris ran offices as a California prosecutor and senator. Often, scandal and failings followed in her wake.
As California Attorney General, Harris was widely criticized for failing to take on prosecutorial misconduct. In fact her office was “called out” by judges for “defending convictions obtained by local prosecutors” who had inserted false confessions, lied under oath, and withheld evidence. A federal appeals judge even admonished officials in 2015 to talk to Harris “and make sure she understands the gravity of the situation” involving prosecutorial misconduct.
Likewise, Harris’ top deputy was accused of sexually harassing a staffer while working for Harris at the California Department of Justice, costing the state $400,000 to settle the case.
Now, as vice president, not only has Harris’ office been plagued by staff issues, but the vice president is scrutinized for her role as “Border Czar” leading the Biden administration’s efforts to solve the border crisis. Early in their term, Biden designated Harris to address the migration challenges at the border after he initially rolled back several of his predecessor’s initiatives.
Harris came under fire after she failed to visit the border for months after she was given the assignment. By the time she finally showed up in El Paso, untold tens of thousands had illegally crossed into the United States, many of them violent criminals and gang members.
“Serving as our nation’s Border Czar, VP Harris has overseen the worst, unmitigated border security crisis in our lifetime. The data is irrefutable,” Mark Morgan, former Commissioner of Customs Border Protection under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, told Just the News.
“She fully supported the dismantling of the network of tools, authorities, and polices we had in place under the Trump Administration that had led to the most secure border in our lifetime and has repeatedly lied to the American people regarding the government’s loss of operational control of our own borders,” Morgan continued.
“Under her reign, more Americans have died from fentanyl pouring across the border; more potential national security threats and criminals have attempted to exploit our open order policies; and more illegal aliens have been encountered during her tenure, than any other time in our nation’s history. Her performance has negatively impacted every aspect of our country’s safety and national security and can only be described as – complete failure,” he added.
In fact, NewsNation reported Monday that Harris failed to speak with the new Border Patrol Chief after he assumed the office last year. Earlier in the year, former Chief Raul Ruiz said he also never heard from Biden or Harris during his tenure. “I’ve never had one conversation with the president or the vice president for that matter. I was chief of the Border Patrol. I commanded 21,000 people. That’s a problem,” Ortiz said on 60 Minutes.
At the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration, Harris famously visited Central America and called on immigrants not to make the journey to the United States. “At the same time, I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come,” Harris said at the time.
However, little progress was made following the visit. Indeed, the opposite happened—millions of illegals immigrants continued to enter the United States throughout the last three and a half years . The Federal Reserve estimates that 3.8 million new illegal aliens could enter the country in 2024 alone, if current crossing rates continue.
The Kamala Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News.
“You know, with Kamala Harris, you know, what has she done as borders are? What has she done? Nothing. And I think the her record speaks for itself,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Monday.
Harris’ prior public service in California reveals a pattern of scandal and failures that will come to the forefront if Harris replaces President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. Biden announced his decision to drop out of the race over the weekend and endorsed Harris to replace him on social media platform X.
During her term as California Attorney General, Harris was rebuked by judges after her office attempted to defend a conviction obtained by local prosecutors, who had inserted a false confession in a 1995 murder case. The defendant, a housekeeper for the murdered couple, was charged but never confessed.
When the defendant appealed the conviction on the grounds that prosecutors presented false evidence, Harris’ state office challenged the appeal to uphold the conviction, which earned a rebuke from the judge. The judge criticized Harris by asking her deputy, Kevin Vienna, if her office wanted to defend the conviction “obtained by lying prosecutors,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
In December 2018, during Harris’ first term as a U.S. senator from California, one of her long-time staff members resigned after the Sacramento Bee inquired with Harris’ office about a $400,000 sexual harassment settlement dating from her tenure as attorney general. Larry Wallace, who was the director of the Division of Law Enforcement under Harris in California, joined her senate office after she was elected.
Harris claimed in a media statement at the time that she was unaware of Wallace’s behavior, but the incident’s timing was awkward for the senator—at the height of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. She was part of a prominent group of female senators who called on Senator Al Franken to resign after he was embroiled in an harassment scandal. She had separately introduced a bill that year to ban forced nondisclosure agreements in harassment lawsuits.
Before she became the California attorney general, Harris served for two terms as San Francisco district attorney. While in this role, one single error—failing to check the background of a lab technician—impacted 1,700 cases. But, when faced with scrutiny over the incident, Harris tried to distance herself from the blowback and let her staff take the hit.
In 2010, a judge admonished then-District Attorney Harris’ office for violating the rights of defendants when it failed to notify them of a police drug technician who admitted to skimming cocaine from the evidence stash at her laboratory. The judge said the failure of Harris’ office to notify the defendants of this information violated a “constitutional duty.” After the technician’s illegal behavior was identified, prosecutors were forced to drop more than 600 drug cases, according to SFGATE.
Again, Harris tried distancing herself from the error. Speaking to the press, Harris said at the time that “contrary to public perception, I don’t run the crime lab.” Her efforts to distance herself from the scandal were not successful, however, because she admitted that her office failed to conduct a background check on the technician, instead relying on police to be forthcoming with that information. A background check would have revealed the technician’s previous conviction in a domestic violence case, information the prosecutors would constitutionally have to provide a defendant.
Neither were Harris’ campaigns free from scandal. When she first ran for San Francisco district attorney in 2003, an ethics board found she violated campaign finance laws, resulting in one of the largest fines in city history, according to SFGATE. Harris broke the voluntary $211,000 spending cap after she pledged to the voters that she would honor the limit.
The city’s ethics commission ultimately found that Harris committed the violation and fined her campaign $34,000, though they ruled that it appeared to be unintentional. Harris took full responsibility for the “mistakes” and promised to take responsibility. Her opponents, however, had a hard time believing the violations were not intentional and criticized her for being “sloppy.”
Later, in 2006, Harris came under scrutiny during her campaign for attorney general after she refused to return donations from a disgraced fundraiser after she accused her Republican opponent of something similar. Harris accepted, and kept, donations from Norman Hsu, a Democratic fundraiser and fugitive of 15 years for grand theft auto charges. Hsu had also contributed to other Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton, who promptly returned the funds.
In 2019, Harris accepted donations from the firm that defended Jeffrey Epstein a decade prior in his Florida sexual abuse case. Senator Harris, who was then running for president, had criticized the firm’s work on the same day saying their work on the case called “into question the integrity of our legal system.”
The failings have followed the senator to the vice presidency. In addition to a struggle to address the border crisis, reports emerged after Harris became Joe Biden’s vice president that her office was dysfunctional and suffered from poor communications, Politico reported in June of 2021, only about six months after her term began.
“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” said one person with direct knowledge of how Harris’ office is run, according to Politico. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—.”
The reported dysfunction points to a larger issue about Harris’ offices over her 18 years in public service—the high turnover rate. According to Washington, D.C.-based conservative watchdog Open the Books, Harris had a 92% turnover rate in her first three years as vice president.
“In the most recent publishing through March 31, only four of the original 47 staff listed in a 2021 government report remained consistently employed and are among the office’s 50 current staff members,” Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski wrote in a post to Substack based on his organization’s findings.
The instability of Harris’ vice presidential office was reportedly a factor considered by Biden and his advisors as they prepared for the president to potentially drop his reelection bid. Her office management style was reportedly part of a tense relationship between her office and the West Wing, Axios reported.
