California Democrat Senator Kamala Harris, a former presidential rival to Joe Biden and now a possible Vice-Presidential pick, has an interesting past that may not play well with the party’s woke Leftist base.
Harris’s former career as a prosecutor and Attorney General of California included many controversial “tough-on-crime” incidents, and now they are being scrubbed from her Wikipedia page, as to not upset the Left’s voters. The Intercept reported that her decision to support Orange County prosecutors for “rampant misconduct” and her saying that “it is not progressive to be soft on crime” could turn off voters should she get on the national stage as the Vice-Presidential nominee.
According to the Intercept:
At least one highly dedicated Wikipedia user has been scrubbing controversial aspects of Harris’s “tough-on-crime” record from her Wikipedia page, her decision not to prosecute Steve Mnuchin for mortgage fraud-related crimes, her strong support of prosecutors in Orange County who engaged in rampant misconduct, and other tidbits — such as her previous assertion that “it is not progressive to be soft on crime” — that could prove unflattering to Harris as the public first gets to know her on the national stage. The edits, according to the page history, have elicited strong pushback from Wikipedia’s volunteer editor brigade, and have drawn the page into controversy, though it’s a fight the pro-Harris editor is currently winning.
The piece continues that on June 11, the Wikipedia user removed this section about the Orange County scandal, saying that they were proofreading for length:
Later that year, Harris appealed a judge’s order to take over the prosecution of a high-profile mass murder case and to eject all 250 prosecutors from the Orange County District Attorney’s office over allegations of misconduct by Republican D.A. Tony Rackauckas. Rackauckas was alleged to have illegally employed jailhouse informants and concealed evidence. Harris noted that it was unnecessary to ban all 250 prosecutors from working on the case, as only a few had been directly involved, later promising a narrower criminal investigation. The U.S. Department of Justice began an investigation into Rackauckas in December 2016, but he was not re-elected.
The Intercept also talks about how Harris’s first bid for public office running for San Francisco DA, where she lambasted her opponent, Terence Hallinan, for not being tough enough on crime:
In her first bid for public office, Harris embraced a “tough-on-crime” approach in the San Francisco district attorney race and unseated Terence Hallinan, who was considered one of the “most left-wing politicians in the country.” Under Hallinan, the district attorney’s office focused on rehabilitative justice initiatives instead of incarceration, which led to the lowest felony conviction rates of any county in California.
While campaigning in the Mission District, SF Weekly reported at the time, Harris slammed Hallinan for failing to prosecute anti-war protesters for property destruction. “It is not progressive to be soft on crime,” she said.
On June 8, the Wikipedia user removed this quote from the page, saying that the changes made were “minor edits for length.”
Kamala, in reality, is obviously on the hard Left, but it is still truly telling that they would seemingly rather people in power who would rather let criminals run wild than crack down on them.
