She embraced the movement to defund police in 2020, saying that activists had ‘rightly’ called to redirect police budgets from officers.

By Chuck Ross, The Washington Free Beacon

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is touting her as a tough-on-crime prosecutor who “put murderers and abusers behind bars” as part of a $50 million ad blitz in several battleground states.

But that PR effort will have to contend with Harris’s record as San Francisco district attorney, which includes lenient plea deals and probation for a string of career criminals—a serial domestic abuser who later murdered his girlfriend, a repeat felon who gunned down a newspaper editor in Harris’s hometown of Oakland, and others.

Harris’s fledgling campaign is leaning on her prosecutorial past—as San Francisco district attorney, then California attorney general—to fend off criticism of her soft-on-crime record.

“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,” she said at a campaign rally in Wisconsin last week.

“So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

But in 2005, Harris struck a plea deal with Dwayne Reed, charged with the murder of the California secretary of state’s son during a robbery.

Harris agreed to release Reed, who had six prior felony convictions, in exchange for testifying against his accomplice in the murder-robbery, according to news reports at the time.

Reed, who was released from jail two days after testifying against his accomplice, murdered another man eight months later.

In December 2004, Harris’s office agreed to a plea deal with Scott McAlpin, who was charged with domestic violence against a woman, Anastasia Melnitchenko, whom he had stalked and terrorized since 2001, according to SFGATE.

Eight months after the plea deal, McAlpin, who had eight other domestic violence charges on his record, murdered Melnitchenko and stuffed her body in his trunk.

Prosecutors in Harris’s office did oppose McAlpin’s release from a San Francisco jail days before the murder.

Former San Francisco homicide prosecutor Jim Hammer, who worked under Harris, criticized her for striking plea deals with both Reed and McAlpin, and wrote in a September 2006 column that Harris lacked the “guts and the willingness to go after tough cases.”

In 2006, Harris’s office granted probation to Devaughndre Broussard, charged in the brutal assault and robbery of a metro train passenger.

A year later, Broussard assassinated Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, who was investigating a crime syndicate implicating Broussard’s family.

“He should have gone to state prison,” the father of Broussard’s previous assault victim said at the time. “Blame it on Kamala Harris.”

Harris has not addressed her handling of those cases, and her campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

But she has faced criticism before as being soft on crime, and overly critical of police officers.

She embraced the movement to defund police in 2020, saying that activists had “rightly” called to redirect police budgets from officers on the street to social services programs.

During Harris’s tenure as district attorney—from 2004 to 2011—police officers accused her of being too slow to charge murder cases, and offering lenient plea deals in lieu of going to trial.

She even alienated fellow Democrats, including then-Sen. Dianne Feinstein, for quickly rejecting capital murder charges in the April 2004 murder of San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza.

A San Francisco homicide investigator blasted Harris over her handling of the murder case of David Taylor, who confessed to beating and stabbing his 65-year-old mother to death in a drug-induced haze.

Harris’s office took over the case, and agreed to a voluntary manslaughter charge against Taylor, which carried a 12-year prison sentence.

“This deal was made without any input from me,” San Francisco homicide inspector Maureen D’Amico said in 2006.

“It was just picture-perfect investigation when everything was done right, done well,” D’Amico said.

“If (Taylor) gets out, goes back to crack cocaine, he is liable to flip out. This time it could be an innocent citizen.”

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Unburdened by the past, Kamala II is ready to march into the future while accepting responsibility for none of the past.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

Some scurrilous social media disinformation sources have taken to accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of supporting the Green New Deal, banning fracking, defunding the police, and describing herself as Indian.

Experts using science however agree that Kamala Harris didn’t say any of these things, and that if she said them she didn’t mean them and anyway coconuts are an incredibly delicious source of nutrients that are also used to power the space shuttle.

Faced with cheapfakes, fakecheaps, AI deepfakes, and misinformation, the intelligence community has already concluded that as of last week, Kamala Harris has nothing to do with some unknown (possibly Russian) impersonator who temporarily played the vice president and occasionally the border czar.

That Kamala Harris, prone to inappropriate malapropisms, circuitous sentences, and awkward cackles best suited to a sitcom laugh track, has nothing to do with the exciting new candidate Kamala Harris(!) who emerged last week and has already garnered 2 billion social media followers, $500 million in donations and 1.2 trillion volunteers all ready to campaign and cast their votes in Atlanta.

Kamala Harris II is not only a genius who can fix everything but is literally a being who has never existed until last week and cannot be blamed for any of the actions of Kamala Harris I whom scientific experts in the intelligence community have signed a paper saying was probably an android programmed by Republicans to be really annoying.

Unburdened by the past, Kamala II is ready to march into the future while accepting responsibility for none of the past.

She is black or Indian and likes the same things you like (probably) and mostly is incredibly awesome because she doesn’t really exist.

Like Schrodinger’s Cat, she is in a state of flux due to her quantum uncertainty. She may be one thing or another.

Like William James’ theory of “I” and “Me”, she may not even be a truly conscious being, but a collection of momentary impulses in which case she can’t be blamed for the border, the economy or any of it.

The one thing we know about Kamala is that she isn’t Kamala. She’s everything except Kamala.

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Christie did not endorse any of the rivals, rather he criticized them for not targeting Trump.

By The Associated Press

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Wednesday suspended his Republican presidential bid just days before Iowa’s leadoff caucuses, ceding to growing pressure to drop out of the race from those desperate to deny Donald Trump a glidepath to the nomination.

Addressing supporters at a New Hampshire town hall, Christie said he had come to the conclusion that he had no pathway to victory.

“Campaigns are run to win. That’s why we do them,” he said. “It’s clear to me tonight that there isn’t a path for me to win the nomination.”

