by Dan Morain
All the while, Harris’s publicity machine was busy broadcasting her positions across Twitter and other social media on signature issues and trumpeting news of her strident concerns about Trump, his administration’s policies, and their alleged wrongdoing and cover-ups.
Harris built a loyal and national Twitter following, often focusing on Trump’s actions against immigrants, working families, and people of color. As winter turned to spring, Harris became more aggressive in her questioning of witnesses in a never-ending gauntlet of Intel, Homeland Security, Environment, and Budget hearings. She began appearing with increasing frequency on the nation’s most-watched news shows and in the pages of its most prominent newspapers. Her global profile grew, thanks to the huge cadre of foreign correspondents in Washington to chronicle the Trump administration for their audiences back home.
By early summer, Harris had emerged as one of the Trump administration’s most aggressive and high-profile critics. Keeping true to her 2016 election-night speech, Kamala Harris was fast becoming a leader in the Democratic resistance to Trump in the Senate. More broadly, she was seen as a symbol of a new generation in Washington.
With Harris’s arrival, change had come to the Senate. More was yet to come.
28 “I’m Asking the Questions”
On January 29, 2017, Senator Kamala Harris, following in the footsteps of parents who marched for civil rights in the 1960s, joined protesters outside the White House who were denouncing President Trump’s declaration that he was banning travel from seven majority-Muslim nations, an order that proved to be illegal.
In Washington, Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham condemned the ban, warning it “will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism.” Back in California, the Muslim travel ban confirmed some of the worst fears of the anti-Trump resistance. Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, already running for governor, joined a thousand people at an impromptu protest at San Francisco International Airport. They sang the Woody Guthrie protest ode “This Land Is Your Land.”
That night, Harris called Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly at his home to voice her concerns and those of her constituents and to elicit details about the administration’s plans.
“Why are you calling me at home with this?” Kelly gruffly replied to the U.S. senator. Harris, stunned at the response, tried to explain. The call ended quickly with Kelly saying he’d get back to the senator. He never did, she writes in her autobiography.
In the months ahead, Harris gradually amped up the intensity of her cross-examinations of Trump administration officials. She took that to a fierce new level on June 6, 2017, when Kelly came before the Homeland Security Committee. Harris was itching for this day.
Harris grilled Kelly on Trump administration threats to cut off federal anti-terrorism funds to cities that didn’t enforce harsh new immigration detention orders, a direct threat to California’s major cities, even when those cities’ lawyers concluded it would expose them to civil liability.
Harris’s questions came in rapid-fire succession, and she frequently cut off Kelly in an effort to get him to provide responsive answers. Visibly frustrated, the normally unflappable former general began protesting that he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
Finally, an exasperated Kelly said, “Would you let me finish once?”
“Excuse me?” Harris replied. “I’m asking the questions.”
So it went. Republicans on the committee weren’t happy. Harris didn’t seem to care that she had ruffled their feelings.
* * *
On June 7, 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appeared before Senate Intel. Senators wanted to know about his role in Trump’s decision a month earlier to fire FBI director James Comey. They also intended to question Rosenstein about his decision to appoint Robert Mueller as a special counsel to oversee the Justice Department probe into possible ties between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign.
When Harris’s turn came, she peppered Rosenstein with yes-or-no questions and, as with Kelly, interrupted when he started to dodge. Harris’s focus was on getting Rosenstein to commit to writing a letter granting Mueller complete independence as a bulwark against White House interference or retaliation.
As she spoke, she pointed at Rosenstein, pen in hand. Flustered, he explained that the issue was complicated and that his response would require “a very lengthy conversation” with Harris.
“Can you give me a yes-or-no answer?” Harris replied.
“It’s not a short answer, Senator,” Rosenstein said.
“It is,” Harris shot back. “Either you are willing to do that, or you are not.”
As Harris’s questioning got increasingly testy, committee chairman Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, cut her off. Looking in her direction, Burr said, “Would the senator suspend? The chair is going to exercise its right to allow the witnesses to answer the question.…”
Harris, incredulous, was not accustomed to being told to, in essence, stifle herself. She whipped her head around to glare at Burr. Squinting her eyes in disapproval, she listened as his rebuke of her continued before a live TV audience estimated to be in the millions. Burr told Harris he was exercising his right as chairman by giving Rosenstein “the courtesy, which has not been extended all the way across,” of responding how he saw fit. When Harris tried to explain her line of questioning, Burr cut her off again. Democrats stayed silent, some looking at their notes. Kamala Harris was definitely leaving an impression.
The exchange went viral immediately: old White male senators had “shushed” Harris, the only Black woman on the committee. As it exploded on Twitter, the rancorous partisan bickering worsened between Democratic and Republican senators and between Democrats and the Trump administration.
Within hours, Harris and her staff had shrewdly exploited the incident by coming up with a meme:
“Courage, Not Courtesy.”
