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.”
When just now I google-searched "Kamala Harris protected pedaphile priests", links to a lot of news articles came up.
This was at the top of my Facebook timeline when I woke up this morning, I left out a ton of other people's comments:
This was at the top of my Facebook timeline when I woke up this morning, I left out a ton of other people's comments:
I don’t know how I’ll vote in November, other than it won’t be for Trump. I don’t know a lot about Kamala Harris, either, but what I do know is that if all conservatives have is the old, worn-out allegation they have always slung at any woman in a position of power - that she slept her way to the top - then Biden picked himself a winner. It’s disgusting and will certainly earn an unfriending from me. You’re better than that, gentlemen. Knock that shit off.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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