Since Kamala Harris was elected as San Francisco’s district attorney two decades ago, crime in the City by the Bay has made a comeback.

One real-life scene from a Dirty Harry reenactment took place just a few weeks ago, when a 17-year-old delinquent shot 49ers rookie wide receiver Ricky Pearsall in the chest as the first-round NFL draft pick was shopping near Union Station in the middle of the day. Such shopping excursions have become increasingly rare among San Franciscans; lawlessness and filth helped reduce the city’s foot traffic by 22% last year alone.

As the top cop — for seven years in the city and later six in the state — Harris played a role in this decline. Critics often point to her refusal to prosecute as a capital offense the murder of police officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004, which incensed even Democrats. “If you make charging decisions based on personal philosophy,” said Bill Lockyer, California’s attorney general at the time, “I will take this case away from you.”

But it is Harris’s refusal to even question the well-connected suspects in the murder of another policeman that better illustrates the dangers she would present as our nation’s president.

Cold Case

On February 16, 1970, shortly before an 11 p.m. shift change, a bomb placed on a windowsill exploded at the Park Precinct police substation in San Francisco. The bomb, which included industrial staples, injured more than half a dozen policemen.

Brian V. McDonnell, a father of two with 20 years of experience on the force, lost an eye and significant blood through a slashed jugular vein. He died two days after the blast.

Just a few days earlier, during a midnight shift change at the nearby Berkeley police complex, radicals had detonated two bombs and injured two police volunteers.

“The relationship between this and the Berkeley police episode would indicate that there is some connection between the two,” San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto said after McDonnell’s death. “We are going to have a very, very vigorous investigation. It will be an all-out investigation to bring these kind of maniacs to justice. We will get them there.”

But 54 years later, the maniacs remain beyond the reach of justice. Neither a $5,000 reward offered at the time nor numerous grand juries ever did “get them there.” Nor did renewed interest two decades ago spark indictments when a then-anonymous and now-ubiquitous political figure was elected as district attorney of San Francisco; Kamala Harris refused to investigate, let alone prosecute left-wing terrorists for the murder.

Why? Critics point generally to a soft-on-crime approach and specifically to the ideologically privileged position of the suspected perpetrators that fostered a no-enemies-to-the-left mindset from a district attorney dependent on votes in progressive San Francisco. Whatever her motivations, McDonnell’s murder remains unsolved.

Taking Credit

Cliff Kincaid documents the alleged Weather Underground bombing that killed McDonnell in 1970, and Harris’s lack of interest in prosecuting those behind it, in a new report issued by America’s Survival. “But no indictment was ever brought,” he points out. “She now campaigns as a ‘tough prosecutor.’”

Kincaid alleges that Harris was involved in an effort, reported at the time, to gag local police from speaking out about the incident. He believes the authorities used an active investigation as a ruse to suppress publicity in a case that many in the local power structure wished would just go away.

California Governor Ronald Reagan called the attack “one of the most cowardly, despicable things that anyone can imagine” and noted that radical groups long signaled a shift from protest confrontation to “terror tactics.”

The Weather Underground did not take credit for it at the time — but years later, some involved described the Berkeley bombing as a Weather Underground operation.

“We wanted to do it at a shift change, frankly, to maximize deaths,” a Weatherman explained to Bryan Burrough for his 2015 book Days of Rage. “They were cops, so anyone was fair game. Basically it was seen as a successful action. But others, yeah, were angry that a policeman didn’t die.”

Nearly four days later across the Bay, one did.

Strong Ties

The known evidence confronting District Attorney Harris and the feds indicates to many the definite culpability of the Weather Underground. The fact that a former member of the group admitted its involvement in the Berkeley police bombing just days before the San Francisco police bombing serves as just one piece of evidence in a larger puzzle.

In interviews and books, former Weathermen confirm their heavy presence in the Bay Area at the time. They also took credit for a series of bombings way back when that targeted not only the Capitol and the Pentagon, but police stations around the country. For instance, the group boasted of bombing a New York City police station on June 9, 1970, that injured eight and another bombing that October of a memorial to Chicago policemen who died in an 1886 terror attack. So, the bombing of the San Francisco police station fits the modus operandi.

