HAVEN’T WE YET LEARNED ABOUT LAWYERS? THAT THEY ARE AMORAL SOCIOPATHS? LOOK AT HILLARY BILLARY CLINTON AND THE OBOMBS!
In addition to campaign donations from multiple law firms defending San Francisco priests against abuse claims, Schweizer observed that “board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese-related organizations and their family members donated another $50,950 to Harris’s campaign.”
Kamala Harris Failed to Prosecute Priest Sex Abuse Cases Despite Victims’ Pleas
AP Photo/Eric Risberg
12 Aug 2020603
Joe Biden announced Tuesday he has chosen Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate, a person the presumptive Democrat nominee described as a “fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants.”
During Harris’s tenure as San Francisco’s chief prosecutor, however, she showed no signs of fighting for “the little guy” when she failed to prosecute any of the sexual abuse claims brought against Catholic priests in the city, despite outcries from victim groups.
In fact, as Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, observed in his book titled Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, during her 13-year tenure as district attorney and then attorney general, Harris failed to prosecute even one case of priest sexual abuse, though during that same period at least 50 major cities had brought charges against priests.
At the same time Harris failed to pursue prosecution of cases of priest sexual abuse, her office “would strangely hide vital records on abuses that had occurred,” Schweizer revealed.
The bombshell details show that while Harris’s predecessor, former San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan, had launched an aggressive investigation into priests of the Archdiocese of San Francisco accused of sexual abuse, Harris’s campaign to unseat Hallinan showed an unusual influx of unparalleled donations from high-level officials of the Catholic Church.
Schweizer wrote:
Harris had no particular ties to the Catholic Church or Catholic organizations, but the money still came in large, unprecedented sums. Lawyer Joseph Russoniello represented the church on a wide variety of issues, including the handling of the church abuse scandal. He served on the Catholic Church’s National Review Board (NRB) of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The purpose of the NRB was to review Catholic Church abuse cases. Russoniello was also a partner in the San Francisco law firm Cooley Godward. Russoniello donated the maximum amount by law to her campaign, $1,250, and his law firm added another $2,250. He also sat on Harris’s advisory council when she was San Francisco district attorney. Another law firm, Bingham McCutcheon, which handled legal matters for the archdiocese concerning Catholic Charities, donated $2,825, the maximum allowed. Curiously, Bingham McCutcheon had only donated to two other candidates running for office in San Francisco before, for a total of $650. As with Russoniello, their support was unusual.
In addition to campaign donations from multiple law firms defending San Francisco priests against abuse claims, Schweizer observed that “board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese-related organizations and their family members donated another $50,950 to Harris’s campaign.”
As Schweizer noted, Harris’s ties to those working to block exposure of the archdiocese’s secret documents containing information about priests accused of sexual abuse were extensive.
The author explained that attorney Paul Renne of Cooley Godward was the husband of former San Francisco city attorney Louise Renne, a mentor to Harris. Paul Renne worked with lawyer Joseph Russoniello, who, as Schweizer wrote, “negotiated the agreement to bury the abuse records from public view.”
Though Harris has touted her early career as a sexual crimes prosecutor, after she won her run-off campaign against Hallinan, her office actually worked to cover up the records of claims of sexual abuse by priests of the San Francisco archdiocese.
According to Schweizer:
Hallinan’s office had used the archdiocese files to guide its investigations and talked publicly about releasing the documents after removing victims’ names and identifiers. Harris, on the other hand, abruptly decided to bury the records. For some reason, she did not want the documents released in any form. Harris’s office claimed that the cover-up was about protecting the victims of abuse. “District Attorney Harris focuses her efforts on putting child molesters in prison,” her office claimed. “We’re not interested in selling out our victims to look good in the paper.”
Victims’ groups, however, were quite eager for the documents to be released.
“They were outraged by her actions,” Schweizer noted. “Far from protecting victims, they argued, the cover-up was actually protecting the abusers by keeping their alleged crimes secret.”
“They’re full of shit,” Joey Piscitelli, the northwest regional director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), said, reported Schweizer. “You can quote me on that. They’re not protecting the victims.”
