The numbers are pretty stunning. From 2004 to 2011, Kamala Harris was the San Francisco DA responsible for all prosecutions and the prosecution team in the San Francisco area. Between 2004 and 2011, she did not prosecute a single case of priests’ sexual abuse–period. To put that in the context of how stunning that is, if you look at the top 50 metropolitan areas in the United States at that time, all 50 prosecuted at least one case, the sole exception being Kamala Harris in San Francisco.

After being elected as San Francisco’s DA, Harris terminated her predecessor’s plans to publicly release “clergy abuse files” naming names of priests accused of sexual abuse. Terence Hallinan, the former DA of San Francisco, had slated the files for public release against the wishes of the Archdiocese of San Francisco

The Archdiocese of San Francisco wasn’t real happy to share hundreds of pages of complaints that had been made about priests in the area, and according to Hallinan’s account, there were at least the names of 40 current and former priests who had been accused of molestations by people in that archdiocese. Terence Hallinan talked about the fact that he was going to pursue prosecutions. He also wanted to have victims’ groups go through to redact names, and then he wanted to release the records to the public, which had been done in so many other areas.

Well, he lost in the 2003 elections to Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris came in; she deep-sixed those documents. She basically put it under seal so that it could never be released publicly.

Harris received political campaign donations from lawyers and law firms representing the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Many of the law firms and lawyers who were representing the archdiocese on a variety of legal matters — including priests that had been identified as possible culprits — gave large contributions to Harris’s political campaign. Some of them had never given contributions to a race like this before, but they loaded up her campaign coffers.