The 1994 crime bill Kamala Harris attacked on Wednesday was crafted by her brother-in-law.
Harris criticized the crime bill during a stop in New Hampshire as a way of criticizing former vice president Joe Biden. Harris said the bill contributed to “mass incarceration in our country,” established the “federal three strikes law,” and “funded the building of more prisons in the states.”
Biden was the bill’s lead sponsor in the Senate, but working on it in the Clinton administration was Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West, who is married to Maya Harris, Kamala Harris’s sister and her campaign chair. West, a former Obama administration official, also chaired Kamala Harris’s transition team after she was elected to the Senate in 2016.
West chose to feature his work on the crime bill in 2012 when he was nominated to be associate attorney general. It was the chief achievement he listed for his two years working as a special assistant under former attorney general Janet Reno.
“From 1993 through 1994, I served as a Special Assistant in the U.S. Department of Justice,” West wrote in his official questionnaire to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Under the direction of U.S. Deputy Attorneys General Philip Heymann and Jamie Gorelick, as well as Attorney General Janet Reno, I worked on the development of national crime policy, including the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill.” – READ MORE