Similarly, attorney Rick Simons, who represented victims of clergy sexual abuse, said Harris’s action of covering up the documents “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.”
When Harris attempted to shift the blame for hiding the records to Hallinan, her predecessor responded that she engaged in “the kinds of deals that have allowed the church sex scandal to go on as long as it has.”
As a result of Harris’s efforts to cover up the documents, Schweizer wrote that psychologist James Jenkins, who founded the archdiocese’s Independent Review Board – which oversaw the methods to handle abuse claims – “abruptly resigned from the board”:
He accused the church of “deception, manipulation and control” for blocking the release of the board’s findings. Jenkins argued that Harris’s deal with the archdiocese not only denied the rights of known victims, it also prevented other possible cases from coming forward.
In April 2010, Schweizer reported Harris’s office denied a request from a San Francisco Weekly journalist who sought the archdiocese’s abuse records. Similarly, Schweizer wrote he requested the same documents in 2019, through an attorney in California.
“The San Francisco district attorney’s office responded they no longer had them in their possession,” he noted.
“Were they destroyed? Were they moved somewhere else?” Schweizer asked. “It remains a disturbing mystery.”
August 14, 2020
Let's hope Catholics remember what Kamala said
We have something interesting in the Biden-Harris ticket. He claims to be a Catholic, and she has a history of attacking ruthlessly the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men's group.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a member in my parish. My late father was also a member way back to his time in Cuba.
The "Knights" feed the poor, raise money for natural disaster victims, and participate in many community programs.
Senator Harris's bigotry needs to be shared with Catholics in all of those battleground states. This is from Alexandra Desanctis:
In late 2018, while evaluating the nomination of Brian Buescher to serve as a district judge in Nebraska, Harris posed a series of questions insinuating that his involvement in the Knights of Columbus -- a charitable Catholic fraternal organization -- disqualified him from serving on the bench.
Here's one of her written questions:
Since 1993, you have been a member of the Knights of Columbus, an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men. In 2016, Carl Anderson, leader of the Knights of Columbus, described abortion as "a legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths." Mr. Anderson went on to say that "abortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale." Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman's right to choose when you joined the organization?
That's pretty rough, and I remember it quite well. By the way, what does Harris thinks happens to all of those babies who are aborted?
My guess is that former V.P. Biden has quite a few friends who are "Knights." Will he get a question about this? He should.
PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
Catholic Abuse Survivors: Kamala Harris ‘Chose Not to Prosecute a Single Abusive Priest’
23
5:55
The executive director of a national network of survivors of sexual abuse by priests said in a statement sent to Breitbart News that then-District Attorney Kamala Harris (D-CA) “chose to ignore an opportunity” to investigate priests in San Francisco for abusing children.
Zach Hiner, the executive director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), corroborated the bombshell details about Harris revealed by Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer in his book Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite.
Linking to a video by The Intercept that profiles Harris’s conduct as San Francisco’s district attorney, Hiner said:
Senator Kamala Harris, as the District Attorney of San Francisco, chose to ignore an opportunity in 2004 to continue the work of her predecessor, Terence Hallinan, who was compiling dossiers about abuse in the Archdiocese of San Francisco with the intention of investigating and cracking down on that archdiocese. Despite the work that Hallinan had done, when Harris assumed office she stopped cooperating with victims and chose not to prosecute a single abusive priest.
WARNING: Graphic Video
Schweizer, the president of the Government Accountability Institute, exposed in his book that, during her 13-year tenure as district attorney and then attorney general, Harris failed to prosecute even one case of priest sexual abuse, though during that same period, at least 50 major cities had brought charges against priests identified as pedophiles.
The author detailed that while Harris’s predecessor, former San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan, had launched an aggressive investigation into priests of the Archdiocese of San Francisco accused of sexual abuse, Harris’s campaign to unseat Hallinan showed an unusual influx of unparalleled donations from high-level officials of the Catholic Church.
In addition to campaign donations from multiple law firms defending San Francisco priests against abuse claims, Schweizer observed that “board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese-related organizations and their family members donated another $50,950 to Harris’s campaign.”
