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By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine
Kamala Harris is running as a prosecutor, but a lot of her old friends are in prison.
Having the FBI knock on your door was an occupational hazard in Kamala’s San Francisco circles where her boyfriend, future Mayor Willie Brown, took her to Nob Hill parties by night, and by day appointed her to boards where she earned hundreds of thousands for showing up.
But the biggest favor Willie did for Kamala wasn’t buying her a BMW, flying her to New York City on Trump’s plane, or accompanying him to the Oscars: it was buying her a political career.
A few years after their fling, the FBI would begin its 5-year investigation of San Francisco city government.
Kamala’s sugar daddy had been the focus of investigations going back two decades.
Kamala Harris claimed that she had become a prosecutor to fight for justice, but when she was dating the married Brown, he had been the focus of FBI investigations going back to when she had been a teenager.
It did not deter her. If anything, just the opposite.
What did Brown see in Kamala beyond the obvious?
The California pol with legal troubles behind him and in front of him plucked the deputy DA from obscurity, introduced her to the wealthy and powerful, and put her on a track to becoming the city’s DA and state attorney general just as he was making the transition from Assembly Speaker to San Francisco mayor.
“I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie,” the former chairman of the California Democratic Party noted.
With her bank account fattened by the $400,000 received from her role on Brown’s boards and more importantly on a first name basis with top donors, Kamala was ready to start moving up the ladder.
And a few years later she was working in San Francisco City Hall. With Willie Brown wrapping up his final term in office, Kamala began preparing to run to be San Francisco’s DA.
The 2003 election saw Willie Brown’s proteges and pals, Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, take control of San Francisco politics.
Kamala ran with Brown’s backing to unseat a DA who had been investigating Brown’s donors.
If the Brown machine was going to go on running San Francisco, it needed an ally in the DA’s office to protect its corrupt way of doing business.
Before the election, the Brown machine left nothing to chance by calling on the services of Mohammed Nuru: a Nigerian immigrant calling himself ‘Mr. Clean’ during his tenure at the city’s Department of Public Works.
Nuru had gotten started with SLUG: a social justice community gardening organization that doubled as an election turnout operation.
Nuru had been accused of using SLUG employees to campaign for Willie Brown if they wanted to keep their jobs.
SLUG loyalists then took over the DPW and were deployed to help Newsom and Kamala win.
SLUG employees, many of them homeless or ex-cons, were forced to cast absentee ballots at a Kamala event.
Kamala’s campaign manager admitted to being in contact with Nuru during the election and SLUG workers filled up her events.
News reports described employees being forced to ride “in vans organized by Harris to the Department of Elections at City Hall, where they were pressured by SLUG crew chiefs to cast absentee ballots for Newsom” and then “asked them to turn over their voter stubs.
One street cleaner even said a crew chief peered over her shoulder as she voted.”
District Attorney Kamala offered to investigate the allegations that she had been elected through the ugliest kind of machine politics and voter intimidation.
Much like her promises to investigate Willie Brown, that went nowhere. When Nuru was finally arrested, it was after an FBI investigation.
Despite Willie Brown paying his legal fees, ‘Mr. Clean’ was sentenced to 7 years in prison.
A large part of the legacy of Kamala, along with other top prosecutors, and the rest of the Brown machine was a local and state government too corrupt to investigate itself.
Attorney General Kamala Harris did not take long to show why state officials could not be trusted to investigate their own political allies.
Kamala claimed that she was dedicated to fighting the sexual abuse of women and girls, but she had carefully turned a blind eye to what was happening in Brown’s inner circle.
As attorney general, she went on doing the same thing.
In her first year in office, Kamala endorsed Rep. Bob Filner in his race for San Diego mayor.
A year later, women began coming forward accusing the Progressive Caucus co-founder of groping and sexually harassing them.
His alleged victims included a great-grandmother and rape survivors among over 30 women. His tactics included putting victims in a headlock.
Despite the parade of victims, some of them ex-military and a future congresswoman and a reported 90 witnesses, the man now being dubbed ‘Filthy Filner’ had nothing to worry about.
The local DA recused herself and the state attorney general stepped in to take her place even though she had been a political supporter of the man she was cutting a plea deal with.
“This prosecution is about consequence and accountability. No one is above the law,” Attorney General Kamala Harris falsely claimed.
The plea deal that Kamala cut for her political ally gave him 90 days of house arrest and some therapy.
Filner did not even have to register as a sex offender. That was quite a light sentence for charges that involved misdemeanor battery and false imprisonment.
Around the same time, a 75-year-old man had been sent to jail for six months for groping a court reporter, but Kamala allowed Filner, who had gone after multiple women, and had been accused of inflicting chokeholds on some of them, to just walk away.
Some indeed were above the law. And that was why Kamala had been elevated to where she was.
Attorney General Kamala Harris became famous for politicizing investigations and turning her office into a front in the culture wars.
But just as it was important which cases she took on that she should not have, like the prosecution of undercover investigators of her Planned Parenthood backers to score points with the state’s big political donors, equally revealing were the cases she chose to ignore that involved misconduct by political allies and their friends.
Kamala refused to investigate corruption in Hercules, CA, claiming that “local governments are primarily responsible for resolving complaints involving local government employees or agencies.”
Rather than investigate mismanagement of the state’s giant CalPERS pension fund, she shook down big banks to prop up the failing funds.
She likewise refused to dig into corruption in Caltrans, eventually settling for a single scapegoat.
Likewise her failure to seriously go after PG&E led to wildfires and a deepening energy crisis in California.
But Attorney General Kamala Harris had learned all too well at the feet of Willie Brown what it took to succeed in California politics.
Instead of fighting crime, she helped unleash a crime wave.
The future senator and vice president neglected basic law enforcement in favor of picking battles over illegal aliens, gay marriage and abortion that would be popular with donors.
And she was careful to avoid taking on the big power blocs and special interests running the state.
Kamala had not run to be district attorney or attorney general to enforce the law, but to use them as stepping stones for higher office.
Inept as a prosecutor, Kamala provided a distraction by cloaking the state’s good old boy politics in a skirt, leftist agitprop and some diversity.
Her wealthy donors thrilled with her radical political activism and opened up their wallets and purses.
At a fundraiser in San Francisco, her megadonor finance chair recalled, “we’d go around with the bag and collect the money.”
Kamala’s fundraising broke records and went on breaking records.
That river of money would not have been possible without the political connections forged by Mayor Willie Brown and by the perception of some of the state’s powerful and wealthy donors that Kamala had their back.
As Kamala continues to break records, money has once again poured in from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood and some of the most corrupt industries in the country.
What is it that they love so much about Kamala Harris? The same thing that Willie Brown did.
Looks come and go but a corruptible moral compass lasts forever.
