In a fresh line of attack, Donald Trump targeted Vice President Kamala Harris’s prosecutorial record on marijuana, telling Fox News that she “put thousands and thousands of Black people in jail over marijuana.
“She was a bad prosecutor. She was a prosecutor of Black people,” Trump said Monday on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”
“She put thousands and thousands of black people in jail over marijuana. But when it came to big crime, murders and everything else, she was weak,” the former president told Laura Ingraham in an interview.
The narrative of Harris’s aggressive cannabis prosecutions has followed her since her 2020 Democratic presidential bid. When President Biden dropped out of the race and named Harris as the presumptive nominee, criticism over her rulings as a prosecutor re-emerged.
What Say You, VP Harris?
“Before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected as United States senator, I was the elected attorney general, as I’ve mentioned, of California. And before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor,” Harris told campaign staffers the day after Biden endorsed her to take his place at the top of the Democratic ticket. While Harris may have been grandstanding her prowess as a tough prosecutor for Trump’s sake, voters on the left often referred to Harris as a cop.
“And they didn’t mean that as a compliment,” Paul Butler, a law professor at Georgetown and a former public prosecutor, told NPR.
When Harris ran for president five years ago, her time as a prosecutor was a liability as she was often criticized for her record on marijuana, which of course has changed.
Though Trump’s attack is misleading, one wonders if he is making his first moves to position himself against cannabis criminalization by bringing Harris to task and laying the mass incarceration of Black people for cannabis at her doorstep? Analysis conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union shows that Black people are 3.6 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession, despite similar usage rates.
Peoplesmind
