Here are the Disastrous Soros District Attorneys You Don’t Know
Meet the team of George Soros foot soldiers raking in millions of dollars to ignore the rule of law
If there’s one thing leftist billionaire George Soros is known for, it’s using his vast wealth to spread anti-American ideology one district attorney (DA) race at a time. The results of these efforts—lawlessness, skyrocketing crime rates, and rampant chaos—speak for themselves.
You’re probably familiar with many of these “Soros DAs,” whose celebrity status on the Left masks their disastrous performance in office. Chicago’s Kim Foxx, for instance, announced earlier this year that she won’t be seeking reelection. Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon has himself faced several recall attempts. In St. Louis, District Attorney Kim Gardner was forced to resign in May following reprimands and fines from the Missouri Supreme Court. And Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner—who sued the city’s police department dozens of times as a defense attorney— was eventually impeached, despite receiving nearly $1.3 million from Soros sources for his 2021 reelection campaign.
But these are just the Soros DAs the media has reported on. Here are the Soros foot soldiers you don’t know—and the damage they’re causing to our communities.
Flying Under the Radar
In Portland, Oregon, District Attorney Mike Schmidt—who was backed with $320,000 from Soros for his first race in 2020—refused to prosecute 2020 summer rioters, a felony under state law. Instead, he defended them.
In California, Soros dropped $275,000 to back Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton in 2018, who was selected by a board of supervisors to serve the remainder of her predecessor’s term after he was convicted of felony perjury. Becton had never served as a prosecutor before then. Part of the selection process to fill the vacancy included a questionnaire on which Becton plagiarized responses, including quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, the New York Post reported.
That apparently didn’t bother the board, and she was soon appointed to the position and went on to win the office in 2018. She was reelected in 2022 with the help of $1 million in Soros funding.
In Florida, Soros spent $1.4 million supporting Aramis Ayala for Orlando’s state attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court back in 2016. Ayala solution for certain criminals was to have their charges dropped in exchange for watching an educational video about resisting crimes and the dangers associated with breaking the law.
The Soros trifecta, however, could not be complete without radical changes to smaller, local level counties as well. Just The News and other media outlets have shown how far some of these attorneys have gone to eroding public confidence in the rule of law, with examples including the reduction of incarceration, the elimination of cash bail, slashing the length of parole, and even opting not to prosecute certain infractions at all.
The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF) authored a report called “Justice For Sale,” in 2022, profiling DA candidates who received mass donations from Soros sources.
Jody Owens of Hinds County, Mississippi, received $500,000 from a Soros PAC—despite being accused of sexual harassment in mid-2019 by a colleague. While in office, Owens said he would focus on reduction in incarcerations and would intentionally avoid pursuing charges for particular crimes. He soon brought murder charges against two police officers that were eventually dismissed for lacking of evidence showing any injury to the alleged victim.
Monica Worrell of Orange and Osceola Counties in Florida won her election to State Attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit in 2020 with $1.5 million in assistance from Soros. Take it from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who accused Worrell of failing to hold an alleged murderer accountable for his previous run-ins with the law:
I know the state attorney in Orlando thinks that you don’t prosecute people, and that’s the way that somehow you have better communities. That does not work [emphasis added].
In Virginia’s June 2023 primary, two Soros-backed prosecutors—Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (Arlington County) and Ramin Fatehi (Norfolk)—used their 6-figure Soros contributions to trumpet their “restorative justice” policies. What does this look like in practice? Abolishing cash bail for a start.
Fatehi originally ran uncontested in 2021 on a platform of being a progressive prosecutor who doesn’t waste time on “low-level” offenses. His webpage brags about his support for gutting cash bail, scrapping the jury trial penalty, and his commitment to “honor the principle that Black Lives Matter.”
Down in Georgia, Chatham County’s Shalena Cook Jones raked in nearly $150,000 from Soros to get elected District Attorney in 2020. According to the Capital Research Center, after taking office Cook dropped her staff by 35 percent and removed half of the office’s felony prosecutors—some of whom resigned due to the radical policies she adopted. The result was sadly predictable: Savannah crime rates rose so dramatically last summer, that a curfew was proposed to reduce the carnage.
Jack Stollenmaier of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, got $185,000 in his bid for district attorney—something he was accused of lying about in 2021. Instead of removing criminals from the county’s streets, Stollenmaier wants to transform the criminal justice system. Per his website, Stollenmaier is focused on
… supporting sensible alternatives to incarceration when appropriate, and collaborating with other agencies to bring about comprehensive changes that improve the quality of life for all who are touched by the criminal justice system.
In New York’s Ulster County, Soros DA David Clegg received nearly $250,000 to get him over the hump during his 2019 election. He was also the subject of controversy during his candidacy when one of Soros’ political action committees “produced mailers featuring him shaking hands with Ismail Shabazz, a Kingston activist and convicted weapons dealer known for his harsh criticism of police,” Hudson Valley One reported. Clegg denied any involvement and said he would not have chosen that picture.
“I had nothing to do with it,” said Clegg. “I didn’t choose that photograph, nor would I have.” The Mid-Hudson Association of Police Chiefs, Association President and Saugerties Police Chief Joe Sinagra replied to the photo with a statement saying, “Mr. Clegg’s touting of his association with this convicted felon who advocates violence against police officers is an affront to every man and woman who serves to protect this community.”
On Clegg’s watch there has also been a surge in gun violence and shootings.
