SAN FRANCISCO (CA)
Breitbart News [Los Angeles CA]
August 22, 2024
By Olivia Rondeau
Vice President Kamala Harris bragged about her supposed passion for helping victims of sexual assault while speaking at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), ignoring her track record of failing to prosecute sexual abuse cases within the Catholic Church and even hiding “vital records on abuses that had occurred” when she was a San Francisco district attorney.
Addressing the crowd to formally accept her party’s presidential nomination on Thursday night, Harris reflected on a “pivotal moment” in her life that influenced her decision to become a prosecutor by bringing up the story of a peer who was victimized.
Harris said that when she was in high school, she started to “notice something about my best friend Wanda.”
After Wanda supposedly confided in her that she was being abused by her stepfather, Harris claimed that she “immediately told her she had to come stay with us, and she did.”
“This is one of the reasons I became a prosecutor — to protect people like Wanda because I believe everyone has a right to safety, to dignity, and to justice,” she continued. “No one should be made to fight alone; we are all in this together.”
That last claim would be considered ironic to some members of victims’ groups, who accused her prosecutorial office of brushing survivors’ stories under the rug.
During Harris’s 13-year tenure as district attorney and then attorney general, she failed to prosecute even one case of priest sexual abuse, even as at least 50 major cities brought charges against priests in the same period.
“They’re full of shit,” Joey Piscitelli, SNAP northwest regional director, told Peter Schweizer, a Breitbart News senior contributor and author of Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite.
“You can quote me on that. They’re not protecting the victims,” Piscitelli said of Harris’s office.
Rick Simons, an attorney who represented victims of clergy sexual abuse in California, said Harris’s action of covering up documents on the cases “shows a pattern and practice and policy of ignoring the rights of children by one of the largest institutions of the city and county of San Francisco, and in the Bay Area.”
Later in her convention speech, Harris claimed, “As a young courtroom prosecutor in Oakland California, I stood up for women and children against predators who abused them.”
However, Schweizer revealed that in addition to campaign donations from multiple law firms defending San Francisco priests against abuse claims, multiple “board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese-related organizations and their family members donated another $50,950 to Harris’s campaign.”
“Harris had no particular ties to the Catholic Church or Catholic organizations, but the money still came in large, unprecedented sums,” the investigative journalist wrote.
Schweizer alleged that connections Harris had with powerful people within the archdiocese influenced her “to bury the records” with allegations against priests.
Her office “would strangely hide vital records on abuses that had occurred,” he added.
“District Attorney Harris focuses her efforts on putting child molesters in prison,” her office stated in an effort to refute those claims. “We’re not interested in selling out our victims to look good in the paper.”
“[Victim groups] were outraged by her actions,” Schweizer argued. “Far from protecting victims, they argued, the cover-up was actually protecting the abusers by keeping their alleged crimes secret.”