President Joe Biden was a notoriously bad law student. He failed a torts class after he was caught plagiarizing a paper, and graduated near the bottom of his class—76th of 85—at Syracuse University Law School. But he still managed to pass the Delaware bar exam, considered one of the most difficult in the nation, on his first try. The Delaware bar confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon that Biden was admitted in 1968, the same year he graduated.
The same can't be said about the vice president to whom Biden decided to "pass the torch" after leading Democrats threatened to ruin his reputation unless he dropped his candidacy for reelection. Kamala Harris failed the California State Bar exam on her first attempt in July 1989, the same year she graduated from UC Hastings Law School in San Francisco.
"In studying for the bar, I had put forward the most half-assed performance of my life," Harris wrote in her memoir, The Truths We Hold. Some would argue that Harris's failed presidential campaign in 2020 was even more half-assed, but her failure to pass the bar was certainly a statistically impressive achievement. Nearly 82 percent of Harris's fellow Hastings graduates, and more than 72 percent of first-time exam takers in California, passed the bar in 1989 according to public data.
Harris’s anemic academic record could haunt her come November. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens warned this week that swing state voters could be turned off by the fact that Harris’s career has been fueled not by her intellectual prowess, but by "connections and favoritism."
Indeed, Harris passed the exam on her second attempt and was admitted to the California State Bar in June 1990. Shortly thereafter, she landed a job as an assistant district attorney in the Alameda County prosecutor’s office in Oakland. It was there that Harris struck up a romantic relationship with California Assembly speaker Willie Brown (D.), a married man 30 years her senior.
During their passionate fling, Brown gave Harris a BMW sports car and appointed her to posts on the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the Medical Assistance Commission, earning her a combined $80,000 a year on top of her existing prosecutor’s salary, Politico reported. Brown connected Harris with powerful Democrats who would facilitate her rise in California politics.
Harris dumped Brown in 1995 after he won his election as mayor of San Francisco. "She concluded there was no permanency in our relationship," he recalled in 2003. The Free Beacon honored Brown with a Man of the Year award in 2019 for launching his former lover's political career, which could soon culminate in her historic election as president of the United States.
Other leading Democrats who failed their bar exams on the first try include Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Charlie Crist.