by Dan Morain
“I kind of got the feeling that if she had her way,” Wyden said, “she’d be on a whole bunch of committees.”
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When Schumer announced the committee assignments on December 20, 2016, Harris hit the equivalent of a political jackpot. She didn’t get a seat on the Judiciary Committee, given the queue of senators many years her senior, but she did get a seat on four committees, all of them high profile. One was Senate Intel. Another was Environment and Public Works. Harris was also assigned to the Senate Budget Committee, one of the key committees with jurisdiction over the Affordable Care Act. And she was given another slot that guaranteed a national spotlight: a seat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Harris wasted no time in announcing her new posts, saying they had put her in the perfect position to take on the Trump administration and the president-elect himself.
“These four committees will be key battlegrounds in the fight for the future of our country,” Harris said. “At a time when so many Californians and Americans are uncertain about our future, I will aggressively fight for our families and the ideals of our nation.”
That Harris was well on her way to making a name for herself on the national stage wasn’t a shock to any Californian who had gotten to know her. But she was shifting her ways. Perhaps it was that she no longer had to be mindful that she was representing the State of California in litigation and could be freer to express her opinions. Clearly, Trump’s election—and hers—was having an impact. Given her status, Harris prepared to lead the resistance to this most unlikely, unorthodox, divisive, and, as she came to view him, racist president.
27 The Resistance
On January 3, 2017, Vice President Joe Biden administered the oath of office to Kamala Harris as California’s forty-fifth senator. The daughter of Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris, immigrants from India and Jamaica who came to America in search of higher education and better lives, was the second Black woman to serve in this most exclusive club and the first woman of Indian descent.
Harris arrived having been briefed by the best political minds in Washington and California on how to succeed in the Senate. Above all, hire a good staff and come prepared. She did that and more. But nothing could have prepared Harris—or the rest of the Senate—for the maelstrom that began with the start of the 115th session of Congress.
Instead of what all of Washington had expected—a friendly handoff of the levers of power from President Obama to Hillary Clinton, former rivals who had become aligned—Donald J. Trump was crashing the party. Trump’s intention was to undo as many achievements by Obama and congressional Democrats as possible.
Trump’s nominees for positions overseeing that dismantling would undergo confirmation hearings immediately, in a Senate that was more bitterly divided along party lines than any person could remember.
Republicans, who controlled the Senate and House of Representatives, would ram through everything the incoming administration wanted on critical issues, including immigration, the environment, health insurance, taxes, and Supreme Court nominees. Democrats could do little more than protest.
In the days leading up to Trump’s inauguration, outgoing Obama administration officials were gravely concerned about intelligence suggesting that Trump’s campaign, and perhaps the president-elect himself, might have colluded with Russia in ways that helped him defeat Hillary Clinton. Working in secret, Obama’s national security team raced to investigate any potential ties before Trump took the reins of power on January 20. The Obama administration’s goal was to document and safeguard incriminating information lest Trump try to whitewash the matter. All of that made for a tense time between the start of Congress and Trump’s inauguration.
Democrats saw Harris, who had spent twenty-six years in law enforcement, much of it as a line prosecutor, as someone whose skills would come in handy. Although she hadn’t tried a case in more than a decade, she could use her courtroom experience to cross-examine uncooperative Trump administration officials in ways few other senators could.
That, no doubt, was one of the reasons Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer put her on so many important committees, including one that is usually out of reach for freshmen: the Senate Intelligence Committee.
One of its longest-ever serving members, Ron Wyden, couldn’t remember the last time a first-year senator was given a seat on Intel. But it was becoming increasingly clear in the days after Harris’s swearing-in that her election to the Senate could not have been better timed, for herself and her political aspirations and for a Democratic Party on the ropes.
Between Intel, Homeland Security, Environment and Public Works, and Budget, Harris became a front-line responder trying to hold the Democratic line against many, if not most, of the issues at the heart of Trump’s agenda. Her role in that effort, or counter-effort, would only grow and help inform and define Harris’s tenure in the Senate and, in time, her run for the White House.
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Senator Kamala Harris’s sixth day in office, January 10, 2017, was a harbinger of the contentious and exhaustively busy times to come. In the morning, the Homeland Security Committee held a confirmation hearing for retired Marine Corps general John F. Kelly. As head of the U.S. Southern Command, Kelly oversaw all American military operations in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean from November 2012 to January 2016. As Trump’s nominee for the powerful post of Homeland Security secretary, Kelly would run point on many issues of critical importance to the border state of California, and the nation. The four-star general came so well regarded that the bipartisan outpouring of support for him, and the fawning lawmaker compliments, was noteworthy even for Congress.