That went viral as well, and so did related merchandise. “RT this if you’ve ordered your ‘Courage, Not Courtesy’ sticker and want your friends and family to get one too,” Harris tweeted. Some of it, unaffiliated with Harris, added the words HARRIS 2020. Six days after that, Harris herself would engineer her most viral moment of all.
* * *
The Intel Committee’s witness that day on June 13, 2017, was Jeff Sessions, though some of Harris’s staffers made a point of saying aloud his full name, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, in recognition that, like his father and grandfather, he was named for the Confederate president and a Confederate general. As a U.S. senator from Alabama, Sessions was the first major Republican to endorse Trump’s presidential run in February 2016. But as attorney general, he followed Justice Department guidelines and recused himself from the Trump-Russia probe, citing a conflict of interest stemming from his appointed role as the head of the Trump campaign’s national security advisory council. That infuriated Trump, because it put a civil servant, Rosenstein, in charge of the investigation. For those and other reasons, Sessions’s testimony was must-see TV, and some were tuning in to see Harris cross-examine him. They were curious what she could draw out about what he knew about possible Trump connections to Russia during and after the campaign, about why Trump fired Comey, and about Trump’s efforts to derail the probe.
“Smoke the hell out of Jeff Sessions Tuesday,” Jim Spears, a Louisiana voter, a college teacher, and an occasional tweeter, said in a tweet to Harris. “I’m eager for the grill.” Spears was one Democratic voter who thought Harris was the Democrats’ best weapon against Sessions, that she would “just cut through Jeff Sessions’ bullshit and racism to get whatever answers she needed.”
Harris’s rapid questioning looked especially jarring in contrast with Sessions, a seemingly mild-mannered, elfin five-foot-five septuagenarian with a southern drawl. His genteel disposition aside, he had taken the hardest line possible against immigration when he was in the Senate. Sessions spent much of the hearing dodging questions.
“I don’t recall,” he restated.
Harris interrogated Sessions about whether he had met Russian business leaders or intelligence operatives at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, which, as it turned out, was a focus of Kremlin operations. He said he had not. Then, he said, he wanted to clarify his answer given how many people he’d met in Cleveland. Harris continued to press him, and a visibly rattled Sessions pleaded with her to slow down.
“I’m not able to be rushed this fast,” Sessions stammered. “It makes me nervous.”
As many of her current and former staffers can attest, Harris can have that effect on people. She kept at it, demanding more specificity from Sessions about what law or policy he was invoking in saying he couldn’t discuss key issues or share documents with the committee. Sessions replied, “I’m not able to answer the question.” Harris wasn’t buying it.
“You rely on that policy. Did you not ask your staff to show you the policy that would be the basis for refusing to answer the majority of the questions that have been asked of you?”
As she continued, once again, Harris was shut down.
“Senator Harris, let him answer,” one of the senior Republicans on the committee told her.
Afterward, Republican senators and conservative commentators accused Harris of being disrespectful and failing to follow Senate rules of order. Old-time Washington hands, especially old men, were having difficulty with Harris’s audacity and her tenacity. But no one who knew her back in California had any doubt that this was Kamala Harris’s way.
29 “Yes or No”
Kamala Harris’s star was rising after the June 2017 hearings where she grilled top Trump administration officials John Kelly, Jeff Sessions, and Rod Rosenstein.
Not surprisingly, Republicans were critical of Harris’s style. She also was irritating some of her fellow Democrats and career Homeland Security officials who had no political ax to grind but felt insulted by her.
In private, some Democrats believed her pugilistic tone was mostly for show. Others suspected her thirst for the spotlight was part of a long-range plan to “pull an Obama” by staying just long enough in the Senate to get the credentials needed to run for president. Fueling that view, Harris announced in mid-April that she had just returned from a weeklong trip to the Middle East, an important way for a senator seeking a place on the national stage to burnish her foreign policy credentials. In Iraq, she met with California service members supporting local forces in fighting ISIS, inquiring whether they had the support they needed there and also when they returned home during and after deployment. She traveled to Jordan to witness firsthand the devastating impact of the Syrian refugee crisis caused by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
“It is critical we have a sound, detailed, and long-term national security strategy to combat terrorism in the Middle East, and an immigration policy that provides a safe haven to those fleeing violence and oppression,” Harris said in a press release on her return.
The trip wasn’t part of any formal congressional delegation. Rather, she went because of her positions on the Senate Intel and Homeland Security Committees, she explained. However, Harris wasn’t on committees with direct oversight of the military, such as Armed Services or Foreign Relations. That didn’t escape notice on Capitol Hill, where some veterans recalled that Senator Barack Obama won a prized seat on the Foreign Relations Committee to beef up his foreign policy credentials ahead of his presidential run.
