By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Joe Biden has named his 2020 running mate: authoritarianism.
American prosecutors wield awesome and terrible powers
that lend themselves easily to abuse, and Senator Kamala Harris, formerly the
attorney general of California, is an enthusiastic abuser of them.
Harris was a leader in the junta of Democratic state
attorneys general that attempted to criminalize dissent in the matter of global
warming, using her office’s investigatory powers to target and harass
non-profit policy groups while she and her counterpart in New York attempted to
shake down Exxon on phony fraud cases.
Until she was stopped by a federal court, Harris was
laying subpoenas on organizations such as the Americans for Prosperity
Foundation, a conservative-leaning group that is critical of Democratic
global-warming proposals. She demanded private information that the
organizations were not legally obliged to disclose, including financial
information and donor lists, in order to be able to subject the supporters of
right-leaning groups to legal and financial harassment. This was, as a federal
judge confirmed, an obvious and unquestionable violation of the First
Amendment.
It was also a serious abuse of power. Harris’s actions
were coordinated with those of then attorney general Eric Schneiderman in New
York, who argued — preposterously — that Exxon’s taking a different view of
global warming was a form of securities fraud. This isn’t a conspiracy
theory: They held a press conference and organized their effort into a
committee, which they called AGs United for Clean Power.
This was not happening in a political vacuum. At
approximately the same time, the IRS was being weaponized to harass and
disadvantage right-leaning nonprofits and policy organizations, for example,
leaking the confidential tax information of the National Organization for
Marriage as an act of political retaliation, an offense for which the IRS was
obliged to pay a settlement. (The IRS’s other abuses, as in the Lois Lerner
matter, remain largely unpunished.) A lawyer with connections to Barack Obama
and Andrew Cuomo attempted to extort billions of dollars from Chevron in a
mammoth racketeering project that involved falsifying evidence and bribing
judges, a project that was cheered on by green activists such as musician Roger
Waters and Democratic operatives such as former Cuomo aide Karen Hinton, both
of whom had negotiated for themselves a percentage of the settlement. That went
on until a federal judge intervened on RICO grounds. Democratic voices in the
media were calling for the authorities to — this part is even less subtle
—“arrest climate change deniers,” a project to which activists such as Robert
F. Kennedy, Jr. lent their voices.
And this was not idle talk: As with Harris’s abusive
investigation in California, a legal pretext was offered, albeit a patently
ridiculous one.
Harris’s self-serving prosecutorial abuses have been
directed at political enemies, but they also put hundreds — maybe thousands —
of people in jail or at risk of prosecution on wrongful grounds when it suited
her agenda. As Lara Bazelon of the Loyola law school wrote in the New
York Times:
Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to
uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct
that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of
crucial information by prosecutors.
Consider her record as San
Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011. Ms. Harris was criticized in
2010 for withholding information about a police laboratory technician who had
been accused of “intentionally sabotaging” her work and stealing drugs from the
lab. After a memo surfaced showing that Ms. Harris’s deputies knew about the
technician’s wrongdoing and recent conviction, but failed to alert defense
lawyers, a judge condemned Ms. Harris’s indifference to the systemic violation
of the defendants’ constitutional rights.
Ms. Harris contested the ruling by
arguing that the judge, whose husband was a defense attorney and had spoken
publicly about the importance of disclosing evidence, had a conflict of
interest. Ms. Harris lost. More than 600 cases handled by the corrupt
technician were dismissed.
In the context of Harris’s political vendettas, that
eagerness to engage in “systemic violation of the defendants’ constitutional
rights” is particularly terrifying.
In choosing this corrupt prosecutor as his
vice-presidential candidate, Joe Biden has made a serious error, one that
highlights his already substantial deficiencies in judgment.
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