Republican presidential candidate donald trumpduring an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists conference on Wednesday, falsely claimed that presumptive Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris failed to pass the California bar exam.
The falsehood was said during a conversation when the Semafor reporter Kaida Goba He asked whether the former president would resign if he felt he would not be able to continue as president if elected. Trump responded by challenging Harris, whom he is 19 years his senior, to a cognitive test.
“She failed the bar exam. She didn’t pass the bar exam, so maybe she wouldn’t pass the cognitive test,” Trump said. “She didn’t pass the bar exam, and she didn’t think she was going to pass, and she didn’t think she was going to pass, and I don’t know what happened.”
Harris said she did not pass the exam on her first try, but later passed and was admitted to the California Bar a year after finishing law school.
Trump’s statement came amid a series of disparaging attacks on the vice president during the interview, including questions about the authenticity of his heritage.
“I didn’t know she was black until a few years ago when she became black, and now she wants to be known as black,” Trump said.
The former president also stated that Harris was a “DEI” candidate and called the moderator Rachel Scott of ABC News was rude for repeating the candidate’s previous derogatory statements about the black community.
Trump: I’ve never been asked a question in such a horrible way, first question. You don’t even say “Hello, how are you?” Are you with ABC? Because I think they are a fake news network, a terrible network pic.twitter.com/K8qnUnYKUf
-Acyn (@Acyn) July 31, 2024
Trump’s interview was scheduled to last an hour, but ended in less than 35 minutes, with Scott ending the interview by saying, “we have to leave it there, for the Trump team.”
The claim about Harris’ bar exam performance first appeared during Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s 2020 confirmation hearings and is true but lacks context. Harris passed the bar exam and worked as a prosecutor in California before becoming the state’s attorney general.
Harris passed the difficult exam
The bar exam is the qualifying exam for lawyers to receive a license to practice law in a particular state.
California has a notoriously difficult bar exam. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times wrote that his approval rate “generally hovered around 50%”.
Harris graduated from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 1989.
Harris told the New York Times in 2016 that she failed the exam on her first attempt and consoled a recent law graduate who also failed the exam, saying, “I told her, this is not a measure of your ability.”
The California Bar Association shows that Harris was admitted in 1990 and allowed its license to become inactive in February 2021.
In 2020, when the complaint first appeared, the approval rate for “newbies” taking the test it was just over 67%. Less than 45% of “beginners” who took the test in February passedaccording to a California Bar Association report.
Charleston School of Law Dean Larry Cunningham told USA TODAY in 2020 that the exam was criticized as “unrealistic” and insufficient to assess some important legal skills, such as interviewing clients and arguing in court.
“These criticisms also explain why many law graduates who struggle to pass this high-stakes exam on the first try become excellent lawyers and judges,” he wrote.
This article originally appeared in USA TODAY: Trump claims that Harris, former prosecutor, did not pass the bar exam, she did
