Yesterday, I had promised my followers to run a search to see if Kamala Harris had ever argued any appeals -- ever. Even just one.
I got busy but have now completed that task.
The short answer is "no, never." I could not find any evidence she had ever argued an appeal.
I challenge her to cite to the records in such a case and explain why it is not captured in Westlaw, which is the most comprehensive electronic research service in existence.
Here's the search I ran in Westlaw, which other lawyers with access to Westlaw can readily replicate:
Databases for search: ALLFEDS + ALLSTATES
(this searches all reported and many unreported cases in all federal courts AND state courts -- I did not even limit my search as to state courts in California alone).
Boolean search terms: adv: ((kamala /3 harris) /2 argued)
This first part of that Boolean search finds the universe of all cases where Kamala Harris (including Kamala D. Harris and Kamala Devi Harris -- or any other potential variants of her name) appears. Then the second part of the search narrows that universe down to cases where the word "argues" appears within 2 words of her name.
The search returns only 5 cases--see the first picture below.
I then manually checked each of the 5 cases returned by the search. In each of those, one of her subordinates argued, not her--see, for example, the second picture below (noting that her subordinate Steve Oetting was the one who argued Flournoy v. Small in the Ninth Circuit -- one of the 13 federal circuits).
Practices can vary, but in general, prosecutors -- especially in state systems -- often argue their own appeals. Not Kamala. She never even attempted the feat, which requires the lawyer presenting or defending the appeal to both know the law, think on their feet in responding to questions from a panel of three or more judges, and know the factual record.
Westlaw also includes a report about cases worked on. But it goes back only to 2014, and by then she was already AG and doing nothing more than supervising, so nothing about her own chops as a lawyer in her own right can be gleaned from that report.
I note that I find it an insult that she sat in judgment on the second Senate Judiciary Committee vote on my nomination to join the leadership of the Justice Department in early 2018 (she voted against me, but I still got out of Committee). Based on my research thus far, she is not a technically accomplished lawyer. I also note that even during my high-level service in the U.S. Justice Department, I continued to argue some cases myself. Legal reporters were puzzled and asked me why several times. I told them that I wanted to keep the saw sharp. That is how real lawyers think and act. I also note that I argued more cases myself personally than any of the other 5 to 6 Assistant Attorney Generals in the Trump Administration running litigating Divisions at Main Justice like I did. (I originally ran 1 Division but eventually simultaneously ran 2 Divisions, which is why I talk about 5 to 6 other Division. The total number of litigating Divisions at USDOJ is 7.)
Kamala also takes after her running mate, Joe Biden, who did poorly in law school and was even caught plagiarizing during his studies. (And remember that Kamala failed the bar exam once.) Yet, Biden got to sit in judgment on the Senate Judiciary of both the great Yale Law Professor, constitutional and antitrust scholar, and Kirkland & Ellis partner Robert Bork -- and in judgment of the great and long-service Justice Clarence Thomas -- during their respective confirmation hearings.
And yet both Biden and Harris, when they were Senators, acted like royal legal scholars when they were questioning such nominees as Bork, Thomas, and Kavanaugh. It disgusted me at the time and still does. (I watched Bork's nomination when I was in college. I watched Clarence Thomas's the year before I started law school. And I watched Brett Kavanaugh's during a period when I was preparing for an oral argument of my own before the Fifth Circuit, when I was in private practice.)
Now, one of our two major parties has nominated Kamala to be President. She wasn't qualified to sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, let alone be Commander in Chief or Magistrate in Chief, or to select future Supreme Court Justices -- which she will select an awful lot of if she gets elected and then packs the Supreme Court, as she has said she plans to do.
Lastly, I note that I am still trying to actually lay my hands on a transcript where she first-chaired a trial as a California prosecutor. She and her campaign (@KamalaHarris) could easily assist me and put to rest any doubts about her legal bona fides -- and do so at any time -- by locating such a transcript, uploading it to a storage site, and linking to it on X in response to this post.
The challenge to do that is weeks old now. And the days are counting down to the election -- one in which Democrats tell us that she is a sharp-as-nails prosecutor whom the Nation should trust with its highest office and this is one of her main qualifications.
That claim is starting to ring very hollow.
I hope that America wakes up before it is too late.
I got busy but have now completed that task.
