As misinformation continued to spread in the build-up to the 2024 U.S presidential election, one quote attributed to Democratic candidate Kamala Harris caught the internet's attention. On Aug. 17, one X user claimed the vice president once said she could ruin lives with "the swipe of a pen" (archived).
Similar claims appeared elsewhere on the platform, where one user's post had amassed more than 1.8 million views as of this writing (archived). It was captioned: "Power hungry Kamala Harris describing how she can ruin lives with the
The above X posts featured a video of Harris speaking at the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Democratic Party's annual banquet during the 2020 presidential campaign. In the recording, she said:
I learned — I think I was, I don't know, 22 when I started that work — I learned that with the swipe of my pen, I could charge someone with the lowest-level offense. And because of the swipe of my pen, that person could be arrested, they could sit in jail for at least 48 hours, they could lose time from work and their family, maybe lose their job, they'd have to come out of their own pocket to help hire a lawyer, they'd lose standing in their community, all because of the swipe of my pen. Weeks later I could dismiss the charges, but their life would forever be changed. So I learned at a very young age, the power.
Snopes examined the claim and concluded the footage was real, meaning it was not AI-generated, digitally manipulated, or otherwise altered. However, it was missing context because the user only posted a small clip from a longer video.
The full footage, which was available on C-SPAN (at 18:58), showed Harris was referring to then-President Donald Trump. The quote above continued in the longer video (at 19:47):
So I learned at a very young age, the power, the power, to impact real human beings that we have when we hold these offices. And I was just a lowly deputy DA. Yet we have a person in the White House who holds the office of president of the United States who does not fully — or even partially — understand what it means to have power. Let's be clear about that. He goes around swinging what he thinks is his power, he doesn't understand — he doesn't understand what it means to be powerful. Because when you truly understand what it means to be powerful, you understand that the greatest measure of your strength is not who you beat down, it's who you lift up.
Harris told a similar story at a Google event in 2010: "It's an incredible amount of power, and you want to make sure that the people who have this kind of power are taking seriously the responsibility in terms of understanding, as much as anything, the impact on the people who will be affected by that."
In sum, Harris did once speak about the amount of power she wielded as a district attorney and how "the swipe of her pen" could affect someone's life, but she was speaking in the context of Trump not understanding "what it means to be powerful."
She did not specifically use the phrase "ruin lives," as several posts on X claimed.