As Schweizer noted, Harris’s ties to those working to block exposure of the archdiocese’s secret documents containing information about priests accused of sexual abuse were extensive.
Hiner continued:
Later, as Attorney General, Senator Harris was silent about advocating for clergy abuse victims, surely in part because her boss, Jerry Brown, expressed his disdain for windows of justice that involved his church — he was a Jesuit Seminarian.
Not surprisingly, with no crackdown, San Francisco remains one of the last few archdioceses in the nation to refuse to provide a list of abusers. We believe that the San Francisco list would contain hundreds of names of sexual predators who are yet publicly unknown, leaving communities in California unprotected. Had Hallinan’s policies been pursued, that list would likely already be published, with crucial information that would safeguard the community and help victims heal.
SNAP’s executive director, however, expressed praise for Harris’s successor as California attorney general, Xavier Becerra (D), and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). He said Becerra has “opened a statewide investigation into Catholic Church practices and has ordered all California bishops to preserve sex abuse files.”
Hiner added Newsom “signed into law a three-year ‘window of justice’ that already has attracted hundreds of lawsuits that name predators and enablers, known and unknown.”
“These are monumentally positive moves for victims of clergy abuse and all citizens,” he said. “When predators are named, parents can protect their kids. We believe that what Becerra, Newsom, and the California legislature have done should be replicated nationwide.”
“It is clear that survivors from San Francisco who tried to work with Kamala’s office feel like they were betrayed and hung out to dry,” Hiner added. “Survivors today can look to the work done by AG Xavier Becerra and feel more confident that their top law enforcement official cares about ending the scourge of child sexual abuse, and we hope that Kamala learns from his example.”
As a guest on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily on Thursday with host Alex Marlow, Schweizer noted that victims’ rights groups condemned Harris’s cover-up of the documents detailing allegations of sexual abuse against priests.
“The victims’ rights groups snapped,” Schweizer remarked. “Some of the … groups went absolutely ballistic, and you can understand why. Kamala Harris claimed that she sealed those records to protect victims. The victims call that outrageous and wrong.”
Schweizer pointed out former Gov. Jerry Brown’s (D) alma mater, Saint Ignatius Prep, was one of the “elite-connected” institutions whose supporters contributed to Harris’s campaigns.
“That school has also educated several generations of the Getty family, the very wealthy family that made its money in oil,” he also said, as Marlow observed Newsom’s father served as general counsel for Getty Oil.
“Gavin Newsom is also very passionately supportive of this school,” Schweizer said as well. “Members of the Getty family sit on the school’s board of directors, and, of course, the Getty family were huge backers of Kamala Harris’s run for this office.”
“Once Kamala Harris took that position as San Francisco [district] attorney, these victims were completely shut out by and all cooperation ended,” the author said. “This is a story that needs attention. It demands her being asked about it and her answering questions about it.”
Blue State Blues: Kamala Harris, Serial Abuser of Power
The one thing to know about Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) is that whenever she has a tiny bit of power, she abuses it.
In introducing Harris on Wednesday, former Vice President Joe Biden said that she was a fighter for the “little guy.” But he gave no examples — because there are none.
There are plenty of examples of Harris fighting against the “little guy.”
The most egregious example is her malicious prosecution of filmmaker and anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, who made undercover videos of Planned Parenthood employees discussing how to make money from the sale of tissue from aborted fetuses.
It was the first and only time undercover journalists had been prosecuted under an obscure California law.
Worse, Harris reportedly acted after meeting with Planned Parenthood, which was apparently upset that Daleiden had caught their employees in the act. The abortion group also wanted the videos suppressed. Daleiden says that when the state executed its search warrant on his home, its purpose was to seize unpublished videos to make sure they were never released.
Harris, he said, colluded with a powerful left-wing interest group to abuse the First Amendment and punish him for exposing it.
So much for fighting for the “little guy.”
Harris also abused the powers of her office to target a political opponent. It was part of a pattern. She attempted to force Americans for Prosperity, a 501(c)4 group supported by the Koch brothers, to reveal its donors, though they are already known to the federal Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Harris tried to do at the state level what the IRS scandal had done throughout the country: bully and intimidate a conservative group.
