Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris is in damage control mode over revelations that her office paid out over $1.1 million in response to sex harassment and misconduct claims while she was California’s attorney general.
Allegations of sexual harassment and retaliation by co-workers, reports of inappropriate touching, and complaints about sexually charged comments and actions in the workplace are among the recorded incidents that resulted in payouts during Harris’ six-year tenure as AG, according to records obtained through a California Public Records Act request by the Los Angeles Times.
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Harris insists she was unaware of the suits, but has retroactively shouldered the burden of responsibility. “As the chief executive of a department of nearly 5,000 employees, the buck stopped with me,” she said, adding that as a senator, she is made personally aware of any harassment complaints. Harris has cast herself as a staunch supporter of #MeToo, but despite her efforts at reinvention, her long record as a prosecutor seems to confront her at every turn.
She claimed ignorance of charges against top aide Larry Wallace after the Justice Department paid $400,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging he had harassed and discriminated against his executive assistant – even though he had worked closely with Harris for 14 years. Under Harris’ leadership, the Department of Justice paid out $649,500 to special agent James Rodriguez to settle charges the agency had harassed and retaliated against him for winning an earlier settlement – transferring him to undesirable jobs, slow-walking his pay, and even encouraging co-workers to file complaints about him. While she pleaded ignorance about that settlement as well – the largest made under her tenure – her history of protecting officials guilty of prosecutorial misconduct – including falsified confessions, doctored evidence, and perjury – speaks for itself.
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After Harris’ Justice Department was ordered to ease the overcrowding plaguing California jails in 2014, her office argued that releasing minimum-security inmates up for parole would deprive the state of California of a vital supply of the cheap labor it had come to depend on to fight the country’s deadliest wildfires – sparking a media firestorm that Harris tried unsuccessfully to quench by claiming she had no idea her own office was advocating keeping prisoners in jail to fight wildfires at $1 per hour.
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