Meet Kamala Harris’s ‘problem-solver-in-chief’

After Joe Biden bowed out of the presidential race in July, Kamala Harris brought in a key ally to help her navigate a campaign built for someone else.

Kamala Harris and, inset, key adviser Brian Nelson.

When Kamala Harris made the decision in 2011 to pull out of multistate mortgage settlement negotiations during the foreclosure crisis — a defining moment in her political career — the then-California attorney general drafted a blistering letter with the help of one of her most trusted aides.

The pair debated every word, with Harris peering over her aide’s shoulder as he typed. “I have concluded that this is not the deal California homeowners have been waiting for,” they wrote.

More than a decade later, that aide, Brian Nelson, was one of the first people Harris hired during another defining moment in her political career.

After President Biden bowed out of the presidential race in July, leaving Harris with just over three months to campaign until Election Day, she brought Nelson over from the Treasury Department to help her navigate a presidential campaign that was built for someone else.

A pragmatist who isn’t seen by people who know him as overtly ideological, Nelson takes a similar approach to governing as Harris, one that portends a shift from the lofty, New Deal-style policy prescriptions proposed by Biden to a more consensus-oriented, incremental strategy.

“I kind of think of him as her problem-solver-in-chief,” said Jill Habig, who served as special counsel to Harris when she was California’s attorney general. “Part of why he’s such a good partner to her is, I think he gets the way she thinks and is aligned with that.”

Harris, who had been in Washington for only four years before she became vice president, doesn’t have a deep bench of longtime aides, making Nelson, 47 years old, perhaps the most influential of the small group of advisers shaping her domestic and foreign policy agenda.

The pair forged their relationship fighting big banks, but over the years, they have cultivated ties with business leaders. Some of the campaign’s early moves, including a plan this week to pare back Biden’s proposed increase in the top capital-gains tax rate, signal that the vice president and her top policy adviser are open to hearing concerns from the business community.

Crafting a policy agenda

In his new role, Nelson has a challenging task: articulating a coherent policy agenda in a short period that connects with voters, who say they want to learn more about the vice president’s record and vision for the country, while also creating some separation from Biden, his former boss.

Nelson and other Harris advisers have made the calculated decision to outline a handful of broad policy proposals focused on lowering costs for the middle class instead of issuing lengthy white papers that lay out a comprehensive vision for a second term. The lack of specifics has opened Harris up to criticism from Republicans, including Harris’s opponent, former President Donald Trump. Nelson has pushed back against those attacks. At an event on the sidelines of last month’s Democratic National Convention, Nelson called Harris’s policy agenda “substantive.”

Nelson declined to be interviewed for this article, but The Wall Street Journal spoke to more than a dozen people close to him and the vice president.

Harris recommended Nelson as the administration’s nominee to serve as Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, a coveted position that became more high-profile as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza unfolded.

Even while he was at Treasury and not officially on Harris’s staff, he served as a confidant behind the scenes and Harris brought him on to help on key projects, according to people who have worked with both of them. If Harris is elected, Nelson is widely expected to score a senior role in her new administration, with Democrats floating his name for a range of positions from director of the National Economic Council to Treasury secretary.

“Brian has been something of a constant in her world and an available and accessible sort of confidant, source of history and comfort that a lot of prominent electives are not able to maintain,” said Nathan Barankin, who served as chief of staff to Harris while she was attorney general and a senator.

One of the first policy proposals Harris released as the Democratic nominee was focused on making housing more affordable — a full-circle moment in Harris and Nelson’s working relationship, those who know them said.

Nelson, who previously worked for Harris for nearly her entire two terms as attorney general, helped secure the $20bn mortgage settlement that Harris’s campaign has emphasised on the campaign trail, and he played a central role in passing California’s Homeowner Bill of Rights, a set of state laws providing protections to homeowners facing foreclosures.

Although Harris ultimately got a much larger settlement by pulling out of the multistate negotiations, a Journal analysis found that roughly a quarter of it was used as she intended: to help lower the debt burden on Californian’s primary mortgages.

As they travelled the country together during the negotiations, they also got to know each other personally, rushing into clothing stores at times to buy fresh clothes when their trips got extended. “It was an awkward moment of levity as we critiqued each other’s choices off the rack,” Harris wrote in her book.

“They built their bond in the trenches of the mortgage crisis,” said Travis LeBlanc, who served as senior adviser to Harris when she was California attorney general. “There were some tense meetings, and Brian was at the centre of all of that. It’s in that kind of a stressful scenario that you bond, or you break, right? The two of them, they bonded.”

A California connection

Nelson, a Southern California native who attended the University of California, Los Angeles as an undergrad, started at Yale Law School during the week of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which he has said shaped his career.

After working in the private sector, Nelson joined the national security division of the Justice Department. Before returning to Washington, D.C., during the Biden administration, he also worked for the organising committee for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles.

Harris, who briefly met Nelson at former Attorney-General Eric Holder’s Christmas party in December 2010, hired him following a trip to Washington for a meeting of state attorneys general. Harris had become increasingly sceptical of the ongoing mortgage settlement negotiations and knew she would need more top lawyers on her team. Tony West, Harris’s brother-in-law and a Justice Department official during the Obama administration, made the introduction, people familiar with the matter said.

During her job interview with Nelson at a restaurant in Los Angeles, Harris grilled him about his views, jumping from one issue to the next. She learned that they think about policy in a similar way, a former senior aide to Harris said. “It felt like a dissertation defence, but you’re being asked to defend your dissertation on like 19 different topics,” the aide said. “That conversation is a bit of a microcosm of the way that her mind works. And I think they are kindred spirits in that way.”

In addition to housing, Nelson, while working for Harris in California, played a central role in two other issues that the vice president’s advisers point to as foundational aspects of her political resume: her investigation of the defunct, for-profit education company Corinthian Colleges, which resulted in a judgment of more than $1 billion; and her efforts to crack down on transnational criminal organisations.

Nelson maintained a close relationship with Harris during his time at Treasury. He worked on one of Harris’s signature issues: improving access to banking and financial resources in the Caribbean. But people who worked with Nelson said he rarely flaunted his ties to the vice president. Aides only got brief glimpses of their friendship, including when one spotted a text message from Harris wishing Nelson a happy birthday.

During his nearly-three-year stint at Treasury, Nelson was at the centre of the Biden administration’s economic sanctions campaign against Russia, as well as the price cap on Russian oil. He visited dozens of countries during his time in the job, as he worked to keep U.S. allies on board with the sanctions regime despite scepticism from some European nations.

On his frequent trips abroad, Nelson often bore the brunt of other countries’ frustrations. In February, a senior official representing a U.S. ally unloaded on Nelson during a bilateral meeting, accusing the Biden administration of not doing enough to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Nelson, according to a person present, kept his cool despite the official’s heated rhetoric, laying out the administration’s efforts to funnel aid into Gaza.

People who worked with Nelson said the response was typical of his approach to the job. “I can see him being a diplomat at some point, an ambassador,” said Ben Harris, a former Treasury Department official. “He has the disposition of someone who is measured, thoughtful and not especially reactionary.”

Nelson built relationships with major players in the financial sector as he and his team offered guidance about the implications of the sanctions on Russia. “There are always some government officials who are unwilling or unable to engage meaningfully with the private sector, and that was never Brian,” said Brent McIntosh, the chief legal officer at Citigroup and a former Trump administration Treasury Department official. “Brian and his team were willing and able to talk to us.”

The Wall Street Journal