Kamala’s history of backstabbing her bosses

Vice President Kamala Harris was pushed to the top of the 2024 Democratic ticket more than a month ago — and it’s still not entirely clear how much involvement she had with the effort to force President Joe Biden to step aside from his reelection campaign. It’s a question worth clearing up as it turns out she has a history of leapfrogging her bosses.

During her first sit down interview with CNN on Thursday night, Harris said she stood by her assessment of Biden’s cognitive ability after his debate against former president Donald Trump. But she was not asked if she played a role in the palace coup. Reporting indicates that Barack Obama, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, among others, convinced Biden to step aside. Harris was not named as one of the instigators, but of course she benefited immensely from their efforts. She managed to sail to the Democratic nomination without going through a traditional primary process and has now branded her campaign as one for the “future” despite the fact that she currently serves in the Biden administration.

As Harris leaves Biden in the dust, let’s recall how she started her political career. In February 1998, Harris was appointed by San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan to serve as his assistant district attorney. Hallinan was a radical communist activist with a long history of settling disputes via fist fights that won the district attorney’s office in the 1995 election (the same year that Harris’s boyfriend, Willie Brown, won his mayoral seat).

Being assistant DA was Harris’s highest profile job to that point — Brown had appointed her to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board four years prior, in 1994 — and she worked there for two years prosecuting major cases like homicides, burglaries and sexual assaults. She left the office in 2000 to work on child abuse and neglect cases at City Hall. Interestingly enough, former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle — Donald Trump Jr.’s current fiancée and California governor Gavin Newsom’s first wife — worked as a prosecutor in the San Francisco office but was fired when Hallinan took office. Guilfoyle later accused Harris of blocking her return to the office, which Harris denies. Guilfoyle was rehired by Hallinan to serve as assistant DA in 2000, after Harris left to work at City Hall.

Fred Gardner, who served as press secretary for Hallinan starting in January 2000, wrote for the Anderson Valley Advertiser about his time working in the office alongside Harris. He noted that Willie Brown had highly recommended Harris for the position (though they were no longer dating at the time) and that Hallinan had a deep fondness for her, as well. “He spoke with special respect and affection for Kamala Harris,” Gardner recalled in the 2020 piece. Harris was often made available for interviews when Hallinan wasn’t. But there were warning signs that Harris was prepared to turn against the boss who gave her so much responsibility and public stardom.

Gardner said that Hallinan’s chief assistant, Darrell Salomon, warned him not to make Harris a star because she was going to run against Hallinan in his 2003 reelection campaign: “He said he didn’t want me directing media inquiries about Prop 21 to Kamala because she was planning to run against Hallinan in November 2003. ‘She has an agenda,’ Salomon asserted.” Salomon further cautioned that Harris was “fucking … Willie Brown” and was his “protégé” which meant she was not to be trusted.

Gardner asked Harris if she was indeed planning to run against Hallinan in 2003. She denied it.

“I asked Kamala bluntly if she was planning to run in 2003. She said, ‘Not if Terence decides to run for a third term.’ She said it would be ‘unprofessional.’ I told Terence, who did not believe her,” he said.

Gardner still insisted he never “caught wind” of any “disloyal plans” from Harris. But Hallinan was right.

Harris not only ran against Hallinan in 2003, but was repeatedly eager to hit him where it hurts. Any sense of loyalty to her boss evaporated once she had left the office and certainly when the two squared off in the primary. She suggested during a run-off debate that Hallinan was corrupt and that she might have to prosecute him. In response to accusations that her relationship with Brown had helped her career, Harris claimed Hallinan ran a “debauched workplace where prosecutors had sex in the office,” the New York Times reported. She also flamed Hallinan’s office as being in “disarray,” referring to an incident in which fourteen prosecutors returned from lunch to find pink slips on their chairs. But that incident happened shortly after Hallinan took office and well before Harris joined his team.

Harris’s closing campaign ad took aim at the fact that the DA’s office had been run exclusively by white men.

“Harris’s staff had gone to the library and retrieved photographs of more than a century’s worth of San Francisco’s district attorneys, every one from 1900 to 2003. They were all white men,” Politico reported.

Fast forward two decades, and Harris is operating by the same playbook — doing whatever it takes to get ahead, even if it means ruthlessly knifing once-allies. When she ran against Joe Biden in 2019 during the 2020 Democratic primary, she strongly implied he was a racist for opposing school busing measures and praising segregationist senators… only to later join his general election campaign as his running mate. And when Democratic leaders eventually shivved Biden, she was waiting in the wings, ready to take over. Hallinan, Biden… they were both just inconvenient obstacles for Harris’s climb to power.

In another synchronism, Harris was accused of ripping off Hallinan’s policy platform when she ran against him in 2003. “She made a big effort, a successful effort, at targeting my voters. She pretty much adopted my entire agenda,” he said. During the 2024 campaign, Harris swiped several policies from Trump, including ending taxes on tips and increasing the child tax credit. What can be, unburdened by what has been.