Profiles in Corruption

by Peter Schweizer

  Carol Langford, a legal ethics expert who headed the American Bar Association ethics committee, saw the money flow as a major problem. “Of course, there’s a conflict there. If your office sues someone and you take money from the defendant, that’s a conflict.” She added, “Consider the tenants of these flea-bag hotels who are worried about bugs and rats—and then they see someone who is supposed to be protecting them taking money from the landlord. What are they going to think?”48 Hallinan, who was being vastly outspent in the campaign, claimed that “many of the contributors are connected with city government.” He argued that they were not giving that money for nothing; she would have trouble dealing with “corruption in city agencies” because of the conflict of interest.49

  The ethical problems with Harris’s campaign went beyond the financial questions. Shortly after the election, complaints emerged from city cleaning crews who said they were forced during the campaign to attend political events for mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris.50 Willie Brown had a history of deploying a “patronage army”—a cadre of city employees who performed political work because they owed him their jobs—to help favored candidates win elections.51

  In this particular case, workers assigned to street cleaning crews complained that they were asked to do political work including during Kamala Harris’s run for district attorney. Mohammed Nuru, a Brown protégé hired in 2000, was the deputy director of operations in the City’s Department of Public Works. He ran among other things a project called San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (popularly known as SLUG). The organization was supposedly hired by the city to provide cleanup and gardening work around the Bay Area. But they also served another purpose: as a resource to be deployed as part of the Willie Brown machine. In the 2003 election, they were deployed to help, among others, Kamala Harris in her bid for district attorney.52

  According to internal records, SLUG employees were told by their bosses to “attend campaign events for” Kamala Harris.53 Campaign manager Rebecca Prozan admitted that she had conversations with the head of SLUG, Nuru, throughout the campaign, although she denies asking him to bring workers to the rallies. The results were undeniable. In one instance, Prozan admitted that the Harris campaign had mailed out 9,000 flyers for a public event, but only 50–75 people actually showed up. An investigator said, “Prozan concluded that all or most of the attendees were in fact SLUG workers.” Reportedly, Ron Vinson, a former Willie Brown deputy press secretary, led the workers into events.54

  In the November 2003 elections, Harris came in second behind Hallinan in a three-person race. Because neither candidate received a majority of the vote, there was a runoff.55 Winning the upset runoff victory, in early January 2004, Kamala Harris was sworn in as San Francisco district attorney. She decided to take the oath on a copy of the Bill of Rights rather than the Bible. There were two benedictions—one from a Hindu priest in Sanskrit, the other from an African American minister. The national anthem was played—as well as the National Black Anthem. After the swearing in, there was sitar music, and soul and Indian food were provided.56

  One week after she was sworn in as district attorney, the city opened an investigation into the allegations that city workers were pressured to campaign for Harris and newly elected Mayor Gavin Newsom. But no charges were ever brought.57

  As San Francisco district attorney, Kamala Harris enjoyed enormous discretion in the handling of legal cases. She would often determine which cases to prosecute and which not to. This was particularly true in highly public and politically sensitive cases. Over the course of her tenure, a consistent pattern emerged of favoring individuals and institutions that were either her political supporters, or those closely aligned with Willie Brown, or both. Some of these cases involved all-too-common instances of big-city cronyism and corruption involving city contracts, but other cases would involve disturbing crimes that were covered up.

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  Perhaps the deepest and most troubling mystery of Kamala Harris’s tenure as a prosecutor centers on the disturbing issue of sexual abuse of children by priests. Harris often recounts her background as a sex crimes prosecutor earlier in her career to attack others for their legal failings in this area. In July 2019, for example, she rightly criticized the lax penalties that pedophile Jeffrey Epstein faced in his plea agreement with prosecutors. Harris attacked the prosecutor in the case, Alex Acosta, who was now labor secretary in the Trump administration, for “protecting predators.” Harris even went after the law firm that represented Epstein in those criminal proceedings, arguing that their representation of him “calls into question the integrity of the entire legal system.” Critics noted that she gladly took campaign donations from the same firm.58

  But Harris’s handling of the widespread priest abuse scandal in San Francisco, and later in the entire state of California, raises far more questions. During her decade-and-a-half tenure as a chief prosecutor, Harris would fail to prosecute a single case of priest abuse and her office would strangely hide vital records on abuses that had occurred despite the protests of victims groups.

