WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris’s efforts to stop the cries of “lock him up” are aimed Donald Trump The comments at the Harris-Walz rallies this week may be an attempt to avoid the kind of rhetoric we saw at Trump’s rallies in 2016.
But there’s also a very practical reason for Harris not to show support for such language: Any comments or signs of approval she makes could further delay or complicate the ongoing federal criminal charges against Trump. That includes the Jan. 6 and 2020 election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
If Harris wins the November election, Trump’s Jan. 6 case — though weakened by the Supreme Court — will move forward toward trial. As a sitting vice president in the administration that appointed the attorney general to oversee the case, any comments Harris makes about the trial could give the former president’s lawyers fodder to argue in court that her remarks violated Trump’s due process rights. That includes any suggestion that locking up Trump is an explicit goal (as Trump repeatedly said about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign).
When a “lock him up” chant went up at a Harris rally in Wisconsin this week, she told her supporters, “We’ll let the courts handle that,” and she used a similar phrase when the same chant went up at another rally. “Our job is to defeat him in November,” she said.
Harris, a former prosecutor herself, has been cautious in her references to the raft of civil and criminal cases Trump has faced in recent years. Conscious of the impact she could have on Trump’s ongoing federal cases, Harris has surrounded herself with Justice Department veterans, including her brother-in-law Tony West, a former top Justice Department official, and former Attorney General Eric Holder, who has vetted her vice presidential nominees.
But Harris doesn’t face the same restrictions in discussing state and local cases against Trump, or cases that have already been heard.
“I was elected United States Senator. I was elected Attorney General of California. And before that, I was a prosecutor in the courtroom,” Harris said at her first campaign rally last month, a statement she has since repeated. “And in those roles, I’ve taken on all kinds of perpetrators — predators who took advantage of women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, con artists who broke the rules for their own gain. So listen to me when I say: I know the type of Donald Trump.”
A close reading of Harris’ references — to predators who took advantage of women, to fraudsters who ripped off consumers, to con artists who broke the rules for their own gain — appear to refer to other civil and criminal cases Trump has faced, not the Jan. 6 case he currently faces. In 2023, a jury found Trump liable for the sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll; earlier this year, a New York judge ordered Trump to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in civil fraud; and Trump was found guilty in May of 34 felonies in a case involving violating campaign finance rules to make a hush-money payment to a pornographic film actor during the 2016 campaign.
Harris, who herself came within feet of a pipe bomb left at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on the evening of January 6, 2021, will face a complex task in any debates about the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s efforts to cling to power after his 2020 loss.
She also likely won’t talk too much about Trump’s handling of classified documents: A federal judge appointed by Trump did dismiss a federal case involving his alleged mishandling of classified documents, but the Justice Department has appealed and the case may ultimately stand.
“Her campaign position is complicated by the fact that she is a member of the board, in the same way that it would have been complicated for” President Joe Bidensaid Bill Shipley, a former federal prosecutor who now represents numerous defendants from the Jan. 6 attack. Moreover, Shipley noted, Harris is herself a lawyer, which would raise ethical issues if she were to speak about ongoing cases.
There are Justice Department rules about communicating with the media about ongoing cases, and there is a DOJ tradition of trying to speak within the “four corners,” meaning that information about ongoing cases comes from court documents, not from media statements. While those rules are binding only on the Justice Department, part of Harris’s pitch to voters is that she would respect the boundaries between the Justice Department and the White House that have existed for decades, ever since the Watergate scandal.
When asked by NBC News why she had stopped the “lock him up” chants, Harris’ campaign said in a statement that the vice president is focused on persuading voters to stop Trump in November.
“Vice President Harris has a simple message: There is one way to stop Donald Trump and his damaging Project 2025 agenda, and it will be at the ballot box this November,” a campaign official said.
Trump’s campaign responded to a question about the chants by saying they “would be funny if Kamala Harris and Joe Biden hadn’t literally turned the legal system against President Trump in an attempt to imprison him before the election.”
The Trump campaign and Republicans in Congress have repeatedly accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the Justice Department against Trump, even though the federal charges against him were brought by an independent special counsel, Smith, who has aggressively pursued cases against both Democrats and Republicans.
During the Biden administration, the Justice Department appointed another special counsel, a former Trump appointee, who secured the conviction of Biden’s son Hunter Biden on weapons charges. A third special counsel, a Republican previously appointed by Trump to be a top federal prosecutor, oversaw an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents and decided not to pursue charges.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