On the Homeland Security Committee, the resentment ran deep, said a former senior Homeland Security official, who left the department in the summer of 2020 and spoke on condition of anonymity. Some senators and committee staff believed Harris was shirking her share of the tedious work that made up the vast majority of committee business, a galling transgression for a first-year senator. Worse, some officials came to believe that her brusque and antagonistic style was jeopardizing bipartisan efforts on critical security matters that had been years in the making.
“The impression that I am left with is that she’s not well liked by the majority of people that had to interact with her on the Homeland Security Committee,” said the former senior Department of Homeland Security official, who dealt with senators and committee staff.
Harris could be disrespectful to top-level Department of Homeland Security officials undergoing Senate confirmation, no matter what issues they would be overseeing. That might have been understandable if they would be enforcing Trump’s immigration policies, which affected Californians directly. But Homeland Security has 240,000 employees who deal with many apolitical issues and are devoted to trying to keep Americans safe.
The resentment about that ran so deep at the Department of Homeland Security that when current and former senior officials were coming out publicly in support of Joe Biden, at least four of them decided not to after he named Harris as his running mate, said the former Homeland Security official, who had worked in Republican and Democratic administrations and left in order to come out publicly against Trump. “They were like, ‘Sorry, I can’t do it.’ ” The former official added, “Something about the way that she operated really bothered these individuals. For them, it seemed like she was always about the politics and not about the mission.”
* * *
An issue that rubbed some officials wrong was that Harris declined to meet with many people Trump nominated for the highest positions in Homeland Security. Instead, she chose to grill them in public confirmation hearings with yes-or-no questions about complex topics that could not be answered in simple ways. The Trump nominees’ inability or refusal to answer questions might make for good sound bites, but it did little to provide the public with answers to some of the most important policy issues of the day. It also didn’t help promote the kind of good governance that’s needed for the Senate to succeed at its oversight role. Perhaps most important, it didn’t help foster productive relationships between top department officials and one of the senators, Harris, who oversaw them.
Traditionally, the kinds of fraught issues that Harris liked to ask about in public hearings are discussed initially in private meetings. Those meetings, known as courtesy calls, come at the end of an exhaustive process for the select few political appointees deemed so critical to the department’s mission that they require confirmation by the full Senate.
These appointees are required to send enormous amounts of personal and professional background information to the oversight committee. After digesting that information, the committee sends the nominee a lengthy series of policy questions. Once the nominees reply, they meet with the committee staff, potentially for hours. The last stop is the courtesy call with senators. It’s the most important: it’s how senators and senior staff get a feel for the nominees and their management style. The calls are akin to an interview for a big job. In less partisan times, the meetings could make the difference between confirmation and rejection. Even if they agree to disagree, the senator and nominee can establish some rapport and trust.
In the spring of 2017, Elaine Duke, nominated by Trump to the second-highest-ranking position in the Department of Homeland Security, sought a meeting with all the Homeland Security Committee members. She especially wanted to meet with Democrats so she could provide them with detailed answers to issues that were in the headlines and that seemed too complicated for the structure of a public hearing. Duke, a career civil servant, had spent twenty-eight years in public service, working in the administrations of Obama and George W. Bush. Almost all the Senate Democrats met with her privately, but not Harris. Harris asked her questions in public.
“I know I’m not the only one she didn’t want to meet with,” said Duke, who is widely seen as an apolitical moderate. “My understanding is that in general she did not meet with any of the Republican nominees.”
Duke said Harris’s prosecutor-like questions seemed more geared to making headlines than collectively figuring out the best way forward, leaving her wondering: “Are
you trying to glean information for oversight or are you trying to indict?”
Duke was confirmed on an 85–14 vote in 2017, with Harris voting against her confirmation and Feinstein for it. She served until April 2018, including five months as acting Homeland Security secretary. She had no comment when asked whether Biden’s choice of Harris as his running mate influenced her decision to not publicly support the Democratic nominee.
“When you look at her public record, the hearings and the campaign, is there an underlying anger there?” Duke asked. “And will that help, or further divide the country in terms of moving away from compassion and more toward anger?”
* * *
Donald Trump’s leadership style as president was the same as it was during his campaign. He was playing a part in a reality show, with enough interesting characters and plotlines to keep audiences riveted and glued to their screens. Whether she did so intentionally or not, Harris was one of a few Democrats to play Trump’s own game. She was becoming an easy-to-identify character herself. She did so in Trump’s way, too, by grabbing the spotlight to get her message out and change the narrative.
Under normal circumstances, lawmakers are criticized for acting like politicians and seeking the limelight. Perhaps because of jealousy or competition, blatant self-promotion is seen as a vice, not a virtue. But as Trump took over Washington, Harris rose above the din. Her ability to come up with pithy sound bites, viral videos, and eye-catching headlines elevated her from being a bit player in the show to becoming a star. The more Republicans made her the public face of the Democratic resistance, the more the Republicans made Harris’s star rise even higher. Reporters helped, too, seizing on the narrative that Harris was helping create that she was engaged in a David and Goliath battle with Trump and his administration.