Vice President Kamala Harris’ checkered prosecution record during her tenure as California attorney general is resurfacing as her bid for the White House heats up. From locking up parents whose children had chronically missed school to supporting a bail fund that let violent Black Lives Matter rioters out of jail in 2020, Harris’ approach to criminal justice is facing fresh scrutiny.
America First Legal (AFL), a nonprofit conservative legal watchdog group, launched seven investigations into Harris’ prosecutorial background on Thursday afternoon, alleging 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.”
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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at her presidential campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, on Monday. (Erin Schaff/Pool via Reuters)
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 said. “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.”
Early in her legal career, Harris dated California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who reportedly helped her secure influential positions at the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission. AFL is now investigating whether Harris received undue political favoritism and whether she properly recused herself or disclosed conflicts of interest.
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Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks with President Biden in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washinogton, D.C., on July 26, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
During her 2020 presidential campaign, which she launched in January 2019, Harris faced significant criticism over her prosecutorial record. Opponents of tough-on-crime prosecutions argue it disproportionately affects low-income families and minorities, further entrenching them in the prison system.
One of the most criticized aspects of Harris’ record was her handling of school truancy cases. Harris supported a truancy law, passed in 2011, that allowed district attorneys to charge parents with a misdemeanor if their children were chronically absent during the school year without a valid reason.
In 2019, Molly Redden of HuffPost reported how the truancy program affected some families in her article, “The Human Costs of Kamala Harris’ War on Truancy.” Among those impacted was Cheree Peoples, an African American mother arrested in April 2013 after her child had missed 20 days of school.
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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to supporters during a campaign rally at West Allis Central High School in West Allis, Wisconsin, on Tuesday. (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)
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.
She also faced accusations of being too harsh on low-level drug offenders during her time as San Francisco’s district attorney and later as the state’s attorney general. Liberal critics argued that her policies contributed to mass incarceration of Black men rather than focusing on rehabilitation and criminal justice reform.
But in June 2020, Harris promoted the bail fund that helped bail Black Lives Matter rioters out of jail, but only a fraction of the more than $41 million actually went to freeing rioters.
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Meanwhile, some Democrats are framing a potential Harris-Trump matchup as the “Prosecutor vs. the Felon,” in light of former President Trump’s recent court cases.
“It’s fairly clear that nobody disagrees, nobody disagrees that Trump is a felon because of political prosecution,” Epstein said. “And if the standard for Kamala Harris is that the process that led to Donald Trump being convicted is one of justice and one that she follows, then logically, it means that she is a political prosecutor, not a fair honest broker.”
Fox News Digital’s Stepheny Price contributed to this report.
