Covering Kamala Harris (with Marisa Lagos)
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If you're enjoying our show's election coverage over the past few weeks, then you'll want to check out the latest episode from our friends at Masters of Scale, featuring an urgent call to action from former President Bill Clinton. Recorded live at the recent Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, the conversation between President Clinton and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman explores what's at stake this November and what actions we can take to have an impact, regardless of the outcome.

If you're interested in hearing this episode or previous talks with Protect Democracy's Ian Bassett, Stacey Abrams, and Barack Obama, search Masters of Scale on your favorite podcast platform. Hey folks, Eli Honig here. As you may know, we recently launched a second weekly episode of the Cafe Insider Podcast, where I'll be joined by cafe contributors and other guests to tackle one major legal or policy issue in about 30 minutes.

This week, I'm joined by longtime political journalist Marisa Lagos to discuss Vice President Kamala Harris's record as a California prosecutor. If you're a member of Cafe Insider, head on over to the Insider feed to listen to our full conversation. Listeners of the council remain here for an excerpt from our discussion. To become a member of Cafe Insider and get access to two new episodes each week,

head to cafe.com slash insider pod. That's cafe.com slash insider pod. You can try the membership for just $1 for one month. That's cafe.com slash insider pod. Now onto the show.

Anytime you're looking at somebody who's running a large prosecutor's office, and that certainly could be the DA's office in San Francisco, obviously the AG's office in California. I was in charge of an office of 500 or so people in New Jersey. Your office is going to charge thousands upon thousands of cases. And so anyone who wants to grab the 10 worst or the 10 most extreme this way or 20%,

20 that went bad or 30 that had bad results. You can do that all day, any day to anybody who's ever been in any kind of supervisory prosecutorial position. So there's plenty to work with here both ways. In your estimation though, Marisa, on the scale of one to 10, one being your progressive prosecutors, your Larry Krasner's in Philadelphia, and 10 being just your Texas sheriff with the star on, kicking ass and taking names.

Where does Kamala Harris fall? Where did she fall as a prosecutor? Hmm. Depending on the day and the era, I'd say a four to a six. I mean, I really do think she's pretty middle of the road. How do you reach that conclusion? Well, I think one thing like you have to think about, and maybe this is going a little too far back, but it's just like where she came from. Like we said, she's a woman of color and her parents were big in the civil rights movement, but she kind of took a more traditional route. And I think that she really saw specifically during her time at

at a Black HBCU, that working within the system was going to be the way that she could make change. And so she did want to make change. So she's certainly not on the sort of typical tough-on-crime, yeah, Texas sheriff. She understood that maybe the way that things had been going, especially in California around criminal justice, was potentially too punitive and wasn't actually leading to good outcomes. But on the other hand,

other hand, she was not one of these sort of lefty, what we call now a progressive prosecutors who maybe question the kind of premise of the entire system. She coined this term smart on crime or at least co-opted it when she was D.A. She wrote an entire book about it. You know, she instituted programs like Back on Track, which offered first time offenders this kind of suite of services to really

put their lives back on track and avoid a felony conviction if they could complete what they were offering. And the people she brought in to conduct that work, to work with these young men and women...

were very much from the sort of reform community, if you want to call it that. They were people who had been working on the streets, who had been out in the community. And maybe some of them, like Latifah Simon, who's actually now running for Congress here, didn't believe in what, you know, progressives would call the carceral state. So she brought in those voices. But then she also, I would say, listened very strongly to the people in her office who were line prosecutors, who had done the work. She had done it herself. And I

I'll just, you know, say to put a pin on that, but in her first race for district attorney in 2004, she ran as a moderate. She had the existing DA, the incumbent on her left, Terrence Hallinan, very much more in the mold of what you would call a progressive prosecutor, although his critics would say he was just kind of a hot mess. The office was definitely in turmoil. Yeah. Yeah. And

And then on her right, you had Bill Fazio, who was coming from a very traditional law enforcement background and was really running more tough on crime. And so, you know, I think from the beginning, she staked out this middle ground. And I really do see a through line between that and her entire career. You know, it's so interesting to hear you say that because, again, I was a prosecutor at various levels. I'm not comparing myself to her. She was a state AG. I never was that. But around the same time, I was a prosecutor from 04 to 18, which is almost exactly overlaps with her.

And just reading back through her record, I don't come away. She reminds me of a lot of the good AGs and county prosecutors and U.S. attorneys who I worked with, which is not necessarily easy to pigeonhole. It's kind of an unfair question. I ask you one to 10. As you said, it could be. It varies. But those smart on crime initiatives were very popular. She doesn't strike me as someone just from looking at a record who was unduly permissive of criminal conduct. To the contrary, I think she was could be.

tough when needed. She doesn't strike me as being overly punitive either. There's examples both ways. And the embrace of those types of programs that you just laid out was becoming very popular, not just in Democratic circles, by the way. I mean, I served under mostly Republican state AGs here in New Jersey. And that smart on crime was...

I laughed for a second when you said she coined the phrase. I was like, she didn't coin it because I was hearing it all the time out here. But you then said adopted it as a law. I don't know who coined it. I don't know if anybody did, but it was very popular and I think effective in that era. Well, you bring up a really good point, which is I think we have such like political amnesia. But when a lot of the criminal justice reforms really started taking hold here in the late 2000s, I

I would say separate and apart from Kamala Harris, because she really stayed out of a lot of those political fights as a prosecutor. But at the time, you had folks like Grover Norquist, who was helping fund these types of initiatives, arguing that we were spending too much money and resources on locking people up. The Koch brothers. The Koch brothers. These were, yeah, right wing sort of small government, libertarian leaning folks who said, hey, we need to rethink this. And, you know, let's not forget Kamala Harris was

District Attorney and coming into the Attorney General's office at a time when California's prisons were so overpopulated that the Supreme Court literally said, reduce the population or we're going to do it for you. And so a lot of...

you know, the kind of pressures that came out of that era that have resulted in what are now sort of controversial criminal justice reforms were really not coming from a kind of lefty space entirely. They were coming from a necessity after, you know, we really threw the book at people in the 90s for things. I mean, I covered the three strikes debate here. There were literally people in prison for 25 to life who had had a third strike of, you know, a tiny amount of drug possession. And it just...

It was really a new time and era of thinking. And I think that we have to remember that context when we talk about her career. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Okay, let's step back for a moment.

Part of this is, I'm just curious, but you are uniquely situated to tell us, what does Kamala Harris really like? I mean, we see her out there on the campaign trail, and I think we get a sense, but you were covering her in her early days. So what's she like personally, but also what was she like as a manager of both the DA and the AG's office? That's such an interesting question. I'm going to take the second part first, because as you know...

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