https://nypost.com/2024/02/21/opinion/the-soros-backlash-how-the-nation-has-turned-against-soft-on-crime-prosecutors/
For $40 million — a rounding error for one of the wealthiest men in history — George Soros helped remake the nation’s legal system.
Supporting prosecutors who vowed not to prosecute, Soros and related entities pushed district attorneys who aimed to reshape law and order into anarchy and disorder.
It worked. At his peak influence, 75 Soros-backed prosecutors held office. As a result, one in five Americans, and half of those living in the nation’s most populous cities, were living in an area run by a Soros DA, or one who shared his ideology.
The damage they have done has been immeasurable. Shoplifting and drug use was decriminalized, repeat offenders were set free with no bail, and murders, robbery and rape increased in Baltimore, Chicago, San Francisco, New York and more.
But the worm has started to turn. Through a combination of corruption and voter backlash, a significant number of these district attorneys have been ousted.
There’s still a long way to go, but the message is clear: The Soros experiment has been a disaster for the nation.
Here are among the most prominent adherents to go down in flames:
Marilyn Mosby
Mosby took office as the 25th state’s attorney of Baltimore in 2015, and was one of the first weak-on-crime prosecutors Soros backed.
On her watch, only 53% of felony cases resulted in a conviction, compared to 67% in the four years before she took office. In her words, it’s “shameful to take pride in overwhelming conviction rates” — and the results of that philosophy were immediately made evident.
Between 2015 and 2019, murders skyrocketed nearly 50% after falling 8% from 2009 to 2014. From the 2015-2019 period, 1 in every 350 Baltimore city residents were murdered.
As if her politics weren’t bad enough, Mosby’s legal troubles include allegations she withdrew money from a COVID program designed to help the less fortunate, being indicted by a federal grand jury on four counts of perjury and being convicted on one count of mortgage fraud.
She lost the Democratic primary for re-election in mid-2022 after placing third with just under 29% of the vote, and left office in January 2023.
She will be sentenced in her fraud cases on May 23
Buta Biberaj
Biberaj won the Loudoun County commonwealth attorney race, and was sworn into office in January 2020.
So ineffective was Biberaj at doing her job that the Loudon County Board of Supervisors gave her office a smaller budget than requested in 2021 effectively due to the lack of need. Of 735 cases brought to her office, she dismissed 491, bringing only 8 percent to trial.
What Biberaj is willing to prosecute is just as shocking as what she won’t. Biberaj spent two years prosecuting Scott Smith, a Loudon father outrageously charged with disorderly conduct after being arrested at a school board meeting while speaking out about his daughter being sexually assaulted by a transgender student. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin eventually pardoned him.
Sanity ended up prevailing, and Biberaj was defeated in November 2023 by Republican Bob Anderson.
Kim Gardner
Soros spent $190,000 backing Gardner in 2016, and she became circuit attorney of St. Louis. He then spent another $116,000 backing her re-election.
In exchange for this investment, conviction rates fell from 85% when she was elected to only 54% by 2019. During her tenure, nearly 12,000 criminal cases were dismissed, and, like Biberaj, she had questionable priorities when it came to whom to charge.
Gardner made herself a household name in conservative circles when she targeted the McCloskeys, a husband and wife who defended their home by brandishing firearms after a Black Lives Matter mob threatened them.
Among her non-crime-related scandals was the revelation that she enrolled in a nursing program while on the job. Ironically, this distraction for Gardner probably made St. Louis marginally safer.
Gardner ended up resigning in May 2023 after the Missouri attorney general moved to have her forcibly removed.
Chesa Boudin
Boudin is widely credited with legalizing shoplifting in San Francisco.
We know this from the videos of mass thefts on our social media feeds, if not from the paperwork — stores stopped reporting crime because Boudin wouldn’t prosecute it.
In a truly amazing feat, Boudin managed to be too crazy even for San Francisco. He faced a successful recall in 2022.
Such a disaster was Boudin that Soros denied funding him after the recall. But Soros-funded groups gave money to other “reform” organizations that backed him.
Boudin is now director of a new “justice center” at UC Berkeley. I can only assume their name is ironic.
Monique Worrell
Soros was one of four backers who spent $2.2 million getting Monique Worrell elected as state attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida, where she took office in 2021.
As a result of her election, charges weren’t filed against 40% of defendants arrested in the Ninth Circuit.
She was eventually suspended in August 2023 by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who rightly accused her of “neglect of duty and incompetence.” An acting state attorney now runs that office.
Andrew Warren
Warren was elected as state attorney for the 13th Judicial Circuit of Florida in 2016 and re-elected in 2020.
Warren’s priorities including prosecuting a church for violating COVID lockdowns, even as he signed a statement saying he would not enforce any laws against abortion.
