Kamala's record as prosecutor fuels Trump critique, but she's doubling down

Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascension as the likely Democratic nominee has forced conservatives to pivot somewhat from criticizing President Joe Biden and to use new lines of attack against his former running mate. But Harris’s mixed record has different components of the political right seizing upon its disparate elements while the Trump campaign has pointed to her own “weak-on-crime” record.

She, meanwhile, has leaned into her record as a prosecutor to paint the race as that of a prosecutor against a convicted felon.

Biden announced on Sunday that he had decided not to seek reelection and endorsed Harris to succeed him as the Democratic standard bearer. She has since received the endorsement of nearly every major party lawmaker and has reportedly secured enough delegates to clinch the nomination at the Democratic National Convention.

The Trump campaign initially focused its efforts on attempting to tie Harris to Biden’s record in light of her place in the administration. To that end, Trump surrogates attempted to deem her “Biden 2.0” and quickly released an ad highlighting the situation at the southern border and current economic conditions, further claiming that “Kamala owns this failed record.”

Trump himself, moreover, quickly moved toward painting Harris as a political radical far to the left of Biden, though he further attempted to cast her as power behind-the-scenes directing the Biden administration through its worst moments.

"Kamala Harris has been the ultra liberal driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe. She is a radical left lunatic who will destroy our country," Trump said at a rally in Charlotte, N.C., earlier this week. "Kamala Harris is the most liberal elected politician in American history."

A “Soros prosecutor”

Prior to her service as vice president, Harris was a senator from California, the state attorney general, and the San Francisco district attorney. Republicans appear poised to seize on her record and label her as a soft-on-crime prosecutor in the vein of the “Soros-backed DA” that Republicans have painted as among the leading causes of crime spikes.

The endorsement by Alex Soros for Harris this week is likely to cement the label in the minds of conservatives, who have already claimed she supported “defunding the police” and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"Kamala Harris is just as incompetent as Joe Biden and even more liberal. She was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate for Joe Biden's most disastrous policies,” Trump Campaign National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Just the News. “Not only does Kamala need to defend her support of Joe Biden’s failed agenda over the past four years, she also needs to answer for her own terrible weak-on-crime record in California.”

“A vote for Kamala is a vote to allow illegal immigrants from all over the world to invade our country, a vote to defund the police, abolish ICE, and bail violent criminals out of jail,” Leavitt went on.

Other Trump surrogates, such as campaign communications director Steven Cheung deemed Harris “soft as Charmin,” in reference to her criminal justice policies and the toilet paper brand. He further asserted that she supported releasing “anti-police rioters, rapists, and criminals,” and that she supported defunding the police.

“Too tough on crime?”

On the complete opposite end of the issue, Harris previously took flak from progressives during her own presidential campaign for being ostensibly too overzealous in her prosecutions.

During the 2020 Democratic primary cycle, Harris faced attacks on her record as a prosecutor, with former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, claiming she “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she had ever smoked marijuana.” Harris did oversee roughly 2,000 convictions related to marijuana while serving as California attorney general, but most of those did not serve jail time, according to Yahoo News.

She has further faced scrutiny over her handling of a Supreme Court mandate that the state reduce its prison population and allegations that she fought to keep prisoners incarcerated past their release dates for use as cheap labor.

The claims have some conservatives hoping to seize on the issue to win over support with minority communities. Conservative commentator Rob Smith, for instance this week, shared a “Mosaic of Kamala Harris made up of photos of the Black men she locked up and kept in prison past their release date for free labor.”

“She put a lot of Black men in jail for small stuff, small ball,” Trump ally and Republican National Committee member Harmeet Dhillon told Politico this week. 

Such criticisms seem to resemble Trump’s attacks on President Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign cycle over his authorship of a 1994 crime bill that critics said led to large-scale incarcerations. But the right is far from united on that avenue of attack. Commentator Matt Walsh, for instance, suggested that such an approach was “exactly the wrong move.”

“It would be a disastrous and probably fatal error. Attacking Kamala FROM THE LEFT on crime, accusing her of locking up poor young innocent black men, would be political suicide,” he added. “This is exactly the kind of thing I’m worried about. It’s exactly the sort of mistake Republicans love to make.”

Harris’s response

Harris, for her part, seems inclined to lean into her record as a prosecutor and to present herself as an aggressive prosecutor and to contrast her past employment with Trump’s status as a convicted felon.

The former president was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush money case. He has, however, sought to have the conviction vacated in light of a Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity. But the conviction, nonetheless, has Harris linking Trump with an array of criminal offenders she previously faced in judicial proceedings.

“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds — predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” Harris said in Wisconsin this week, according to Politico. “So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

She further intends to highlight the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot in a bid to paint Trump himself as a candidate of lawlessness and who has little respect for the American system, her aides told the outlet.

For her part, Harris has gone on the record as supporting "defund the police" arguments, and her tweets supporting "The Freedom Fund" to raise bail for those arrested in the George Floyd riots remain online. 

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X.