“This is a remarkable public servant,” North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp gushed in Kelly’s confirmation hearing. “But one of the reasons why I believe that DHS won the Cabinet lottery—and you can tell from perhaps this love fest that we are having with you today—is that you have such a breadth of experience in an area that is very challenging to our Southern Border and really our entire border security.”
Harris wasn’t nearly so celebratory when it was her turn to ask questions.
After thanking Kelly for his service, she began questioning whether he would carry out Trump’s stated plans to build a border wall, deport thousands of people, expand the administration’s enforcement authority, and increase the number of detention cells nationwide. Such issues might not matter much in the Dakotas. But they were of paramount importance and interest in California, where 40 percent of the population is Latino, most of them with roots in Central America, and 27 percent of the population is foreign born.
Harris homed in immediately on DACA, short for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. One of Obama’s signature programs, DACA gave protections to many young people, popularly known as Dreamers, whose parents sought better lives for themselves and their children and crossed the border into the United States with their children in tow. Although Dreamers were not U.S. citizens, most of them had no connection to their parents’ home country. California has more Dreamers than any other state by far, 183,000, many of them in college and many others working. Deporting them was said to be one of Trump’s first initiatives. Harris rightly wanted to know where Kelly stood.
“Are you familiar that under your predecessors, the director of Homeland Security made the decision and issued the information to the troops?” Harris asked. “It was not the President. Are you familiar with that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Kelly responded.
“OK. And do you agree that many of these young people were brought here as children and only know America as their home?” Harris asked.
“Many of them are in that category” was Kelly’s reply.
“And do you agree,” Harris continued, “that they are now studying at colleges and universities and graduate schools across our country, some are working in Fortune 100 companies, major institutions, and businesses, both small and large?”
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nbsp; “I am aware that some are, yes,” Kelly said.
“And do you intend then to use the limited law enforcement resources of DHS to remove them from the country?”
“I will follow the law,” Kelly said.
In her questioning, Harris had been polite but direct: throughout the hearing, she came across as much more of a polished lawmaker than the fearsome bulldog of a prosecutor that some of her colleagues expected. But in this case, she got an answer to her question. Kelly was suggesting, without stating it directly, that he would oversee a policy that would lead to the deportation of Dreamers. It was a direct threat to more than 150,000 people in Harris’s home state.
Harris would save her verdict for Kelly until nine days later, when she issued a statement saying she would vote against him.
“Unfortunately, I can’t look Dreamers in the face and offer them any guarantee that General John Kelly won’t deport them,” she said. “And, without that guarantee, I can’t support his nomination for the Department of Homeland Security. For ethical and moral reasons, we have to honor the promise made by the United States government to these kids.”
Kelly was confirmed on an 88–11 Senate vote the next day, January 20, and sworn in hours later—on the same day as Trump’s inauguration. Harris was one of the eleven; Feinstein voted aye.
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An hour or so after Kelly’s confirmation hearing concluded, Harris attended her first public hearing of the Senate Intel Committee.
On the witness list were four of the government’s top national security officials, who were there to brief senators on a just-released intelligence report about Russia’s multipronged effort to sway the presidential election in Trump’s favor.
At the time, public speculation—and alarm—about the Trump campaign’s possible assistance from Russia had reached a fever pitch, and the president-elect was doing little to refute it except to denounce it as “fake news.”
While still in office, in December 2016, President Obama had tasked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency with compiling the top-secret report titled Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections. A much-redacted, declassified version of it had been released a few days in advance of the hearing, and its conclusions were chilling.
The report said Russia had indeed carried out a comprehensive cyber campaign to sabotage the presidential election and help Trump and that it was personally ordered by Russian president Vladimir Putin.
“Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order,” the report said, “but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.”
Trump and Obama were both briefed on the report and given a copy of it.
Afterward, Trump issued a statement trying to spread the blame, asserting that not only Russia but China and other countries and groups too may have sought to breach Democratic and Republican computer systems. And, he added, “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”
The public report, however, hadn’t addressed the issue of the outcome of the election. And while the highly classified version of the report contained the same findings, it was far more detailed regarding what it said were “key elements of the influence campaign.” Those details were explosive enough to rock the Senate and the rest of Washington.
Among its findings, according to the Washington Post, was that U.S. spy agencies had unverified but credible intelligence that Moscow had kompromat, or embarrassing and compromising information, on Trump’s personal life and finances. That meant the soon-to-be occupant of the White House and world’s most powerful man was potentially subject to blackmail and coercion by one of America’s most aggressive enemies after it had helped him get elected.
Those findings were reportedly contained in a two-page summary attached to the full report. That addendum, the Washington Post reported, also included allegations of ongoing contact between members of Trump’s inner circle and Kremlin representatives.
