Democrats try to turn Kamala Harris’ history as an overzealous prosecutor into a positive – San Diego Union-Tribune

Courtney Baldwin’s story is heartbreaking, as you might expect from a woman who survived the brutality of sex traffickers. But her presence on the main stage at last week’s Democratic National Convention was unexpected, because it underscored just about everything wrong with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and the ideological monoculture she emerged from in California.

Baldwin’s biography is shocking. She was kidnapped by a sex trafficker in 2013 and sold to men “in cities across California.” But her story is ultimately one of personal triumph and liberation. Sharing credit for that victory with Harris may be gracious. It’s almost certainly political. But it’s certainly a stretch: Baldwin went out of her way to claim that Harris rescued her from captivity by shutting down Backpage.com.

Backpage was a kind of Craigslist for escorts – a website that introduced people (mostly women) who were willing to provide companionship (with the near-guarantee of sex) to their paying clients (mostly men). When Harris was California’s attorney general in 2016, she made high-profile announcements that she had investigated, arrested, and charged Backpage executives with trafficking underage women.

Her charges went nowhere. But actual convictions were never necessary. It’s the symbolism that lingers, as evidenced by Courtney Baldwin’s presence just before Harris on the final day of the DNC.

Harris wasn’t the only one running the propaganda campaign. For most of the 2010s, smearing Backpage was a nonpartisan professional sport. Two years after Harris first charged Backpage executives, Trump administration Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the FBI had seized Backpage. He was following Harris’s playbook.

“Backpage.com has existed for far too long as the dominant marketplace for illegal commercial sex, a place where sex traffickers regularly advertised to both children and adults,” Sessions said. said in an April 2018 press release. “But this illegality now ends. Last Friday, the Department of Justice seized Backpage and it can no longer be used by criminals to promote and facilitate human trafficking.”

Years of federal prosecution followed. At one point in the proceedings, a federal judge has reprimanded government prosecutors for their loose use of phrases like “child sex trafficking” to stir up emotional responses from jurors. They declared a mistrial. That didn’t stop prosecutors. The end came in November with a mistrial on all but one of the 80 federal charges — a single count of money laundering against suspect Mike Laceya co-founder of Backpage. By that time, Lacey’s co-defendant, Backpage co-founder Jim Larkin, had committed suicide. (Disclosure: Years before these events, I worked for Lacey and Larkin as publisher and editor of the newspaper they owned, Village Voice Media, in Orange County, California.)

Even as Courtney Baldwin spoke, Harris knew the truth lay elsewhere: that government prosecutors like herself had tried to build their reputations at the expense of Larkin, Lacey and others.

Ironically, the others turn out to be women who used Backpage to screen their clients before meeting them. With Backpage gone, these women are relying on the old business model: violent pimps, criminal gangs, and solitary encounters with dangerous men. Whatever you think of this “sex work,” only a sociopath would call this outcome cause for celebration.

The disappearance of Backpage was also a loss for officials eager to catch real sex traffickers. Reviewing government documents for Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown concluded that prosecutors like Harris knew all along that the charges against Backpage were false, and that — remarkably, given everything those prosecutors alleged — Backpage actually cooperated effectively with law enforcement to crack down on interactions that appeared to constitute sex trafficking.

That’s just one of the problems with the Harris campaign’s Courtney Baldwin’s standout performance on the final day of the Democratic National Convention. There’s also the fact that the source of much of the child sex trafficking is taking place along America’s southern border, specifically the stretch of the border that separates Mexico from California.

The porosity of that border should raise serious questions about Vice President Harris’s performance as border czar. But long before that, even as California’s attorney general was pursuing bogus claims against Backpage, Harris was criticizing a U.S. Senate proposal that would have ended states’ ability to circumvent federal border authority through asylum laws. Never mind the flood of unaccompanied minors from south of the U.S. border, California’s fondness for illegal immigrants, exemplified by its numerous legal shelter grants from federal authorities and myriad financial incentives to stay in the Golden State, continues to provide victims for real criminals.