A district judge agreed that allowing Harris to accept the donor lists would allow “harassment” and could suppress the group’s constitutionally-protected liberties. That judgment was overturned by the Ninth Circuit, and the case is pending before the Supreme Court.
What remains noteworthy about the case is Harris’s behavior: singling out a conservative, pro-business group for legal intimidation. Ironically, the 501(c)4 rules protected the NAACP during the civil rights struggle.
Once she arrived in the U.S. Senate, Harris continued her abusive behavior. She developed a habit of badgering witnesses and then turning her questioning into viral YouTube videos to raise campaign cash.
Occasionally, this tactic backfired, as when she grilled Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing about whether he had discussed the Russia “collusion” investigation. Laughably, she had no evidence; even the left-wing California media panned her performance.
The most shocking example came in 2018, when Harris used a confirmation hearing for Ronald Vitiello, who had been nominated to lead the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, to compare ICE to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
In an outrageous exchange, Harris accused ICE — which exists to enforce federal immigration laws the Senate itself has passed — of being like racist vigilantes who lynched black Americans. She had no evidence, only “perceptions.”
Far from fighting for the vulnerable, Harris has been accused of protecting abusers — most notably, declining to prosecute priests for sexual abuse when she was San Francisco’s district attorney. She was the only DA from a major city to refrain.
In the days since former Vice President Joe Biden picked Harris to be his running mate, conservatives have had a field day mocking the New York Times for calling her a “pragmatic moderate.”
Harris is no pragmatist, no record of working across party lines. She was rated by the non-partisan GovTrack as the #1 most left-wing member of the Senate, further left than Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
The main basis for claiming she is a “moderate” appears to be that she is a former prosector. But so, too, is Kim Foxx, the George Soros-funded radical notorious for dropping the charges against Jussie Smollett in Chicago after he faked a hate crime and blamed it on Trump supporters.
There is nothing intrinsically “conservative” or “moderate” about being a prosecutor, even if the current politics of the Democratic Party and Black Lives Matter are hostile to law enforcement. Harris, like many Democrats in politics, saw the prosecutor’s job as a political stepping stone.
When Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) took Harris to task at the second Democratic debate last year, it was not just because Harris had taken a tough approach to marijuana offenders, but because she had laughed later about having smoked pot herself.
The attack resonated because it was an example of Harris abusing her power. She was willing to put thousands of people in jail for breaking a law she did not believe in herself because doing so would burnish her political credentials.
Another basis for claiming Harris is a “moderate” is that she is a creation of the Democratic Party political establishment. She got her start in politics from her association with California State Assembly leader and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. She won her Senate seat in 2016 with the help of the Bay Area liberal gentry and national Democratic leaders, including then-President Barack Obama. After the 2016 election, Harris tapped into Hillary Clinton’s donor network.
But the “woke” Democratic Party establishment is no longer politically “moderate.”
As Shadi Hamid noted in the Wall Street Journal in 2018, it was the Democratic establishment that became most politically extreme after Donald Trump won in 2016, embracing “Russia collusion” conspiracy theories and the like.
The establishment — of both parties — will adopt any outward political stance to protect its power. And Kamala Harris has a career-long habit of abusing hers.
Harris represents a clear and present danger to liberty in an era when the Democratic Party is siding with violent mobs and vowing to sweep away all obstacles to its power if it wins the November elections. Harris actually joined protests outside the White House on May 30, the same day that demonstrators there assaulted a Breitbart News journalist and others. Back home in California, antisemitic Black Lives Matter mobs were rioting through the heart of Los Angeles.
Biden is promising that he will “fundamentally transform” the country, which he says needs “revolutionary institutional changes.” Harris, too, said Wednesday that she intends to overhaul a system afflicted by “systemic” racial injustice. And Obama called for eliminating the Senate filibuster to allow Democrats to do whatever they want.
If Republicans continue to block progress, I’ll get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal. #ClimateTownHall
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 4, 2019
If Harris would be, as many suspect, running a Biden administration from “day one,” the freedom of every American citizen would be at risk.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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