Kamala Harris insists she doesn’t know anything, again, and again, and again – By Philip Wegmann (washingtonexaminer.com) / Dec 6 2018
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., doesn’t know anything — and that’s her best defense.
When news broke that the California Department of Justice settled a $400,000 sexual harassment settlement involving one of her longtime staffers, Larry Wallace, Harris was supposedly stunned.
The senator didn’t know that Wallace preyed on a female executive at the California Department of Justice while Harris was attorney general in 2016. The senator was similarly oblivious to the fact that Wallace was still a defendant in a lawsuit the next year when she decided to bring him to Washington to serve as a senior adviser.
“We were unaware of this issue and take accusations of harassment extremely seriously. This evening, Mr. Wallace offered his resignation to the senator, and she accepted it,” spokeswoman Lily Adams wrote in an email to the Sacramento Bee.
This would be more believable if this was an isolated incident of ignorance. Unfortunately for Harris and her presidential hopes, she has a habit of know-nothingness: Things would go bad, the headlines would be ugly, and California’s top cop would insist on her own obliviousness.
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.
“I will be very candid with you, because I saw that article this morning, and I was shocked, and I’m looking into it to see if the way it was characterized in the paper is actually how it occurred in court,” Harris told BuzzFeed. “I was very troubled by what I read. I just need to find out what did we actually say in court.”
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.
“I feel awful about this,” Harris told the New York Times before putting out a statement: “As a firm believer in DNA testing, I hope the governor and the state will allow for such testing in the case of Kevin Cooper.”
The point isn’t that Harris helped California imprison a possibly innocent man. The point isn’t that Harris inadvertently helped California keep men behind bars to fight their fires. The point isn’t even that Harris brought a sexual abuser from California to the Senate.
The takeaway is that Harris, in a best-case scenario, didn’t really know what was going on while she was serving as attorney general of the biggest state in the country.
The picture that is emerging and has been for some time is that Harris used her job as attorney general as a stepping stone. She merely used the job and the statewide recognition that comes with it to hop from California to Washington.
Over the holiday season, she says she’s contemplating another jump to the White House. If she wants to be president, Harris has to hope a lot of people believe she knew very little.
