Question: Why would anyone lie about working at McDonald's? If you really want to feign humility, you lie about working at Jack in the Box* before they blew up the clown. (And then brought him back.) Or maybe you lie about working at Denny's.

What kind of a clown lies about working at McDonald's? That's what the Free Beacon wants to know, but this might turn out as thin as ... well, a McDonald's patty:

Harris’s work at McDonald’s, which allegedly took place at a franchise in the California Bay Area the summer after her freshman year in college, is a recent addition to her carefully curated life story. For decades, Harris never mentioned it, not on the campaign trail nor in two books. It’s absent from a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college. Third-party biographers did not write about it. Not until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke to a labor rally in Las Vegas did she mention the job, telling the crowd that she "was a student when I was working in a McDonald’s."

McDonald’s boasts that one in eight Americans has worked at the fast food chain, and Harris, whose campaign is light on policy and heavy on image, has been using her fast food job to portray what the Washington Post, in a credulous piece this month on the Harris-McDonald’s connection, described as "her humble background." (Harris is the daughter of an eminent cancer researcher, whom her campaign calls "a working mother," and a tenured Stanford economist, who split when Harris and her sister were children.)

Early this month, Harris’s campaign said she used her McDonald’s wages to pay for college. "Vice President Harris is the daughter of a working mother and worked at a McDonald’s to put herself through college," campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said this month. A pro-Harris super PAC ad said she "work[ed] her way through school at McDonald’s." And former president Bill Clinton, at the Democratic National Convention, joked that "she’ll break my record as president who has spent the most time at McDonald’s."

The Free Beacon notes that the campaign walked back the claim that Harris tried to put herself through college by working at Mickey D's, a fiscal impossibility even when college was relatively cheaper. Two weeks ago, Politico reset the claim from paying for college to a more-rational "earn a bit more spending money" explanation. Howard University tuition in 1986 when Harris graduated cost $3045 at the time, so a $2.50 per hour job on the fryer for three months wouldn't have cut it.

However, this looks at first blush like a common fallacy: does absence of evidence prove evidence of absence? Not necessarily. It's not clear why Harris would have talked about McDonald's before running for office, even in her memoirs, the first of which came in 2010. Like most teenagers, a fast-food job would hardly be formative in any way that would be meaningful except in personal terms. It's also so ubiquitous an experience that it wouldn't be remarkable in a political context at all. In fact, it's tough to grasp why Harris even mentioned it, let alone would lie about it.

Still, there is an occasional instance where absence of evidence might mean evidence of absence. Free Beacon's reporters dug deep enough to uncover a 1987 job application for a position at Alameda County's DA office. That application required Harris to list all of her previous jobs, presumably for the purposes of doing a background check for a position of significant trust. And the Big Mac seems to be missing:

The Free Beacon also obtained a copy of Harris’s October 1987 job application for a law clerk position in the Alameda County district attorney’s office. On that form, Harris, who was in law school at the time, listed several jobs—including a month-long clerical job at a stock brokerage—in a section that asked her to list every position she held in the last 10 years. McDonald’s is absent.

Harris lists three jobs on the application and five in total on an attached résumé, according to the documents, obtained through a public records request. Harris, who submitted the application as a second-year student at then-University of California, Hastings College of the Law, included granular life experience on her résumé—"extensive travel in India, Africa, [and] Europe" and "lived in Montreal, Canada for six years"—but not McDonald’s.

Hmmmm. The reporters went so far as to track down the owner of the Alameda franchise at the time, who refused to comment. The location is a guess, by the way because the campaign never gave any real details about the specific franchise or the time frame. They contrast that with Barack Obama's claims about working at Baskin-Robbins, which were easily confirmed, and the franchise manager happy to talk about his humble work experience on the way to elite status. 

So ... is Harris faking the fryer? Flipping us the Filet-O-Fish? Giving us a bad shake for the sake of humble apple pie? I have a very hard time seeing why anyone would fake this kind of claim, because there's really no upside to it. No one puts "McDonald's fryer chef" on a professional resumé, after all, so a lack of track record on this before her first presidential run is at least explicable. I'd bet that this turns into a "Corn Pop" story -- presumed fabulism that suddenly gets confirmed by witnesses, to everyone's surprise. At some point, her fellow fryers and flippers will come forward with "My Summer With Kamala" stories, and this will all be a trivia point.

But if it is fake ... don't count on the media to cover it. Call it professional courtesy from the Fake News industry. 

* - I worked at Jack in the Box before they blew up the clown. No, really, I did. It wasn't all that long after Ralston-Purina bought them up and created the Foodmaker unit to get arms-length from Purina's core animal-food business, however. You can see "Foodmaker Inc" in the ad at the link. I can even recall the time and location from memory, which Harris either can't or hasn't for her own history: the La Palma, CA location for five months in 1979, July to December. You could look it up, but who really cares?