“My goal has never been to be just a voice against the hate and division and the selfishness of what our party has become under Donald Trump,” he added, vowing to continue to warn the party and the country about the dangers of a second Trump term.

“I am going to make sure that in no way do I enable Donald Trump to ever be president of the United States again. And that’s more important than my own personal ambition,” he said.

Christie did not immediately endorse any of rivals and instead continued to lace into them in his remarks for failing to directly target Trump for fear of alienating the front-runner’s loyal supporters. Underscoring his deep frustrations, he was overheard on a hot mic before the event began criticizing former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.

“She’s going to get smoked,” he said in an audio broadcast on the campaign’s livestream feed. “She’s not up to this.” He was also overheard saying Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had called him, petrified, but the audio was cut before he finished the thought.

Haley responded in a statement calling Christie “a friend for many years,” and commending him “on a hard-fought campaign.” DeSantis posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he agreed with Christie that Haley would “get smoked.”

Christie’s dropout comes as a surprise, given the former governor had staked his campaign on New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary, which is less than two weeks away. He had insisted as recently as Tuesday night that he had no plans to leave the race, continuing to cast himself as the only candidate willing to tell the truth and directly take on the former president.

“I would be happy to get out of the way for someone who is actually running against Donald Trump,” he said at a town hall in Rochester, New Hampshire, while arguing that none of his rivals had stepped up to the plate.

“I’m famous enough. … I’ve got plenty of titles. … The only reason to do this is to win,” he added. “So I’d be happy to get out of the way for somebody if they actually were going against Donald Trump.”

But Christie faced a stark reality: While recent polls showed him reaching the double digits in New Hampshire, Haley shows signs of momentum. A CNN/UNH poll conducted in the state this week found Trump’s lead down to the single digits, with 4 in 10 likely Republican primary voters choosing Trump and about one-third now choosing Haley.

Allies of Haley, including New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and other anti-Trump Republicans, had been urging Christie to exit. They are hoping a large portion of his supporters will flock to Haley, who is seen as the most moderate candidate remaining, giving her a chance to turn the race into a two-candidate contest with Trump, the overwhelming favorite for the nomination.

The New Hampshire poll — which showed Christie at 12% — found about two-thirds of his supporters would select Haley as their second choice.

Christie had run as the race’s fiercest critic of the former president-turned-GOP front-runner. He warned voters against nominating a candidate who has been criminally indicted four times and could very well be a convicted felon by the November general election. And he argued Trump will lose in a rematch with President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic nominee.

While his anti-Trump message attracted much media attention and helped bring in waves of small-dollar donations that kept him in the race — and on the debate stage — far longer than many expected, Christie was plagued by high unfavorability ratings in a party that remains deeply loyal to Trump.

Nonetheless, Christie managed to outlast far better-known and better-funded candidates, including former Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, in part because he ran a frugal campaign. Instead of flying by private jet and hiring a litany of expensive consultants, he relied on a tight-knit staff of just over a dozen people and had a far lower “burn rate” than rivals like DeSantis, spending far less per day.

And just as he did when he ran in 2016, Christie banked his campaign on New Hampshire, believing his brash “tell it like it is” style would resonate with the state’s more independent-leaning voters, including those who are unaffiliated with a party and can vote in the Republican primary.

He also campaigned in South Carolina and hoped to emerge as the last man standing against Trump after the early state contests.

Christie had long insisted that he had no plans to leave the race before New Hampshire’s primary on Jan. 23 and appeared on track to perform better than he had in 2016, when he finished in sixth with just 7% of the vote.

At the town hall Tuesday, he delivered a sharply worded rebuttal to those calling on him to drop out to clear the path for Haley, arguing that she wasn’t even trying to beat the front-runner.

“I have no interest in being a spoiler for someone who wants to beat Donald Trump,” he said. “But if you’d be willing to be his vice president, if you’d pardon him if you became president, if you’d vote for him even if he’s a convicted felon … I mean, geez, really?”

Christie asked the crowd to imagine what would happen if he dropped out to support Haley and then she agreed to serve as Trump’s running mate.

“What will I look like? What will all the people who supported her at my behest look like?” he asked. “You know, I made that mistake once, eight years ago. I made an endorsement decision based on politics eight years ago when I supported Trump. I’m not going to make the same mistake again. Can’t do it.”

The campaign, in many ways, felt like a mission of redemption for the former governor, who arguably did more than any other Republican to help Trump win the presidency when they faced each other in 2016.

During that contest, Christie delivered a fatal blow to Marco Rubio, another 2016 presidential rival, during a debate that came just as the GOP establishment appeared to be coalescing around the senator from Florida as a Trump alternative. No other candidate ever emerged in his place.

Then, after Christie dropped out, he became the first major GOP figure to endorse Trump during a surprise press conference. He went on to lead Trump’s White House transition operation — before he was unceremoniously fired — and to serve as an on-again-off-again adviser, including preparing Trump for the debates.

It was during one of their 2020 debate prep sessions that Christie believes Trump gave him COVID-19, putting Christie in the hospital in intensive care.

But it wasn’t until the night of the 2020 election that Christie, who had been friends with Trump and his wife for 20 years, broke with the then-president after Trump falsely claimed victory long before all the votes had been counted. Christie later penned a book that was deeply critical of the former president.

After the announcement, Republican Norm Olsen, 71, of Portsmouth, said he wasn’t surprised by Christie’s announcement given his position in the polls.

“It’s very disappointing,” he said. “I think Chris Christie was the best Republican candidate and he had the courage to do what has to happen in this party, and that is stand up against former President Trump.”

Olsen said with Christie out of the race, he’ll be voting for Haley, in part because she, like Christie, has experience being a governor.

“The most important thing over the next couple of weeks is that former President Trump does not win,” he said. “It will be the first chance to save the Republican Party from him.”

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