As California attorney general, Harris had been privy to sensitive law enforcement information about transnational gangs, terrorist threats, and more. The Senate Intelligence Committee operates on a different and far deeper level of secrecy. Its entire staff works out of a bunkerlike SCIF, or sensitive compartmented information facility, within a windowless vault in the bowels of the Senate office complex. For Harris, who had walked into the Senate a few days earlier, being “read in” on matters so vital to national security was eye-opening.
The Intel hearing itself was a spectacle. It was carried live by major cable news networks, and with more than 150 cameras trained on the senators, it had all the trappings of the Watergate impeachment hearings. By the time it was her turn, many of the critical questions had already been asked.
So Harris instead put a series of well-informed questions to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper about whether U.S. intelligence agencies were making sure that the computer networks and personal devices of the president-elect and his transition team were protected from Russia’s ongoing cyber-penetration efforts.
“We’ve done what we can to educate the transition team about the pitfalls of mobile devices in secure areas and the like,” Clapper said.
“Do you believe your education efforts have been successful?” Harris asked.
“You’d have to ask them, I think,” Clapper said cryptically.
In the coming months, one media report after another documented exactly the kind of careless security breaches that Harris had inquired about, including top Trump officials using private cell phones and computers to conduct White House business. Harris asked a few more questions of FBI director James Comey before everyone headed into a closed session, but nothing contentious.
Two days later, though, Harris began to go on the offensive, in the confirmation hearing for Trump’s nominee for CIA director, Congressman Mike Pompeo, a Republican from Kansas.
Harris bore in, starting with the findings of the just-released intelligence report.
“Do you fully accept its findings, yes or no?” Harris asked Pompeo about the intel report.
“I’ve seen nothing to cast any doubt on the findings in the report,” Pompeo responded.
Harris also took a detour into some mostly uncharted waters for the committee, giving her Senate colleagues evidence both of her preparedness for hearings and her willingness to inject progressive politics into intelligence matters.
She questioned Pompeo at length about his known skepticism about climate change despite a near unanimous consensus from U.S. government scientists, wanting to determine exactly how skeptical he really was. And more important, Harris asked Pompeo if his personal beliefs would negatively influence the CIA’s ongoing efforts to gather intelligence about how global warming was already triggering rising instability and conflict around the world.
When Pompeo dodged, Harris came back a second time, late in the hearing, to pin him down.
“Mr. Pompeo, on the issue of climate change, I understand you’re not a scientist. What I’d like to know and what I want to hear from you is I want a CIA Director who is willing to accept the overwhelming weight of evidence when presented, even if it turns out to be politically inconvenient or requires you to change a previously held position.”
Harris got Pompeo on the record as saying that he would.
She then told the nominee for CIA director she was concerned that the Trump administration would adopt discriminatory practices that undermined the CIA’s efforts to recruit and retain LGBTQ and Muslim American employees, “who serve often with great distinction at the agency” and at great risk to themselves.
During a series of questions about the specific laws that apply, Harris elicited from Pompeo an assurance that all employees would be protected equa
lly. Those early hearings, and others, showed that Harris was not the overnight sensation the media would later make her out to be. Nor was she a spotlight-hogging self-promoter. She was getting the work done.
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Kamala Harris showed up well prepared. During hearings, she would spread out and open up her thick binders of documents and notes and write her questions on the fly on little white Post-its. Harris was also a quick study of the Senate’s arcane rules of procedure and protocol. And she appeared to be respectful of her colleagues and cognizant of her place in the Senate hierarchy.
As she set out to do, Harris hired a smart and diverse staff, bringing east her top Sacramento deputy, Nathan Barankin, as her Senate chief of staff, Capitol Hill veterans Rohini Kosoglu as deputy chief of staff, and Clint Odom, who would be the Senate’s only Black legislative director, and Tyrone Gayle, a twenty-nine-year-old African American press secretary who had worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. To oversee her national media strategy, Harris hired Lily Adams. The granddaughter of the late Texas governor Ann Richards, Adams had served in a similar role for Hillary Clinton. She quickly became well regarded among Senate staffers and known for playing an integral role in preparing Harris for high-impact moments, like her questioning of top Trump officials. Harris’s go-to political consultants in San Francisco, Ace Smith, Sean Clegg and Dan Newman, continued to advise her as well.
Harris reached out to other Democrats and Republicans alike to work on issues of mutual interest. One was Kentucky Republican senator Rand Paul. They shared an interest in reforming the cash bail system. They also agreed to cosponsor legislation to protect undocumented youth under DACA. And she asked Arizona Republican senator John McCain out for coffee. He shared with her the wisdom of his time in Congress and on the campaign trail.