Kamala Harris Led Smear Campaign Against Brett Kavanaugh

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), whom Joe Biden chose as his running mate on Tuesday, led efforts to smear Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings in 2018.

Harris pursued unsubstantiated accusations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh, even introducing a letter from a “Jane Doe” who claimed that youthful Kavanaugh and a friend had raped her “several times” after offering her a lift home from a party.

She earned condemnation for a deceptively-edited video in which she claimed Kavanaugh opposed birth control:

 

Even left-leaning PolitiFact rated Harris’s attack on Kavanaugh as “false.”

Harris’s efforts were so brazen that they even earned criticism from the two major liberal newspapers in her home state, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times.

At one point, she asked Kavanaugh about whether he had spoken to anyone at a particular law firm, adding ominously: “Be sure about your answer, sir.” But as the Times‘ Michael McGough noted, “there was no big reveal.”

Later, Harris earned condemnation from conservatives for referring to the U.S. Constitution — which Kavanaugh kept in his pocket — as “that book you carry.”

In 2019, once Kavanaugh was already on the Court, Harris called for him to be impeached over yet another dubious allegation against the justice, which swiftly fell apart.

Harris saw her own opposition to Kavanaugh as a political plus. Politico reported at the time: “Kamala Harris rides Kavanaugh rage in likely 2020 bid.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.