Kamala Harris questioned if she’s daughter
of boyfriend — and future San Francisco mayor — Willie Brown in cringey resurfaced clip.
Future Vice President Kamala Harris made an awkward cameo in an ABC News segment from nearly
three decades ago that went viral on Tuesday, in which the then-California prosecutor
is asked if she’s future San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s daughter — at
the time that the two were dating. “Excuse me, are you his daughter?” an unidentified
woman asks Harris, who is standing next to a distracted Brown, in the clip from a 1995
“PrimeTime Live” video package that surfaced hours before the Democratic presidential nominee’s
debate against former President Donald Trump. After a second of stunned silence,
Harris responded, “No, I’m not.” Harris, now 59, was romantically
involved with Brown, now 90, in the mid-1990s when she was a young
prosecutor in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office and he was a married man
and speaker of the California state Assembly. Their relationship reportedly began
in 1994 and ended sometime in 1995, the year Brown was elected mayor of San Francisco.
The video package – a profile of Brown – cuts to Harris and her then-lover as reporter Judd
Rose notes that the influential Democrat is “notorious” for his “flamboyant lifestyle”
that includes a liking for “fine women.” Harris also appears earlier in the segment, jubilant as she stands by Brown’s side during
his victory speech in the mayoral election. Brown, who appointed Harris
to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the state’s
Medical Assistance Commission in 1994, has been credited with boosting
her career while they were an item. “Yes, I may have influenced her
career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly
speaker,” Brown acknowledged in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2019,
in which he noted that he also helped the careers of several other prominent
politicians whom he did not date. Brown also supported Harris in her successful
2003 run for San Francisco district attorney, which investigative journalist Peter Schweizer
has argued was for “corrupt” purposes. “Kamala Harris has a long history as a
corrupt prosecutor,” Schweizer, who is also the president of the Government Accountability
Institute watchdog group, wrote on X in July. “I don’t use that word lightly,”
he added. “Mayor Willie Brown helped get her elected as San Francisco
District Atty. because the current DA, Terence Hallinan was pursuing legal
cases against his friends and donors.” “When Harris beat Hallinan, she dropped those cases or plead them out
for reduced sentences,” Schweizer claimed. Trump, 78, claimed during a press conference
last month to “know Willie Brown very well” and charged that his opponent’s ex-boyfriend
“had a big part in what happened with Kamala.”