Appearing on NPR Politics Podcast, Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris announced her intention to prosecute Donald Trump for criminal obstruction of justice if she becomes president. The California Senator, who said her administration’s Department of Justice will possibly move to prosecute Trump based her reason on the findings of the Robert Mueller’s Russia report.
With the 2020 United States presidential primaries and elections nearing, aspiring candidates for the two biggest political parties in the country are moving it up a notch with their campaigns in their bid to convince the electorate they are the right candidates to be elected to lead their parties as well as the country.
“I believe that they would have no choice and that they should, yes,” she said.
“There has to be accountability,” she told NPR. “I mean look, people might, you know, question why I became a prosecutor. Well, I’ll tell you one of the reasons — I believe there should be accountability. Everyone should be held accountable, and the president is not above the law.”
Harris was adamant the law must take its course adding: “The facts and the evidence will take the process where it leads.”
“I do believe that we should believe Bob Mueller when he tells us essentially that the only reason an indictment was not returned is because of a memo in the Department of Justice that suggests you cannot indict a sitting president. But I’ve seen prosecution of cases on much less evidence.”
Aspiring to be the first female president of the United States, Harris launched her 2020 presidential campaign in January.
Attended by hundreds of supporters, the Democratic party member told the crowd gathered in her birthplace of Oakland that she will fight for the people to restore lost American values under President Donald Trump.
“People in power are trying to convince us that the villain in our American story is each other. But that is not our story. That is not who we are. That is not our America. The United States of America is not about us versus them,” she said.
“I’m running to be a President of the people, by the people, for all the people. If I have the honor of being your president, I will tell you this: I am not perfect. Lord knows, I am not perfect. But I will always speak with decency and moral clarity and treat all people with dignity and respect. I will lead with integrity. And I will speak the truth,” she told the crowd cheering her campaign slogan: “Kamala Harris, for the people.”
Harris spent her childhood in Berkeley with her mother and sister before they moved to Montreal during her middle and high school years after her mother got a medical research job in the Canadian city.
She has also been criticized by progressive Democrats for her record as District Attorney of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011 and later Attorney General of California, the state’s first African-American and female attorney-general.
Some of them argue that she did not push enough for criminal justice reform and during her tenure in 2012, she failed to tell defence attorneys that a police laboratory technician had allegedly been tampering with drug samples resulting in hundreds of cases being dismissed.
She is also being criticized for not prosecuting Trump’s Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank for alleged foreclosure violations in 2013. He was then the bank’s chief executive and chairman.
Kamala Harris is, however, being praised in other quarters for opposing the death penalty and the Back On Track initiative she pioneered as San Francisco district attorney, which allowed first-time, non-violent offenders to purge their records.