  Harris’s predecessor as San Francisco district attorney, Terence Hallinan, was aware of and had prosecuted numerous Catholic priests on sexual misconduct involving children. And he had been gathering case files for even more.59 In the spring of 2002, Pope John Paul II convened a meeting in Rome to discuss how to deal with the spreading news of abuse.60 By 2003, with a rising national tide of complaints, the scandals would soon reach cities and towns across America. The Boston Globe produced a Pulitzer Prize–winning series on priest abuse and efforts to cover it up. The scandal had now most definitely engulfed San Francisco. Hallinan’s office had launched an investigation and quickly discovered that the San Francisco Archdiocese had extensive internal records concerning complaints going back some seventy-five years. In spring of 2002, Hallinan demanded the church turn them over to his office. A month later, the archdiocese reluctantly complied.61

  The secret documents were explosive and reportedly contained the names of about forty current and former priests in the San Francisco area who had been identified in sexual abuse complaints. Hallinan used the information from the files to begin pursuing legal cases against them. In nearby San Mateo and Marin County, prosecutors obtained the same church records and those in Marin charged Father Gregory Ingels in 2003.62 But by June 2003, Hallinan and other prosecutors had hit a roadblock: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California’s law extending the statute of limitations for priest abuse cases was unconstitutional.63

  Nevertheless, Hallinan was determined to pursue the cases. Discussions began among California district attorneys about how diocese abuse documents might be released to the public.64 Victim advocates were in favor of releasing them, arguing that redacting the names of victims and other sensitive information could protect their privacy.65 Hallinan’s aggressive pursuit of these issues was of major concern to the Catholic Church and related institutions, which were facing mounting legal bills and settlements dealing with cases going back decades. Several priests were dismissed due to the anticipated release of the documents.66

  The records that Hallinan had in his possession touched on well-connected institutions at the heart of California’s power structure. St. Ignatius College Preparatory School, in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, counted California governor Jerry Brown and the powerful Getty family as alumni.67 The school faced enormous vulnerabilities because of abuse problems there. Based on documents later released by the Jesuits who ran St. Ignatius, in the nearly sixty-year span from 1923 to 1982, in forty-three of those years the school employed at least one priest on the faculty who was later accused of abuse.68

  Hallinan’s investigation threatened to bring dozens of additional cases to light.

  The Catholic Archdiocese in San Francisco had reason to be extremely nervous.

  According to San Francisco election financial disclosures, high-dollar donations to Harris’s campaign began to roll in from those connected to t
he Catholic Church institutional hierarchy. 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.69 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.70 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.71

  Another law firm, Arguedas, Cassman & Headley, was defending a San Francisco priest against abuse claims at the time. They donated $4,550 to Harris. The lawyer in the case, Cristina Arguedas, also served on Kamala Harris’s advisory council.72

  Beyond these law firms, board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese–related organizations and their family members donated another $50,950 to Harris’s campaign.73

  Harris also had ties to those who were working to prevent the Catholic Church documents from coming to light. Harris counts among her mentors Louise Renne, who as a city attorney for San Francisco recruited Harris to come work with her as a city attorney after her falling-out with Hallinan.74 Louise Renne’s husband, Paul, was an attorney at the law firm Cooley Godward, where Russoniello worked.75 Russoniello negotiated the agreement to bury the abuse records from public view.76

  Hallinan’s loss to Harris changed more than the nameplate down at the San Francisco district attorney’s office. With the changing of the guard, the fate of the investigation into Catholic priest abuse would dramatically change—and not for the better.

  Harris, who had been a sexual crimes prosecutor early in her career, moved in the opposite direction of Hallinan and worked to cover-up the records. 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.77 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.”78

  This was a bold claim coming from Harris. During the 2003 campaign, a woman who was allegedly tortured by a boyfriend with a hot iron “blasted” Harris for citing her story during a campaign debate. “I am appalled by Kamala Harris referring to my case,” she said. “Harris is supposedly for victims, but she never consulted me before using my case.” In short, she had publicly talked about a case the victim did not want mentioned.79

  When it came to the priest abuse scandal, the opposite was true. Victims’ groups wanted the documents released and Harris was stopping it. They were outraged by her actions. 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,” said Joey Piscitelli, the northwest regional director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), the largest and most active victims’ group. “You can quote me on that. They’re not protecting the victims.”80