The short answer is "no, never." I could not find any evidence she had ever argued an appeal.
I challenge her to cite to the records in such a case and explain why it is not captured in Westlaw, which is the most comprehensive electronic research service in existence.
Here's the search I ran in Westlaw, which other lawyers with access to Westlaw can readily replicate:
Databases for search: ALLFEDS + ALLSTATES
(this searches all reported and many unreported cases in all federal courts AND state courts -- I did not even limit my search as to state courts in California alone).
Boolean search terms: adv: ((kamala /3 harris) /2 argued)
This first part of that Boolean search finds the universe of all cases where Kamala Harris (including Kamala D. Harris and Kamala Devi Harris -- or any other potential variants of her name) appears. Then the second part of the search narrows that universe down to cases where the word "argues" appears within 2 words of her name.
The search returns only 5 cases--see the first picture below.
I then manually checked each of the 5 cases returned by the search. In each of those, one of her subordinates argued, not her--see, for example, the second picture below (noting that her subordinate Steve Oetting was the one who argued Flournoy v. Small in the Ninth Circuit -- one of the 13 federal circuits).
Practices can vary, but in general, prosecutors -- especially in state systems -- often argue their own appeals. Not Kamala. She never even attempted the feat, which requires the lawyer presenting or defending the appeal to both know the law, think on their feet in responding to questions from a panel of three or more judges, and know the factual record.
Westlaw also includes a report about cases worked on. But it goes back only to 2014, and by then she was already AG and doing nothing more than supervising, so nothing about her own chops as a lawyer in her own right can be gleaned from that report.
I note that I find it an insult that she sat in judgment on the second Senate Judiciary Committee vote on my nomination to join the leadership of the Justice Department in early 2018 (she voted against me, but I still got out of Committee). Based on my research thus far, she is not a technically accomplished lawyer. I also note that even during my high-level service in the U.S. Justice Department, I continued to argue some cases myself. Legal reporters were puzzled and asked me why several times. I told them that I wanted to keep the saw sharp. That is how real lawyers think and act. I also note that I argued more cases myself personally than any of the other 5 to 6 Assistant Attorney Generals in the Trump Administration running litigating Divisions at Main Justice like I did. (I originally ran 1 Division but eventually simultaneously ran 2 Divisions, which is why I talk about 5 to 6 other Division. The total number of litigating Divisions at USDOJ is 7.)
Kamala also takes after her running mate, Joe Biden, who did poorly in law school and was even caught plagiarizing during his studies. (And remember that Kamala failed the bar exam once.) Yet, Biden got to sit in judgment on the Senate Judiciary of both the great Yale Law Professor, constitutional and antitrust scholar, and Kirkland & Ellis partner Robert Bork -- and in judgment of the great and long-service Justice Clarence Thomas -- during their respective confirmation hearings.
And yet both Biden and Harris, when they were Senators, acted like royal legal scholars when they were questioning such nominees as Bork, Thomas, and Kavanaugh. It disgusted me at the time and still does. (I watched Bork's nomination when I was in college. I watched Clarence Thomas's the year before I started law school. And I watched Brett Kavanaugh's during a period when I was preparing for an oral argument of my own before the Fifth Circuit, when I was in private practice.)
Now, one of our two major parties has nominated Kamala to be President. She wasn't qualified to sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, let alone be Commander in Chief or Magistrate in Chief, or to select future Supreme Court Justices -- which she will select an awful lot of if she gets elected and then packs the Supreme Court, as she has said she plans to do.
Lastly, I note that I am still trying to actually lay my hands on a transcript where she first-chaired a trial as a California prosecutor. She and her campaign (@KamalaHarris) could easily assist me and put to rest any doubts about her legal bona fides -- and do so at any time -- by locating such a transcript, uploading it to a storage site, and linking to it on X in response to this post.
The challenge to do that is weeks old now. And the days are counting down to the election -- one in which Democrats tell us that she is a sharp-as-nails prosecutor whom the Nation should trust with its highest office and this is one of her main qualifications.
That claim is starting to ring very hollow.
I hope that America wakes up before it is too late.
+1 I formulated another search. Trying to give Kamala every benefit of the doubt.
