By Andrew Shirley | AMAC Newsline Columnist
While former President Donald Trump’s historic comeback rightly garnered most of the headlines following last week’s elections, the campaign of liberal megadonor George Soros to “reimagine” the American criminal justice system through soft-on-crime prosecutors and policies was also dealt a crushing blow on November 5. In total, at least a dozen Soros-linked district attorneys went down.
The most high-profile district attorney race in the country this year was in Los Angeles, where incumbent Democrat George Gascon was facing off against Independent challenger Nathan Hochman. Gascon, who received $2.5 million from Soros-linked groups in 2020, has long been a standard-bearer of the “woke” prosecutor movement. He was an early advocate of ending cash bail, refusing to charge anyone under 25 as an adult, and downgrading charges for crimes he considered to be “victimless,” such as vandalism and robbery. Violent and nonviolent crime has skyrocketed under his watch.
Following two recall attempts against Gascon which fell just short, LA voters finally ousted Gascon this year, with Hochman winning 61.5 percent of the vote to Gascon’s 38.5 percent. Even as Kamala Harris won LA County by 30 percent, voters still chose Hochman, a former GOP nominee for California Attorney General, by 24 percent.
Just up the coast in Alameda County, outside of San Francisco, voters also recalled far-left District Attorney Pamela Price, who had been in office for less than two years and received more than $1 million from Soros-linked groups. The recall, led by the group “Save Alameda for Everyone,” a local grassroots organization, passed with 64.8 percent of the vote.
Price has garnered controversy throughout her tenure for her unapologetic “prison last” approach to criminal justice. One of her first actions after taking office was dropping two murder charges in a high-profile triple homicide case against Delonzo Logwood, a career criminal who killed three people outside a club in 2016. After Price took office, she dropped two of the homicide charges and downgraded the final murder charge to “voluntary manslaughter.”
As a result, Logwood went from a potential charge of life without parole to a sentence of only 12 years. Because the charge includes time already served, he is now looking at early release within a few years.
The Logwood case became an immediate rallying point for the movement to recall Price and culminated in her ultimate removal in this deep-blue progressive stronghold.
In Oregon, Democrat Multnomah County DA Mike Schmidt lost his re-election bid to one of his own office’s deputy attorneys, Nathan Vasquez. Schmidt was one of the primary backers of the ballot measure to decriminalize virtually all drug use in Portland, Oregon. According to the New York Post, shortly after the measure passed, “the city declared a state of emergency after an explosion of fentanyl deaths” and “cops resigned en masse — with many citing Schmidt as the reason for their exit.”
Vasquez ran his campaign on a simple pledge to return the city to “sanity” by re-engaging with police and reestablishing the rule of law.
On the other side of the country, Western Georgia District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez, a Democrat backed by Soros-linked groups, was also soundly defeated. While the votes are still being finalized, Republican challenger Kalki Yalamanchili will likely defeat Gonzalez with more than 60 percent of the vote. The county she presided over was where illegal immigrant Jose Ibarra brutally murdered nursing student Laken Riley this past February.
According to The Daily Caller, Gonzalez focused her campaign on “Alternative accountability-based measures to address most nonviolent crimes or issues presented by juvenile defendants.” Yalamanchili conversely pledged to crack down on illegal immigrants taking advantage of an “ineffective” DA’s office.
Since 2015, through a series of shell non-profits and PACs, Soros has led an aggressive campaign to impose his radical vision of “criminal justice” – which contains little actual justice – on America. In total, Soros has poured more than $40 million into at least 75 local prosecutor races throughout the country.
At the peak of his influence, 50 hand-picked Soros DAs presided over more than 20 percent of the country’s population, paving the way for an explosion of crime and chaos on the streets of some of America’s most important cities. But as of this November, the majority of these prosecutors have either resigned, been recalled, or been defeated outright at the ballot box.
Nonetheless, there were some victories for Soros-backed DAs this year. In Savannah, Georgia, progressive prosecutor Shalena Cook Jones held on to her seat, while Soros-backed Monique Worrell reclaimed her position as the Orange-Osceola State Attorney in Florida after being suspended last year by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for “dereliction of duty” on crime. Other high-profile Soros DAs like Alvin Bragg in Manhattan – a key player in the Democrat lawfare crusade against Trump – also remain in office.
But the tide appears to have clearly turned against the Soros prosecutor movement. From a powerful force in the American legal system just a few years ago, it may soon become just a footnote in history.
