How many cases has Kamala Harris actually prosecuted in a courtroom?
Despite her profile on the California Attorney General website stating she spent her “entire career in the trenches as a courtroom prosecutor,” the only available evidence shows her trying between seven and 15 felonies.
They include a domestic violence scalping, one murder, armed robbery and two child sex crimes – though she claims to have taken hundreds of cases to court.
No records are available from any of those cases, and the only one to have made the news was the 1996 scalping case.
Harris started her career in Alameda County, where she was born, in 1989. In her book “The Truths We Hold” she described being crushed about how she had failed the bar and might not be accepted into the department, but they allowed her to continue working with them until she did finally pass in 1990.
She was then an assistant district attorney in Alameda from 1990 to 1998 before moving across the bay to fulfil the same role in the San Francisco district attorney’s office.
The Alameda County DA’s office sent The Post a list of more than 60 names they said Harris had prosecuted during her time there. However, they provided no further details of any of the cases such as if they were traffic tickets or serious felonies, or if she had personally tried them in the courtroom.
A 2003 article by the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper titled “Kamala Harris has a perfectly credible record. So why does she have to exaggerate it?” quoted a source in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office who claimed she tried “roughly 5 to 10 felonies” there and only two more in San Francisco.
Harris rapidly rose through the ranks, successfully running for DA in San Francisco in 2003.
By that time she was billed as a “veteran” prosecutor with “thirteen years of courtroom experience” who could overhaul the office.
“Kamala has tried hundreds of serious and violent felonies, including homicide, rape, and child sexual assault cases,” a mailer put out by her campaign claimed at the time.
Prosecutors can refer to “prosecuting” a case which can mean, variously, that they oversee the prosecution but do not appear in the courtroom. “Trying” a case means you participate in the structured trial.
Harris was immediately called out for exaggerating her prosecutorial record, as she was forced to admit in a debate with one of her then-rivals, criminal defense attorney Bill Fazio.
In a debate broadcast on KGO Radio Fazio, a Democrat, took her to task.
“How many cases have you tried? Can you tell us how many serious felonies you have tried? Can you tell us one?” Fazio asked, according to the audio of the debate.
“I’ve tried about 50 cases. Mr. Fazio, and it’s about leadership,” Harris said, without offering any further explanation.
“Ms Harris, why does your information, which is still published, say that you tried hundreds of serious felonies? I think that’s misleading. I think that’s disingenuous. I think that shows that you are incapable of leadership and you’re not to be trusted. You continue to put out information which says you have tried hundreds of serious felonies,” Fazio pressed.
In the same year, during the same campaign for DA, she gave a different answer. At a meeting of the Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, attendees asked the same question about how many cases she had prosecuted three times, according to the Bay Guardian.
Harris conceded she had tried “under 30” cases, but added if you counted misdemeanors, it was closer to 100, the outlet reported.
The San Francisco DA’s office did not respond to repeated requests for information on Harris’ prosecutorial record from The Post.
Today, even some of her past opponents stick by her. One San Francisco attorney who clashed with Harris back when she was in the DA’s office told The Post he doesn’t think Harris has a “high IQ” but said he has never not voted Democrat and thus will vote for her.
He added he believed Harris’ controversial 1994 romantic relationship with the powerful one-time mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, greased the wheels of Harris’ rise in the Bay Area.
Fazio – whose Twitter bio still claims he is “the *only* candidate for San Francisco District Attorney to try a felony in an SF courtroom”– himself told The Post this week he solidly supports Kamala and voted for her both in her Attorney General race and her Senate race.
“To be fair, it wasn’t her specifically who said she tried ‘hundreds’ of cases, it was her campaign literature that did,” Fazio claimed.
Fazio, who worked as a deputy district attorney in San Francisco prior to going into private practice and said he had once tried eight murder cases in a year.
“Harris would probably have had to try six to eight cases a year when she was in Alameda County,” Fazio said. “I know she tried at least two cases when she was (a deputy district attorney) in San Francisco.”
Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson James Singer downplayed the 2003 controversy in a statement first given to ABC News.
“Vice President Harris oversaw and was involved in the prosecution of hundreds of serious crimes before she was elected District Attorney of San Francisco,” Singer said.
“For more than a decade, she prosecuted child sexual assault cases, homicides, and robberies in Alameda, before overseeing the career criminal unit and served as the head of division on families and children in the San Francisco District Attorney’s office.”
“That is what mattered to voters in San Francisco more than two decades ago and why she was elected District Attorney.”
Former Department of Justice special agents who worked under Harris when she was Attorney General from 2011 to 2017 told The Post recently that Harris’ claims that “personally prosecuted” transnational drug or gang cases was not true.
They say she merely presided over arrests made by any number of state and federal agencies during her tenure.’ They say she merely presided over arrests made by any number of state and federal agencies during her tenure.
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