Suppose the top prosecutor in your county, seeing criminals acquitted at trial time after time, becomes convinced that the system is rigged against prosecutors. So, he comes up with a plan: he’ll run for public defender and, once elected, have his office advise their clients to plead guilty rather than go to trial.
Now imagine that a billionaire who shares his views funnels hundreds of thousands of dollars to a state-registered political action committee, which then spends almost all it on TV advertising, research, polling, direct mail and other campaign related activities in support of the would-be defender.
The PAC money represents over 90% of the candidate’s fundraising and enables him to outspend the incumbent public defender by a margin of 3.5 to 1.
SOROS FUNNELS $350,000 INTO VIRGINIA PROSECUTOR RACES
On May 16, Matt Dugan, the chief public defender for Allegheny County unseated the incumbent district attorney, Stephen A. Zappala, Jr., in the Democratic primary. The Pennsylvania Justice and Public Safety PAC, funded by billionaire George Soros, contributed the overwhelming sum of money to Dugan’s campaign.
Dugan promises to use his discretion on choosing which charges to file, divert “low-level, nonviolent cases out of the criminal justice system” rarely ask for bail, give lenient plea offers, and concentrate on violent crimes.
If these campaign promises sound familiar, that’s because it’s the standard boilerplate recited by Soros-financed candidates for district attorney.
District Attorney George Gascon barely survived two recall attempts to remove him from his job. (Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)
With the exception of Gascon (who couldn’t because of civil service protections for his deputies), all of these DAs either fired career prosecutors once they assumed office or created such a toxic, anti-prosecutorial atmosphere in the office that law-and-order prosecutors left in droves.
Worse yet, there are eerie parallels between Dugan in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia’s Soros-funded district attorney Larry Krasner.
Before he was elected in 2017, Krasner was a career criminal defense attorney who sued the Philadelphia Police Department repeatedly. In his first run for District Attorney, Krasner received $1.7 million from Soros-funded groups — 90% of his campaign cash. For his 2021 re-election campaign, Krasner received a combined $1,259,000 from Soros-funded groups.
At the end of 2021, when confronted with the spike in murders and shootings (among other crimes), Krasner said, “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence.”
Michael Nutter, the former mayor of Philadelphia, called Krasner’s comments, “Some of the worst, most ignorant, and most insulting comments I have ever heard spoken by an elected official.” Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Nutter said that Krasner owes an apology to the 521 families of Philadelphia’s homicide victims.
On May 16, Matt Dugan, the chief public defender for Allegheny County unseated the incumbent district attorney, Stephen A. Zappala, Jr., in the Democratic primary. The Pennsylvania Justice and Public Safety PAC, funded by billionaire George Soros, contributed the overwhelming sum of money to Dugan’s campaign.
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The rogue prosecutor movement is dangerous, well-funded, and systematically destroying America’s communities. When these progressive zealots take office, everyone loses, except the criminals.
Enforcing the criminal laws of the state is a sober responsibility. A District Attorney should be devoted to upholding the rule of law. The people of Pittsburgh must now decide who they want in that position.