Sure politicians lie, but when they do they should be exposed and called out.

Vice President Kamala Harris has long cast herself as a fearless pioneer of efforts to fight for social and environmental justice.

“When I was elected DA of San Francisco,” Harris told a gathering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta last year, “I started the first environmental justice unit of any DA’s office in the country.”

In her telling, the San Francisco District Attorney formed the special environmental justice unit in the early 2000s especially to protect the long-neglected community of Bayview Hunters Point, a predominantly African American and impoverished part of the city, which had become “a dumping ground for people from other places.” 

In dozens of speeches and interviews in recent years, Harris has bragged that she went “after polluters” and protected minority communities in San Francisco in novel ways as a local prosecutor. 

The narrative has become a bedrock of Harris’ political identity. She featured her DA environmental justice crimes unit in her first statewide television advertisement and she rarely missed an opportunity to tout the history during her presidential bid, during which she promised similar initiatives if elected.

But records from the San Francisco District Attorney’s office and interviews with local environmental advocates point to a different, far less ambitious record. 

While it is not uncommon for politicians to lie, when it is revealed they have, elected officials should be called out and it is a good thing Real Clear Investigations uncovered this. Harris loves to virtue signals making proclamations about environmental justice and racism or something …

But her actual record reveals something totally different and her shenanigans continued as the Golden State’s top cop. From Real Clear Investigations:

Her office reportedly refused to consider charges against utility giant PG&E, which employed many of her campaign aides as paid advisers to the company, over claims that the firm’s reckless actions led to a pipeline explosion that killed eight people and injured another 58. 

Greenaction similarly petitioned her office to take action on the hazardous waste dump in Kettleman, California, an overwhelmingly low-income, Latino city in the Central Valley, that faced myriad health issues because of pollution. The Kettleman case seemed perfect for any environmental justice focus. Harris, however, declined. 

The barriers for effective cleanup of Bayview Hunters Point may have also touched on donor interests. Many powerful groups sought to expedite the development of the land with as little scrutiny of the environmental risks as possible. Records released a few years ago show that a development company with interests in the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard quietly paid $1.3 million to a firm controlled by former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who previously dated Harris and helped connect her to the city’s elite as she started her political career. The payments were for “facilitating communications between the various federal, state and local agencies to accelerate the completion” of the Hunters Point cleanup.

To this day, RCP reports, Bayview-Hunter’s Point remains the most polluted area in California with minority communities affected by the contamination too. Kamala Harris is considered a Black woman with Asian ancestry, yet also did nothing to actually help the very people she claims to defend.

This is actually no surprise, especially when taking into account that, according to her father, one of her ancestors was a Jamaican slave owner while proclaiming the need for reparations for Black people yet refuses to lead by example. But she’ll sure raise money to release violent criminals from jail.