Peter Schweizer: Kamala Harris Was Only Big City DA 'to Not Prosecute a Single Case of Priest Sexual Abuse'

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and author of Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, recalled on Thursday that San Francisco was only one of America’s 50 largest cities not to prosecute a single case of sexual abuse related to the Catholic church during Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) tenure as the city’s district attorney (DA).

Schweizer provided political context surrounding Harris’s refusal to prosecute cases of priests’ sexual abuse on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Schweizer remarked, “A lot of people will remember — especially people my age, in their fifties — in the early 2000s, there was a national scandal that brewed about the fact that the Catholic church had a pedophile problem. San Francisco had that problem, as did other parts of the country. The problem is that under Harris’s tenure from 2004 to 2011, she did not prosecute a single case of priests’ sexual abuse.”

Schweizer continued, “Just to show how that stands out of the top 50 cities in America during the time, the only one that never prosecuted a single case was in San Francisco under Kamala Harris. And the question becomes why, why is she such an outlier in this case?”

Schweizer explained a conflict of interest in Harris’s prosecutorial discretion regarding allegations of sexual abuse involving Catholic priests given that her political campaign donors included law firms providing legal services to the archdiocese and priests involved in such cases.

“A lot of the financial support for [Harris’s] campaign to run as district attorney came from law firms that were providing legal protection for the Archdiocese, they were representing some priests who were involved in civil cases, [and] they handled other legal matters for the Catholic Church,” Schweizer stated.
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Schweizer added, “The San Francisco elites — when you talk about the Getty family, for example, and other high net worth individuals — many of them are part of that Catholic establishment in San Francisco, and when I say Catholic establishment, of course, I’m not talking traditional Catholics. These tend to be very left-wing Catholics. They all were connected to the institutions that were being fingered for these kinds of problems.

Harris terminated ongoing investigations of allegations of sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests overseen by her predecessor, Terence Hallinan.

Schweizer said, “[Terence Hallinan] had actually secured hundreds of pages of documents from the San Francisco Archdiocese that reportedly had the names of 40 to 50 recent or current priests who were alleged to have engaged in such abuse, and Hallinan had planned to prosecute them and to release those records, which is something that was happening around the country.”

After Harris beat Hallinan in 2003, she did not prosecute any of the Catholic priests her predecessor was investigating. Schweizer stated, “[Harris] actually [took] those records and put them under seal so they can never be released, ever, which is a pretty shocking and bold thing for her to do.”

Schweizer concluded, “It speaks to the question ‘Why are you throwing the book at offenders for minor offenses, individuals who are not politically connected, and why are you basically covering up or ignoring crimes for individuals that are politically connected? And that’s been the pattern with Kamala Harris, whether she was a San Francisco prosecutor or California Attorney General.”