Political Prosecutors
Apr 11, 2023
12:03 AM
Reacting to the news of Donald Trumps indictment in New York by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis tweeted: The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head. It is un-American. The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent.
DeSantis is right on every point. Despite some recent attempts
to deny
the shadowy financiers involvement, the progressive movement is, in fact backed by George Soross money. In 2016 alone, Soros pledged $3 million to down-ballot district attorney races across the country. In the past decade, he has spent $40 million to elect seventy five social justice prosecutors. Soros contributed over a million dollars to Braggs campaign through his organization Color of Change.
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DeSantis has been slapped with accusations of antisemitism for highlighting Soross key role in the progressive movement. But while the financiers involvement in electing soft-on-crime D.A.s is well-documented, the governors alleged Jew-hate is conjecture at best. Meanwhile, Soros has a history of supporting antisemitic organizations, as well as an NGO that backs the movement to overthrow the democratically elected Israeli government.
The billionaire has never hidden his opinion about progressive district attorneys. Last year, he published an editorial in the Wall Street Journal titled Why I Support Reform Prosecutors. Soros articulated the standard communist argument that crime is caused by unjust social organization. He promised that fixing the injustices would reduce crime and that, save for the resistance of the retrograde elements, the fixes are easy to implement. He hinted that his opponents actually favor injustice and manipulate the electorate with fear for safety:
Yet our system is rife with injustices that make us all less safe. The idea that we need to choose between justice and safety is false. They reinforce each other: If people trust the justice system, it will work. And if the system works, public safety will improve.
Soros topped his piece off with the explosive racial angle: We need to acknowledge that black people in the U.S. are five times as likely to be sent to jail as white people. That is an injustice that undermines our democracy. What Soros left unsaid as he described this disparate impact or inequity in outcome is that the position of district attorney would be necessarily politicized. Under the arrangement he proposed, instead of simply bringing up charges against the defendants, his lawyers would pledge to select who to prosecute.
Soros district attorneys immediate agenda is ending the mass incarceration of minorities. But of course there is no such thing as mass incarceration. Each defendant was given a trial under due process of the law. Likewise, disparate outcomes are not a proof of tyranny, but perhaps evidence of different cultural and social mores. Points like these fall on deaf ears when it comes to progressive voters, who continue to turn out in favor of weaponizing the office in pursuit of racial justice.
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The son of Weather Underground terrorists Chesa Boudin, once the poster boy of the Soros D.A. movement, left plenty of evidence of his comrades intent to
politicize prosecution
:
I think district attorney is a tremendously important and powerful political position from which to do those things [decarceration or restorative justice, or community service in place of punishment]. And I think that in running and winning this race, I can be part of a broader national moment that is really
testing the boundaries
of whats possible through that office, which for far too long has been abandoned to the most reactionary conservative forces in our society. ... My view is that if you want to have that meaningful change, its not enough to just pass the kind of legislation that we saw in Washington, D.C. earlier this year, the First Step Act. ... If that legislation possible [sic] under this administration, under this Senate, think about what we can do at a local level in a place like San Francisco.
As it turned out, not much was possible in San Francisco. After presiding for a year and a half over the citys downward spiral into a fentanyl dystopia, opting for restorative justice for perpetrators of a hate crime, and filing charges against his former defense client (a clear conflict of interest), Boudin was recalled by the voters.
His replacement is Brooke Jenkins, a former assistant D.A. who left the office to help with the recall campaign. Jenkins promised to charge drug dealers with murder, and so far she has been filing more charges than Boudin and has taken a tougher approach overall. She is, however, working within the framework of the California law, which is now, after the approval of the 2014 Proposition 47, lenient toward criminals. Not surprisingly, violent offenses remain on the rise.
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Boudins problem was San Franciscos thoroughgoing progressivism. It was simply impossible to create a wedge issue with which to ward off voters that wanted some semblance of law and order. Local Democratic Socialists may try to evoke conservative bogiemen about to take over the city and center left residents brand themselves as moderates, but the city remains solidly progressive.
New York City, on the other hand, is far more politically diverse. It has elected Republican mayors in recent memory and for many years it was the home of Donald Trump. With Trump, a political D.A. like Bragg got his wedge issue. During his campaign, with crime rising in the aftermath of the BLM marches, Bragg frequently hinted at his intent to prosecute Trump. He reminded New Yorkers that during his service in the office of attorney general, he had already sued Trump over one hundred times and spoke of his intent of keeping people in power accountable.
DeSantis is right to call Trumps indictment un-American. It is not just that political prosecution of out-of-power opposition leaders is banana republic kind of stuffsomething that our southern
noted. It represents a triumph of the Soros vision for progressive prosecutors. Eroding faith in the political process and deep insecurity in our physical urban environments threatens the democratic institutions of our republic.
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About The Author
Katya Sedgwick
Katya Sedgwick is a writer in the San Francisco Bay area. You can follow her on Twitter @KatyaSedgwick.
Articles by Katya
Tuesday, April 11, 2023 at 4:03 am