Show Notes
Kamala Harris went more than forty days as the Democratic presidential nominee without consenting to a press interview, before finally consenting to a joint CNN sit-down alongside her VP choice, Tim Walz. There are no policy positions for voters to read on her campaign website. What statements she has made about policies she would support if elected are handed to the news media by anonymous aides, even when they directly contradict what she has said before publicly.
“We’re seeing the breakdown of accountability,” says Peter Schweizer, host of the Drill Down podcast. “Our organization started because news organizations lost the capacity to do real investigative journalism. Now we’re seeing journalists who aren’t even asking questions.”
Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers cited an exchange between Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Jonathan Karl of ABC News, in which Cotton noted that Harris had promised in 2019 to abolish private health insurance. Karl, apparently assuming the role of Harris surrogate, countered that Harris no longer supported that, but Cotton reminded him that she has not said so to anyone – anonymous campaign staffers and spokesmen have said that.
Why isn’t ABC News, the New York Times, or the Washington Post insisting to her campaign that she talk regularly with their reporters?
“The media has to be independent to function, and right now they are failing at their job,” Schweizer says.
Now that she is the official candidate for president, there are many things American voters want to learn about Harris that her campaign cannot supply. What was her advice, as the “last person in the room,” to Joe Biden before he ordered the pull-out from Afghanistan in 2021? Why did her vice-presidential staff have a 92% turnover rate, as one report calculated, and what does that say about her leadership skills? Does she support or oppose building the wall along the southern border? Does she support raising corporate and personal income tax rates? Does she still support eliminating private health insurance? These are standard questions that are asked of any political candidate by conscientious reporters in an interview setting, in which the candidate’s responses can be probed by a skilled journalist.
The Government Accountability Institute continues to look into Harris’s political past, and that of her chosen running mate, Minn. Gov. Tim Walz.
Schweizer cited a San Francisco newspaper’s reporting on the business ventures of Harris’s onetime boyfriend and political mentor, former Democratic San Francisco mayor and California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. Brown is listed as a principal in a company called Shipyard Advisors, a consultancy that in 2021 was “facilitating communications between the various federal, state and local agencies to accelerate the completion” of environmental cleanup at a former Navy shipyard in San Francisco called Hunters Point.
“Now that we’ve seen the amount of influence that the State of California has in Washington, D.C., we now have started seeing a lot more movement,” the CEO of Five Point Holdings (owners of the land) said in a March conference call with financial analysts. “There’s a lot of discussion going on about accelerating the process at the highest level in government,” he added during another call in August.
Walz has come under fire for a variety of inaccurate statements in his biography, including his National Guard Service and many trips to China while he was a teacher. Most recently, a 2006 letter to Walz (during his first run for Congress) from a Nebraska Chamber of Commerce surfaced demanding that he “remove any reference” on his campaign literature claiming they had previously given him an award.
“We researched this matter and can confirm that you have not been the recipient of any award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce,” reads the letter addressed to Walz on Nov. 1, 2006.
As Schweizer says on the podcast, “Democracy dies in darkness, but GAI Is the light switch!”
