Mary Grabar, Resident Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), challenges key talking points in Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s and her surrogate’s self-presentation. In Dr. Grabar’s article in the September 9 issue of FrontPage Magazine, she quoted Willie Brown, a powerful former mayor of San Francisco— who did more than anyone else to advance Harris’s career—that she was a “bad ass law-and-order prosecutor.” Nothing, Dr. Grabar remarks, could be further from the truth.

In the first days of the Presidential campaign, Harris maintained “that her experience prosecuting sex abusers and for-profit colleges enabled her to know Donald Trump’s ‘type.’” In her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, she “bragged about how as a prosecutor she stood up for ‘women and children.’”

But when she ran for and was narrowly elected California attorney general in 2010, law enforcement refrained from joining liberal interest groups working to endorse her, choosing to back the Republican candidate Steve Cooley instead.

“Harris’s relationship with police has not been positive,” Dr. Grabar writes. “In 2004, as San Francisco District Attorney, when the Police Officers Association demanded that she hand over to the state the case involving the murder of police officer Isaac Espinoza because of her opposition to the death penalty, she refused.” In 2019 CNN ran a lengthy feature about how she disrespected Renata Espinoza, Isaac’s widow, who “stares” at the screen of Harris’s public presentation today in disbelief, causing her much distress.

In 1970, a bomb went off in a San Francisco police station, killing Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell. Forty years later, in 2009, Cliff Kincaid, president of America’s Survival, Inc., tried to reopen the case with new evidence he and Vietnam War veteran Larry Grathwohl had amassed. Grathwohl had previously infiltrated the Weather Underground for the FBI, and he “had presented evidence to the grand jury and the U.S. Senate that [William] Ayers and [Bernardine] Dohrn,” old friends of Barack Obama, “were involved in that bombing.” According to Dr. Grabar, Harris as San Francisco DA worked against a renewed investigation.

Her record attests that she has been unusually soft on crime. Indeed, “In 2020, she famously raised money for a bail fund for the George Floyd rioters. A woman was just raped by one of the career criminals freed as a result of that very same fund.”

Dr. Grabar is the author of Debunking Howard Zinn (2019), Debunking the 1619 Project (2021), and Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths, to be published this fall by Regnery.