A top aide to Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, supported the “defund police” movement and progressive efforts to pack the Supreme Court with more justices.
Brian Fallon, the former national press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, is now in a key staffer position as Harris appears likely to secure the nomination this year to face former President Donald Trump in November. In January, Fallon took a job as communications director for Harris after an almost six-year stint as executive director of Demand Justice, a left-wing dark money group aiming to upend the federal judiciary radically.
Fallon’s ties to Demand Justice and 2020 support for defunding police after George Floyd’s death sparked riots across the United States will likely become talking points for Republicans — who are seeking to frame Harris as anti-law-and-order. On Friday, CNN reported that Harris also, in June 2020, expressed support for the defund the police movement. Democrats have sought to distance themselves from the movement after crime rose in many cities.
Fallon, who also worked as a spokesman between 2013 and 2015 for then-Attorney General Eric Holder, founded Demand Justice in 2018. The progressive organization, which is registered under a section of the IRS code, 501(c)(4), that allows it to shield its donors from the IRS, used to be a project of Sixteen Thirty Fund. The latter entity is one of the most influential Democratic dark money groups in the U.S. under the Arabella Advisors consultancy network.
Demand Justice, which split off from Sixteen Thirty Fund in 2021, was notably behind advertising attacks on Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh during their confirmation processes. Demand Justice also spent large sums supporting President Joe Biden’s nomination of left-wing Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, records show.
Demand Justice is behind ad campaigns aiming to gin up support for adding more seats to the Supreme Court, a proposal that Republicans have long argued would politicize the federal judiciary and lead to an unfair imbalance of power in the country.
Carrie Severino, president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, posted an image on X on Friday of a Fallon tweet from 2022 praising Supreme Court “leaks.”
Fallon’s post came in the wake of a draft opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade being leaked.
“SCOTUS leaks are good,” Fallon said in May 2022. “Elite lawyers on both the left and right treating the Court as precious all these years have just been giving cover to an institution that is wholly accountable. Rip the veil off.”
Kamala Harris's communications director called for more leaks at the Supreme Court in the wake of the Dobbs draft opinion being leaked.
That leak helped lead to an assassination plot against Justice Kavanaugh a month later. pic.twitter.com/lqqpQaKmPq
— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) July 26, 2024
Demand Justice has a “Supreme Court shortlist” on its website for progressive officials that the group argues would make good justices. The list includes Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, Assistant U.S. Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Kristen Clarke, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, and others.
“Until she says otherwise, we can only assume Kamala shares Brian’s radical wish list,” Davis, who runs the Article III Project, told the Washington Examiner.
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The Harris campaign did not return a request for comment.
According to a RealClearPolitics polling average, Trump leads Harris 47.9% to 46% nationally.
