When Vice President Kamala Harris was California’s attorney general, her team found evidence of corruption after the closure of a nuclear power plant left customer ratepayers to cover the multibillion-dollar settlement bill. Harris was criticized for failing to prosecute. Now, The Federalist has reviewed financial records revealing that the company operating the plant had been giving hundreds of thousands to state Democrats when Harris decided to look away.
The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station permanently shut down in 2013, following a radiation leak the previous year. The settlement originally left customers with 70 percent of the financial burden, or $3.3 billion. And it left 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste on a popular California beach.
As attorney general in California, Harris’s team uncovered evidence of a secret meeting between an executive of Southern California Edison (SCE) — the primary owner of the nuclear power plant — and the then-president of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to apparently draft the settlement. But as Harris was running for U.S. Senate in 2016, the investigation seemingly began to trail off.
Democrat then-Gov. Jerry Brown — who appointed members to the CPUC and endorsed Harris’ bid for Senate in 2016 — met with an SCE executive in 2013, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Later that year, SCE funneled $54,400 to his reelection campaign, state records show. Evidence later revealed another SCE executive secretly met with the then-CPUC president in Poland in 2013. This SCE executive had been a long-time contributor to the campaign