  Rick Simons, an attorney who represented multiple victims of clergy abuse, also attacked Harris’s actions. Hiding the records “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.”81

  Kam Kuwata, a consultant to Los Angeles district attorney Rocky Delgadillo, said there was “no reason why transparency and protecting the victim cannot work hand in hand.”82

  With the outcry of victims groups, Harris’s office then attempted to shift blame, claiming that the idea of burying the evidence had been first suggested by her predecessor, Hallinan.83 But he responded angrily to her claims. “I told Jack Hammel [the archdiocese’s legal counsel] in no uncertain terms that I wouldn’t go along with anything like that.” He went on to point out that the documents contained information about a “potential target of a criminal investigation” and asserted he “wouldn’t do a deal like that for [the archdiocese] any more than I would if it were an Elks Club with a bunch of pedophiles. Those are the kinds of deals that have allowed the church sex scandal to go on as long as it has.”84

  Harris’s actions were strange because they ran contrary to her public image as a fighter for victims—particularly children. Her decision regarding the diocese abuse records set off a chain reaction among those trying to bring to light the widespread abuse that was taking place. James Jenkins, a psychologist who was the founding chairman of the archdiocese’s Independent Review Board, which was offering oversight on how 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. If the names of the priests who had faced credible charges were released, he said, it “would encourage other victims to come forward with their stories. . . . Usually, people who do these things have multiple offenses, usually with multiple victims. The rule of thumb is there are seven more victims for every one who comes forward.”85

  Transparency tends to embolden victims. Statistical evidence from the archdiocese confirms the view that releasing the names of accused priests led to an increase in the number of victims bringing charges. A good example of this is in Los Angeles, where District Attorney Steve Cooley ignored the church’s cry to hide the report and did the opposite of Kamala Harris: he released the records. According to SNAP, this led to more than 211 self-reported or litigation-revealed abusers being named in the Los Angeles Archdiocese.86 In San Francisco, there were only thirty-six, according to a lawsuit filed in 2012.87

  So, what has happened to these abuse records? It is unclear. In April 2010, a journalist with the San Francisco Weekly asked for the records through California’s Public Records Act. Harris’s office denied the request, offering conflicting explanations as to why they could not provide them.88 In 2019, I requested those records through a California attorney. The San Francisco district attorney’s office responded that they no longer had them in their possession. Were they destroyed? Were they moved somewhere else? It remains a disturbing mystery.

  Beyond the handling of these abuse records, Harris also had an abysmal record in prosecuting priest cases.

  She somehow served as San Francisco district attorney from 2004 to 2011, and then as California attorney general from 2011 to 2017, and never brought a single documented case forward against an abusive priest.89 It is an astonishing display of inaction, given the number of cases brought in other parts of the country. To put this lack of action in perspective, at least fifty other cities charged priests in sexual abuse cases during her tenure as San Francisco district attorney. San Francisco is conspicuous by its absence.90

  The blind eye to priest sexual abuse was just part of a pattern of favoritism that has permeated Harris’s career as a prosecutor. Though not as dramatic as the sexual crimes, there were numerous instances where she was apparently prepared to look the other way to protect politically connected insiders.

  Her actions represent the ultimate form of leveraging power in the criminal justice realm—deciding not to pursue criminal charges.

  * * *

  It was the sort o
f thing that vice cops are supposed to do. At San Francisco’s adult entertainment clubs, dancers were taking customers behind closed doors and having sex for money. After repeated complaints that strip clubs in San Francisco were often really serving as prostitution clubs, the San Francisco Police Department decided to take action. They sent out letters to a couple dozen strip clubs and warned them that the police would be looking into their activities. They would be checking their business licenses and making sure that their permits were up to date. The police action caught the attention of newly installed district attorney Kamala Harris, and her staff sent the message to hold off on the enforcement. Meanwhile, in response to continued complaints, the police conducted a pair of sting operations. Three undercover officers went into each of the two clubs and were quickly solicited by female employees for paid sex. At both the Market Street Theater and the New Century Theater, it happened “within minutes.” When the operations were done, nine women were arrested, as was the general manager of the New Century. The cops claimed that they were “slam-dunk cases.”91

  But Kamala Harris dropped the cases.

  “It just leaves me in amazement,” said San Francisco Police Department vice captain Tim Hettrich. It was “almost legalizing prostitution.”92