Jason Williams of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, was helped in his election with $220,000 from Soros in 2020. By 2022, Williams was being described as the “Soros-backed DA . . . who protects criminals over citizens.” The article continued:
Since he became district attorney, less than one out of every five felony cases have ended with a felony conviction (17%). Approximately 67% result in dismissal without legal consequences for the alleged criminal offender. And about 20% of the felony cases dismissed were crimes of violence.
Additionally, the Advocate elaborated on Williams’s devastating decisions since he was elected. According to the Metropolitan Crime Commission’s latest report, in 2021, Williams rejected 46% of violent felony arrests for such criminal acts as murder, rape, kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery, among others. That represents an 84% increase over his predecessor.
And those are just the winners. Others whose campaigns received large sums but were later defeated in 2018 and 2019 include: Shani Curi Mitchell of Monroe County, New York who received $800,000; Pamela Price of Alameda County, California who received $984,000; Genevieve Jones-Wright of San Diego County California, who got over $1.5 million; and Noah Phillips of Sacramento County, California; who received nearly $500,000.
Timing is Everything
When did this push to take over local seats begin? One writer in the Wisconsin Law Review suggests the campaign began in 2015 in cooperation with activists seeking to end mass incarceration in America’s prisons, in an article entitled “Transforming The Progressive Prosecutor Movement”:
This went from being an ad hoc occurrence in a few cities to a movement in 2015, when it became a coordinated effort. That year,billionaire philanthropist George Soros reached out to Whitney Tymas, then-Director of Vera [Institute’s] Prosecution and Racial Justice Program, to see how the two could work together to identify and back reform-minded prosecutors with the goal of ending mass incarceration.
Their Safety and Justice [PACs] backed three district attorneys in their first year: Scott Colom in Mississippi’s Sixteenth District and James Stewart in Caddo Parish, Louisiana were seeking election and Robert Shuler Smith in Hinds County, Mississippi was seeking re-election. All three won. Since then, these PACs have donated to district attorney races across the country [emphasis added].
New York Magazine also ran a piece in 2018, claiming Soros “recruited” Tymas, “who’d collaborated with certain DAs to remedy racial disparities in sentencing while working at the Vera Institute for Justice.”
“I got the call [from Soros], and that was that,” Tymas told the publication. “It was amazing to me that nobody had ever tried it before.”
The news began to hit mainstream media outlets in 2016, with Politico reporting that Soros had embarked upon a “quiet overhaul of the U.S. justice system.” It also highlighted how radical judicial reform had been one of the “progressive movement’s core goals”:
While America’s political kingmakers inject their millions into high-profile presidential and congressional contests, Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals — reshaping the American justice system . . .
The billionaire financier has channeled more than $3 million into seven local district-attorney campaigns in six states over the past year—a sum that exceeds the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors [emphasis added].
The Daily Signal even tracked where Soros was seeking to expand his influence in 2015-2016, with most targeted races falling within swing states.
New York Magazine also ran interference for the movement with an article the summer before the 2016 election, framing Soros’ efforts as a way to “buy America a less racist justice system.”
Growing Influence
Soros was able to get at least ten prosecutors elected from 2018 through 2021, while representing “the single largest source of campaign funds,” for their races. He contributed a total of $13 million directly, or through majority Soros-funded third-party groups.
This [LELDF report] identifies at least 75 ‘progressive’ or ‘reform’ prosecutors elected to serve as the chief law enforcement officer in their respective cities, counties, or judicial districts. In fact, these so-called ‘progressive prosecutors’ now preside over jurisdictions home to more than one in five (~22% or 72 million) Americans.
The scale of their jurisdictional reach includes 25 of America’s 50 most populous municipalities stretching from Seattle to Orlando, and from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. But that reach is not confined to urban centers with self-proclaimed “social justice” local prosecutors elected across 30 states both small (e.g., Mississippi and Hawaii) and large (e.g., California and New York) and in communities ranging from the wealthy suburbs of Washington, D.C. to the rural farming communities of Central Wisconsin.
Republican Senate leadership posted research online last year showing how Soros DAs were seeing spikes in crime within their jurisdictions. The stats showed a rise in homicide rates, shootings, and sex offenses.
Despite all this, Soros’ financial ties and grip on the mainstream media has resulted in coverage of him usually being assigned to apologists, who seek to paint the billionaire as a harmless old man looking to restore balance to the U.S. justice system.
“By focusing on key local races,” Matt Palumbo wrote earlier this year for the New York Post, “Soros is having an outsize impact on people’s lives. Flipping a legislature and changing the law is a lot more daunting than just electing one person who refuses to enforce the law.”
Earlier this month it was announced that Soros’ son, Alex, would be taking over his vast political network and financial empire. The Wall Street Journal quoted him as boasting that he’s “more political” than his father (if that’s even possible).
Will Soros stepping back change anything? Don’t count on it. If anything, Alex Soros will continue to help install far-left radicals into positions of power to carry on is father’s legacy at an even faster rate.
Slaying the Hydra
For conservatives, the solution is clear: Counter “progressive” efforts to overturn the justice system with principled prosecutors who will enforce the law.
The failure of these Soros DA policies may speak for themselves, but we can’t count on that to be enough. Conservatives must apply the model Soros engineeredto school board races, state judicial races, and other local-level elections—in other words, coopt their enemies’ tactics. Winning at the county level is the only way to avoid a totalitarian takeover of our communities.
The time for words is over. The time for debate on judicial philosophy is over. If freedom-loving donors and political groups don’t step up now—and if law-and-order candidates don’t step forward—America will swiftly become a failed third-world country. It will morph into a land where prosecution becomes political persecution—and Lady Justice is no longer blind.
For more, visit StopSorosProsecutors.com
