George Soros is the most dangerous man in America. The investor is intent on remaking the country to his liberal image, from our foreign policy priorities to undermining our criminal-justice system. This week, The Post takes a look at the reach of Soros’ billions, starting with his backing of prosecutors who don’t prosecute. Matt Palumbo, author of “The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros,” explains how the 92-year-old has gone around legislatures to decide which laws will be followed.
To see just how much law and order has eroded under George Soros-backed “progressive prosecutors,” consider Loudoun County in Virginia.
The top prosecutor there, Commonwealth Attorney Buta Biberaj, announced last week that her office wouldn’t be directly involved in the prosecution of misdemeanor charges — among them hit-and-run, eluding police, reckless driving, trespassing, public drunkenness and failure to appear, among others.
Soros dumped $659,000 into the Loudoun County commonwealth-attorney race backing Biberaj for the position, which she won by a slim 49.5% to 47.5% margin despite the massive cash advantage. She was sworn into the position in January 2020.
After last week’s announcement, Biberaj claimed letting all these crimes go unpunished would allow her office to devote more resources to victims of more serious crimes such as “murder, rape, and domestic violence, not speeding tickets.”
Commonwealth Attorney Buta Biberaj announced her office wouldn’t be directly involved in the prosecution of misdemeanor charges.
As always, the rhetoric betrays the facts on the ground. The exact types of crimes that Biberaj claims she wants to focus on are the ones she’s been neglecting most.
The Loudoun County Board of Supervisors decided to give Biberaj’s office a smaller budget increase than requested in 2021 due to high turnover and her handling of domestic-violence cases — of 735 cases brought to her office, she dismissed 491, bringing only 8% to trial.
75-prosecutor roster
Biberaj is just one of 75 prosecutors nationwide who were backed by Soros for their pro-criminal bents. After investing more than $40 million into this project, Soros-backed DAs (and their ideological allies) now represent at least one-fifth of Americans.
That $40 million is a drop in a bucket to the $32 billion that backs his political empire. But by focusing on key local races, 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. In many cases, Soros’ prosecutors decline to prosecute cases, toss charges or cut lax plea deals — bypassing the statutes on the books.
So egregious are the actions of the Soros-backed progressives that for the first time in history these prosecutors have become household names — whether it be St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, who made headlines for persecuting the McCloskeys for defending their home against rioters, Chicago’s Kim Foxx, known for her role in attempting a cover up after actor Jussie Smollett’s hate crime against Jussie Smollett, and the now-recalled Chesa Boudin of San Francisco, the son of 1960s radicals who was raised by terrorist Bill Ayers and effectively legalized shoplifting in the city.
Catalog of catastrophe
While putting together a truly comprehensive “best of the worst” Soros prosecutors list could fill several volumes, here are just some highlights:
• Ten days after taking office, Portland DA Mike Schmidt (backed with $320,000 from Soros) announced that he’d refuse to prosecute rioters in the summer of 2020, and instead defended them. Even though rioting is a felony, he doesn’t prosecute those cases.
• He also refuses to prosecute individuals for “interfering with a peace officer, disorderly conduct in the second degree, criminal trespass in the first or second degree, escape in the third degree, and harassment and riot when it isn’t accompanied by a separate charge.”
• Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner (backed with nearly $1.5 million from Soros) dropped charges on more than 60% of shooting cases and 37% of illegal firearms cases in the two years after taking office in 2018. Not coincidentally, shootings and homicides have spiked since then. In 2020, Philadelphia prosecuted the lowest number of felony cases in 30 years — even though the city saw 499 homicides, more than New York has with five times the population. For reference, there were 351 homicides the year he took office. The city saw a record 562 homicides in 2021, and a slight decline to 516 in 2022, still much higher than when he took office.
• Soros spent $275,000 in California backing Contra Costa County DA Diana Becton, who was selected by a board of supervisors to serve the rest of the term of her predecessor, who was convicted of felony perjury. Part of the selection process to fill the vacancy included a questionnaire in which Becton repeatedly plagiarized responses, including Martin Luther King Jr. quotes she somehow thought wouldn’t get recognized. Three of five members of the board selected her anyway, and she later won a DA race in 2018. Becton had never served as a prosecutor before. Among the crimes that Becton won’t prosecute: Graffiti, unless the graffiti offends her political sensibilities. After a couple allegedly painted over a Black Lives Matter mural, she filed three misdemeanor charges against them including violation of civil rights (a hate crime charge), vandalism, and possession of tools to commit vandalism.
• Soros backed Aramis Ayala to become Orlando’s state attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida, donating $1.4 million. In lieu of actual consequences, Ayala has sought to punish criminals like kindergarteners by giving them an adult timeout and having their charges dropped in exchange for watching an educational video about resisting crimes and the dangers associated with breaking the law. Ironically, that very exercise teaches them that there aren’t many dangers associated with breaking the law.
Policy failures that kill
If the philosophy of progressive policing as advertised really worked, that shifting attention away from lesser offenses would decrease more serious crimes, we wouldn’t have seen the national crime wave that began in 2020 and has continued to this day, and it wouldn’t be especially pronounced in the exact cities following this philosophy.
Soros has spent millions backing these extreme criminal-justice philosophies, but neither he — nor the prosecutors he has backed — have any regrets about the increases in property crime, disorder or even murder.
The number of young men, particularly black and Hispanic young men, who have been murdered in places like Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore in the years since “defund the police,” “no bail” and “raise the age” laws went into effect have skyrocketed. Have they no shame?
