Did Kamala Harris Lie to Get Into a Law School Program for Impoverished Students?

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Kamala Harris will say or do whatever it takes to win the presidency, and her campaign is built on a foundation of lies—whether it’s smearing Donald Trump or distorting her own record. But Harris’s troubling relationship with the truth didn’t start in politics. In fact, she may owe her entire career to a lie that helped her get into law school in the first place.

To explain, we first have to look at how Kamala got into law. She went to the Hastings School of Law at the University of California. “In the fall of 1986, Harris arrived on campus at Hastings a week before most of her classmates,” wrote Politico back in 2021. “She was part of the pre-orientation Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP), which had been founded in 1969 to help law students from disadvantaged communities navigate the stringent demands of the first-year curriculum.”

According to Hastings, the Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP) was created in 1969 “to make an outstanding legal education accessible to those who come from disadvantaged economic and educational backgrounds,” and applicants are thus encouraged to submit “a separate LEOP statement describing the adversity they faced and its impact on their academic preparedness for law school.”

This is important because, contrary to Kamala’s repeated claims of growing up in the middle class, she actually came from a privileged background. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a prominent breast cancer researcher, and her father, Donald Harris, was an economics professor at Stanford University. Even though her parents divorced when Kamala was a child, she clearly wasn’t disadvantaged. 

And what about before Hastings? According to Wikipedia, “When she was twelve, Harris and her sister moved with their mother to Montreal, Quebec, Canada where Shyamala had accepted a research and teaching position at the McGill University-affiliated Jewish General Hospital. Harris attended a French-speaking primary school, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, then F.A.C.E. School, and finally Westmount High School in Westmount, Quebec, graduating in 1981.”

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So, Kamala is the daughter of two college professors, and her mother went on to be a prominent breast cancer researcher. Doesn’t sound like a disadvantaged economic or educational background, does it? 

She was also apparently well-traveled. According to a report from India Times, Kamala’s mother would “take her and sister Maya to India because she wanted her daughters to understand where she had come from.” That doesn’t sound like something you can do if you’re from a disadvantaged background, does it?

In fact, Kamala’s mother considered her daughter to have had a privileged upbringing.

Here’s what the Los Angeles Times reported on October 24, 2004: 

Kamala Davi Harris has always lived in a complicated world, navigating a path where perceptions and reality often conflict. Her mother remembers the patronizing tone of a well-meaning Head Start official in Berkeley who excitedly informed her that Kamala had been tested as highly intelligent: “You don’t under-stand-Kamala could go to college!” What Shyamala G. Harris understood was that this man assumed her daughter must be an impoverished girl from the rough side of town, not a privileged child of foreign graduate students whose academic pursuits led them to UC Berkeley.

Harris’ mother, the daughter of a high-ranking Indian government official, would earn a doctorate in biological sciences and become a well-published breast cancer researcher. She is now based at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories and lives in a spacious condominium in a historic building overlooking Oakland’s Lake Merritt. Harris’ father, Donald, earned his doctorate in economics, joined the faculty of Stanford University and advised the Jamaican government on economic issues. [emphasis mine]

“To get into law school, Harris was a beneficiary of a program that wasn’t intended for someone of her economic or social status,” notes Jim Thompson over at our sister site, RedState. “She almost certainly lied on her application or at a minimum knew that her politics would fit with the LEOP selection committee. Harris was ‘waved in’ because of a lie or because of politics. Harris has consistently used the ‘system’ she decries, and she gained positions that she did not deserve and did not earn. She gamed the system.”