Kamala Harris's $50,000 LAPD Guards Not Her First Corruption Rodeo

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA)

by Monica Showalter: California's Sen. Kamala Harris, the leftist Democratic presidential wannabe who got herself in the news after piously posturing against Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh, has now been caught with her hand in the till, traipsing around California with a Los Angeles Police Department bodyguard detail in tow, at a taxpayer-paid cost of nearly $50,000.

NBC4 of Los Angeles has the details:
Armed, plain-clothes LAPD officers were dispatched to California cities outside of Los Angeles at least a dozen times to provide security for U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris at public events, media appearances, and a party.

LA taxpayers paid for airline tickets, hotel stays, car rentals, and meals, according to detailed expense reports obtained by NBC News. The total cost of the trips, not including the officers' overtime, topped $28,000.The $28K was just a starting point in the cost extravaganza – overtime and other expenses made the total close to $50K. A new police chief found out about the unprecedented freebie from the people of Los Angeles and put a stop to it. The mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, says he never heard of it and laid the blame squarely on recently retired LAPD chief Charlie Beck. One thing is certain: it's never been done before. But this being Harris, it's not surprising it happened.

Harris, per this Mother Jones biography, is a former California attorney general with a radical upbringing, who viewed her prosecutorial career not as a means of putting crooks in jail to protect communities, but as a means of long marching through the institutions – corrupting them from within by taking them over in the name of left-wingery. Everything was political for her, including her political rise as the mistress of California swamp thing extraordinaire, former State Assembly speaker, and San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.

As a prosecutor, she's engaged in some pretty impressive politically motivated corner-cutting. She falsified a confession transcript of a defendant and then, when she was caught, defended it. She's been caught making phony charges of racism about her Berkeley upbringing, as if Berkeley in the 1970s were a den of Klansmen. She has an army of fake Twitter followers in an obvious bid to make herself look more influential than she really is. Lately, she put out a deceptively edited video to smear Kavanaugh.

So no surprise to see her accepting an emolument from the politically correct and easy to shake down LAPD for free stuff. Stuff other candidates have to pay for. Stuff that costs taxpayers big bucks and creates lots of importance and prestige for herself. The Mother Jones profile notes that she seems to be obsessed with wearing upper-class status suits, so it looks perfectly in character.

Garcetti lays the whole scandal at the feet of LAPD former chief Charlie Beck, and sure enough, the pair of them go way back. Harris got elected attorney general in 2009, and Beck was the cop chief trying to avoid her politically correct prosecutorial gaze as he toed her political correctness line.

I trace them as far back as 2012 with this University of Southern California elite conference on human trafficking, here, though their ties may go back farther. Here's a photo of the pair, calling for gun control together in 2013. Here's another photo of the two, her mau-mauing him over Black Lives Matter in 2015. The purpose was to put more fetters on those "racist" police. By 2016, Beck was all in for toeing the Democratic Party line on immigration, with Harris actually inviting Beck to speak before the State Assembly about the importance of not prosecuting illegals because they might not call in crimes. Beck also was the first to call for the issuance of California driver's licenses for illegals as well as halting the towing of illegals' cars in L.A. Here's another one: he was accused of falsely lowering crime wave statistics, which was obviously a political move, given the state's soft-on-crime let-'em-out legislation.

The point? They go way back, and obviously, a sweetheart deal was executed, with Harris getting herself a free LAPD police detail to look important. Oh, and the LAPD police budget increased dramatically over those same years – with the LAPD under Beck even getting two air force bases.

Campaign contribution? You bet.

The thing is, Beck had a history of corner-cutting in just these kinds of transactions – which rather gave Harris some leverage against him. No wonder he toed her party line – and gave her free stuff.

In 2014, Beck got caught up in a corruption scandal around the sale of his daughter Brandi's horse – first to a police-linked foundation for $6,000, and later seeing that "donated" to the LAPD as a police horse. Nice deal for Brandi, and maybe the LAPD, but one wonders about those foundation funds.

He also punished officers erratically, based on family and political considerations, as illustrated when naked photos of Brandi turned up in the possession of an officer on the hot seat, and Beck let him off to sweep the matter under the rug. So you can see that Beck cuts corners, and Harris was in a position to punish him – but somehow she ended up with an LAPD free police detail, to go with her from city to city, instead.

Does this stink of patronage? What else could it be? What's needed now is to put Harris in the hot seat for one-hand-washes-the-other corruption – preferably the kind of treatment Kavanaugh had to endure.
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Monica Showalter contributes article to the American Thinker.

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