In their initial investigation, authorities in 1971 found “an amount of explosives and bomb-making paraphernalia” in a San Francisco apartment rented by a man the landlord identified in a photograph who turned out to be affiliated with the Weather Underground. From that apartment, investigators lifted fingerprints from 16 members of the Weather Underground, including Mark Rudd, Howie Machtinger, Bill Ayers, Cathy Wilkerson, David Gilbert, and Kathy Boudin. The latter two were convicted a decade later for their parts in the murders of two policemen and a security guard.

The Weathermen initiated the bombing campaign after going underground in late 1969. At its famous “War Party” in Flint, Michigan, that year, they hoisted a banner reading “Charlie Manson Power” and adopted a split-finger greeting to symbolize the fork one of Manson’s followers impaled in a murder victim’s stomach. “Dig it: first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach,” Bernardine Dohrn told those gathered. “Wild!”

Larry Gratwohl, a Vietnam veteran who successfully infiltrated Weatherman, testified in 1974 before the Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee that Bill Ayers told him and others that Dohrn, the woman who had praised the Manson Family weeks before McDonnell’s murder, planted the bomb.

“When he returned, we had another meeting at which time — and this is the only time that any Weathermen told me something that someone else had done …Bill started off telling us about the need to raise the level of the struggle and for stronger leadership inside the Weatherman ‘focles’ and inside the Weatherman organization as a whole,” Gratwohl said on Capitol Hill. One of the “real problems [Ayers cited] was that someone like Bernardine Dorhn had to plan, develop, and carry out the bombing of the police station in San Francisco, and he specifically named her as the person that committed that act.”

Attaining Power

Gratwohl then testified that Ayers “very emphatically” stated that Dohrn was involved. Ayers allegedly saying this — partly because he later married and raised children with Dohrn — seems more significant than if any other member of the group had done so. Although they were not married at the time, both, but especially Dohrn, served as leaders of the supposedly leaderless group.

Others implicating Weathermen in the murder include radicals Matthew Landy Steen, who wrote for The Berkeley Tribe, and Karen Latimer, a member. Both Steen and Latimer each told the FBI of attending separate planning meetings for the bombing that involved Dohrn and Machtinger. Unlike Gratwohl, who played a radical for the FBI, Steen and Latimer earnestly served extremist left-wing causes. The statements from the FBI plant and the two leftists all place Dohrn in the mix.

But prosecutors declined to prosecute.

During Harris’s time as district attorney, Barack Obama, who launched his political career with the help of Dohrn and Ayers, served as a senator and ran for president — which, among other reasons, made pursuing the case politically inconvenient. The idea of disturbing the Left’s narrative that the Weathermen — so many employed by that time in universities — never murdered anyone, let alone the impact of possibly pursuing murder charges against friends of the Obamas, seemed disadvantageous for a district attorney on the rise in San Francisco.

The electorate, after all, soon voted into Harris’s old job the young man raised by Ayers and Dohrn: Chesa Boudin. Ayers and Dohrn brought him up as their own son while his biological parents — Kathy Boudin and Dave Gilbert, whose fingerprints curiously appeared in that abandoned bomb factory/apartment — served long sentences in New York for their roles in a Brink’s truck “expropriation” that resulted in three murders (In 2022, San Francisco voters recalled Boudin from his DA role for being too radically soft on crime.).

Though the feds twice looked into the 1970 police station bombing case during Harris’s tenure as district attorney, she conspicuously behaved indifferently toward it. One can understand District Attorney Chesa Boudin wishing to avoid interrogating his adoptive mom for a murder that predated his birth — but what was Harris’s excuse for not interviewing Bernardine Dohrn?

The circumstantial and eyewitness evidence in the public domain may not render a unanimous guilty verdict for Dohrn, Machtinger, and other Weathermen from the court of public opinion. But that body’s verdict on Kamala Harris, and others who held her job, for the crime of failing to place the very-much alive Dohrn, Machtinger, and Ayers on the stand before a grand jury comes down as a unanimous guilty.

 

Daniel J. Flynn serves as a 2024-2025 visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior editor at The American Spectator. His book, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, comes out in the spring.