Warren was suspended by DeSantis on August 4, 2022. That year, the Florida Supreme Court dismissed Warren’s lawsuit challenging his dismissal.
However, the US Court of Appeals ruled earlier this year that DeSantis violated Warren’s First Amendment rights and sent the case back. Regardless, Warren said he wouldn’t be running for re-election.
Kim Foxx
Foxx became a household name after she dropped the initial charges against actor Jussie Smollett for falsifying a hate crime. But her unwillingness to crack down on gang violence in Chicago did more damage — average annual murders jumped from 501 before she took office to 666, the Heritage Foundation found.
In Illinois, there’s no statewide process giving people a legal pathway for a recall vote on a failing public official. Foxx was so bad at her job that a bill was introduced in March 2022 to allow recalls specifically so Foxx could be ousted.
More than 230 attorneys quit her office from June 2021 to October 2022 alone, and she announced in mid-2023 that she wouldn’t be seeking re-election.
David Clegg
Even with Soros’ backing, Clegg only won his upstate New York race in 2019 by 77 votes, and had a turbulent tenure that included half of his legal staff resigning.
He announced in January 2023 he wouldn’t seek re-election as Ulster County district attorney after just one term. He claimed it was due to a serious health issue affecting a family member, though it’s also likely due to the backlash after dozens of felony cases were dismissed because his office didn’t put effort into them.
John Chisholm
Milwaukee County District Attorney Chisholm’s office faced massive criticism after it came to light that it freed Darrell Brooks, the lunatic who killed six people when he deliberately drove through a Christmas parade, five days before the murders, on $1,000 bail.
That further solidified his reputation as a weak-on-crime DA. An investigation from Wisconsin Right Now found that Chisholm’s office “has been refusing to prosecute 6 in every 10 felony cases requested by police and an astounding 8 in 10 misdemeanor cases.”
Amid controversy, Chisholm announced he wouldn’t be running for re-election at the end of this year.
Who’s next
Plenty more scandal-plagued Soros DAs could be the next on the chopping block.
Soros spent $500,000 on a political action committee backing Jody Owens as Hinds County, Mississippi, DA. During his campaign, he faced allegations of sexual harassment from former colleagues, but ended up winning regardless.
His bad behavior didn’t end there. A police incident report shows he was accused of pulling a gun on a man inside a woman’s apartment in September 2022.
Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner is among the most well-known Soros DAs, always making headlines for his weak-on-crime approach to serious crimes.
Last September, the Pennsylvania House voted 162-38 to hold Krasner in contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House Select Committee on Restoring Law and Order, which was investigating Krasner’s approach to crime.
In November, the Pennsylvania House voted 107-85 to impeach Krasner. An opinion and order from the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania rejected the impeachment attempt, and the Senate postponed its trial date.
In lieu of impeachment, Pennsylvania is going around Krasner. In December, the governor signed a law, Act 40, that allows the state to appoint a special prosecutor to handle crimes 500 yards or less from state transportation properties, including in Philadelphia.
Chatham County, Georgia, DA Shalena Cook Jones is another Soros DA of distinction — that of being the only person to be sanctioned by a federal judge for “utter nonsense” after she refused to show up for a deposition in a case from a former assistant DA who claimed she was denied a promotion due to her gender and faced retaliation.
Since taking office, she’s defended rioting and burning buildings and opposed attempts to outlaw sanctuary cities and increase penalties for gangs.
She announced an intent to run again last December, and shortly after she made the announcement, the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission revealed that she failed to file numerous financial disclosures since 2020 for personal and campaign expenses.
Alas, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA who vowed not to prosecute low-level crimes, has avoided pushes to have him removed from office. George Soros funded groups that helped Bragg get elected in 2021, and so far it appears that Bragg will run for re-election in 2025.
Investing in weak-on-crime DAs may have been Soros’ successful investment over the past few years, but it’s an investment that can quickly turn around, as we have seen. All you need to do is vote.
Matt Palumbo is the author of “The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros.”
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FITTON'S Judicial Watch BUSY AS EVER TRACKING CORRUPT DOJ
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| As the presidential election approaches, the Biden administration is expanding its controversial initiative to control information and censor Americans by funding a new project that tracks the spread of “mis-, dis-, and mal-information (MDM)” by internet users. A public university in South Carolina is getting nearly $1 million from the government to map the spread of MDM in real time and create an online dashboard with an MDM tracker. The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is doling out the funds to researchers at Clemson University to meet its reported mission of “improving knowledge and understanding of crime and justice issues through science.” The NIJ claims it provides objective and independent knowledge and tools to inform the decision-making of the criminal and juvenile justice communities to reduce crime and advance justice. |
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