This one is designed to see -- if Kamala prosecuted either hundreds or at least 50 cases -- whether there is any record of a state or federal habeas petition being filed by an inmate to try to get out of custody in a case where she had been the trial lawyer who secured the conviction.
Again, the short answer was that there are no such cases.
If there had been, the trial transcript for the underlying criminal conviction might have been entered into the habeas case record and I then could have used PACER or state court equivalents to try to locate such a transcript filed as a habeas petition exhibit.
I ran the Westlaw search in the same two databases as my prior search tonight (ALLFEDS and ALLSTATES).
The search terms this time were:
adv: habeas and (kamala /3 harris /p prosecut!)
The search returned only 7 cases. It was quite broad in that it's looking for Kamala Harris in the same paragraph as the word "prosecutor" in a habeas case.
All of the 7 cases were federal cases, not state cases. And the majority of the 7 cases involved situations where Kamala was just a named formal defendant in her pro forma capacity as California Attorney General.
So again, no indication of trial transcripts proving Kamala's prosecutorial prowess in habeas cases.
Additionally, this search would have revealed if Kamala had ever opposed a habeas petition filed by someone she'd convicted or helped convict.
That question is similarly answered with a big: NADA.
No evidence that Kamala ever did anything more than supervise habeas opposition briefs. And given how often habeas petitions get filed -- and the breadth of a cases in a large state AG's office like California's -- she likely never even read, let alone helped draft or edit a habeas petition ever in her entire career.
This one is designed to see -- if Kamala prosecuted either hundreds or at least 50 cases -- whether there is any record of a state or federal habeas petition being filed by an inmate to try to get out of custody in a case where she had been the trial lawyer who secured the conviction.
Again, the short answer was that there are no such cases.
If there had been, the trial transcript for the underlying criminal conviction might have been entered into the habeas case record and I then could have used PACER or state court equivalents to try to locate such a transcript filed as a habeas petition exhibit.
I ran the Westlaw search in the same two databases as my prior search tonight (ALLFEDS and ALLSTATES).
The search terms this time were:
adv: habeas and (kamala /3 harris /p prosecut!)
The search returned only 7 cases. It was quite broad in that it's looking for Kamala Harris in the same paragraph as the word "prosecutor" in a habeas case.
All of the 7 cases were federal cases, not state cases. And the majority of the 7 cases involved situations where Kamala was just a named formal defendant in her pro forma capacity as California Attorney General.
So again, no indication of trial transcripts proving Kamala's prosecutorial prowess in habeas cases.
Additionally, this search would have revealed if Kamala had ever opposed a habeas petition filed by someone she'd convicted or helped convict.
That question is similarly answered with a big: NADA.
No evidence that Kamala ever did anything more than supervise habeas opposition briefs. And given how often habeas petitions get filed -- and the breadth of a cases in a large state AG's office like California's -- she likely never even read, let alone helped draft or edit a habeas petition ever in her entire career.
+2 Someone -- a California lawyer -- commented on one of my Kamala threads that California DAs are not involved with appeals in criminal cases, so we cannot expect Kamala to have argued an appeal.
My responses below:
A) She was California AG for 6 years. She could easily have argued an appeal during that time but she never did. Not once. Contrast the Red State AGs like Andrew Bailey and Kris Kobach. They argue key appeals themselves.
B) It is also not invariably true that the California AG's Office handles all criminal appeals coming out of DA's Offices or all civil cases that have a criminal-law nexus. If Kamala were qualified and persistent, she would have gotten herself a criminal appeal to argue, especially in a criminal conviction she had secured at trial (assuming there any of those, and I'm still dubious there until I see transcripts).
Receipts below on the point that DA's Offices are involved in criminal appeals and in criminal-law related appeals.
My responses below:
A) She was California AG for 6 years. She could easily have argued an appeal during that time but she never did. Not once. Contrast the Red State AGs like Andrew Bailey and Kris Kobach. They argue key appeals themselves.
B) It is also not invariably true that the California AG's Office handles all criminal appeals coming out of DA's Offices or all civil cases that have a criminal-law nexus. If Kamala were qualified and persistent, she would have gotten herself a criminal appeal to argue, especially in a criminal conviction she had secured at trial (assuming there any of those, and I'm still dubious there until I see transcripts).
Receipts below on the point that DA's Offices are involved in criminal appeals and in criminal-law related appeals.
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