Hoo boy. You don’t even need the sound on to follow the plot of this clip.

Kamala Harris in January: The attack on Jussie Smollett was an "attempted modern day lynching."

Kamala Harris this month: "I think the facts are still unfolding. I'm very concerned about it obviously." pic.twitter.com/kxoDWHf4WR

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) February 18, 2019

I don’t think she’s scrambling to backtrack from a rush to judgment, like Cory Booker did with respect to his own ill-advised “lynching” tweet. I think she actually might be learning for the first time here that whoever’s running her Twitter account pinched this off a few weeks ago, after Smollett first claimed he’d been attacked:

.@JussieSmollett is one of the kindest, most gentle human beings I know. I’m praying for his quick recovery.

This was an attempted modern day lynching. No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexuality or color of their skin. We must confront this hate.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 29, 2019

The part of the vid where she looks around in desperation for her staff, as if to say “What is this reporter talking about?”, is a delight.

I think the timestamps on her tweet and Booker’s may explain what happened. Booker was quick out of the gate on January 29th in calling the alleged attack on Smollett a “modern-day lynching.” That may have forced Harris’s team to chime in quickly, not wanting to give him an inch in the primary sweepstakes to claim that he takes crimes against black/LGBT victims more seriously than Harris does. So her team went up with their own tweet within 90 minutes, using the same incendiary term — “attempted modern-day lynching” — that Booker used. Maybe that was done with her knowledge on the spur of the moment and then she forgot about it, or maybe it was just a staff decision that required no input from the candidate. Either way, I think Booker and Harris (or their campaigns, rather) each calculated they’d be better off rushing to judgment in Smollett’s defense and risking ending up egregiously wrong than waiting for the facts to emerge and being accused of undue skepticism towards victims of hate crimes.

Solidarity is what matters, even if it meant smearing Trump supporters. It’s not like people who wear MAGA hats are voting Democrat next year, right?

By the way, as of 4:30 ET, the alleged victim in last month’s horrible racist attack has no plans to meet with police today to answer questions. Perfectly normal for a victim of a violent crime not to want to speak to the investigators who are trying to get justice for him.