Leftist billionaire George Soros has been pouring big money into a Texas district attorney race as part of his effort to install extremist prosecutors across America who will protect lawless so-called sanctuary cities that obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration law.
We already knew that pressure groups funded by Soros are litigating to keep U.S. ports-of-entry wide open to terrorists and other people who hate America. And leftist propaganda shops like the Brennan Center for Justice, which has taken in about $23 million from Soros since 2000, have churned out reports arguing that state judicial systems need to be reshaped to more closely follow the Left’s agenda.
Soros is using his vast fortune in an attempt to radicalize local prosecutors’ offices in part because he wants to block U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from functioning. The self-styled philosopher wants to cripple law enforcement in order to advance the radical abstraction known as social justice that simplistically breaks the world down into race, class, and sex. Radicals claim that American laws and institutions are corrupt and that these systems protect, for example, wealthy, white, native-born, non-disabled males at the expense of everyone else. In this instance, U.S. immigration law is inherently unfair to illegal aliens, or so the reasoning goes.
Soros’s current target is Bexar County, Texas, District Attorney Nico LaHood, Peter Hasson reports in the Daily Caller. LaHood is a Democrat who oppose sanctuary cities and describes himself as “a conservative guy.”
Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, is the fourth most-populous county in Texas. Knocking off LaHood would be a significant step forward for the Soros agenda.
Soros has already blown through around $70,000 supporting LaHood’s primary opponent, Joe Gonzales, by way of Texas Justice & Public Safety, a political action committee or PAC. The sum includes more than $30,000 devoted to mailers attacking LaHood as “bigoted,” “racist,” and “Islamophobic” in both the English and Spanish languages.
LaHood countered by running an ad titled “Your DA’s Office is Not For Sale.”
“We know George Soros is a billionaire who has purchased at least 10 other district attorneys’ offices around the country, not to mention other political positions,” LaHood said in the ad.
LaHood has an unusual background for a prosecutor. He was arrested in 1994 for selling $3,600 worth of a controlled substance – 200 Ecstasy pills – to undercover police. He pled guilty “and was given deferred adjudication, a probated $1,000 fine and ordered to perform 320 hours of community service,” according to the San Antonio Express-News.
But the one-time drug dealer turned his life around, graduated from law school, and began practicing as an attorney. He is now a born-again Christian.
Although leftists like Soros pride themselves on supporting ex-cons and so-called people of color like LaHood, a Latino, the district attorney has committed some unpardonable sins in the eyes of left-wingers.
Exhibit A: As noted above, LaHood believes U.S. immigration law should be enforced and is opposed to sanctuary cities. He was pleased with Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, when he signed a law banning sanctuary jurisdictions in Texas. “I do not support sanctuary cities,” LaHood said. “I understand the spirit of what the governor was trying to do, and I appreciate it.”
Exhibit B: LaHood’s views on Islam, which he calls “a horrifically violent religion,” are utterly reasonable, which is an instant deal-breaker for leftists. “Islam is basically a political system wrapped in a religion,” he said. “This has nothing to do with whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or independent or anything in between. It has to do with American values and what’s acceptable in our country or not, period.”
“I don’t get into discussions about Muslims because I have some very, very — and I want to emphasize this — very good friends that wear the label of a Muslim,” has said. “But they don’t follow the tenets or the principle of Islam, more importantly Sharia Law, because they’ve been Americanized.” Terrorists “are truly, militantly following what the text tells them to do.”
Exhibit C: he’s not a Trump-hater. He describes himself as “a conservative guy,” and criticizes the president in only the mildest terms. “Trump’s style, he’s not my style,” LaHood said last year to conservative talk radio host “Doc” Owen. “He’s not wrong on a lot of things. He’s wrong in some things. He’s not wrong in everything.”
Soros intervened financially in another Texas district attorney race in 2016, giving an unheard-of $500,000 in PAC money to Kim Ogg, who beat incumbent Republican Devon Anderson to become DA in Harris County, which includes Houston. Ogg promised a “significant culture change,” including greater leniency in marijuana possession cases and making it easier for criminal defendants to make bail.
According to a Daily Signal analysis, in the 2016 election cycle Soros shelled out almost $11 million in 12 DA races. Democrat candidates backed by Soros ended up winning in 10 of those dozen contests. Soros also funded district attorney candidates in Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Mexico.
Soros’s backing helped elect radical leftist Lawrence (Larry) Krasner (D) as Philadelphia DA this past November. In private practice, Krasner had sued police more than 75 times and represented Occupy Philadelphia and Black Lives Matter.
After being sworn in on Jan. 2, Krasner fired 31 prosecutors without explanation on his fourth day in office, Joe Schoffstall reports at the Washington Free Beacon.
A list of those who were purged from the office shows that a number of them came from the homicide division, drug enforcement, and civil asset forfeiture units. The terminations have stalled court cases in the city, where one judge on Monday criticized the office after they asked that a murder trial be postponed due to the assistant attorney general being one of the dozens of people let go by Krasner, according to reports.
Krasner has vowed never to seek the death penalty in any criminal case and to keep Philadelphia a sanctuary city. A segment of his platform titled “Resist the Trump Administration” spelled out his plan to “protect immigrants,” “reject the drug war,” and “stand up to police misconduct.”
Last year Soros gave $1.7 million to the Philadelphia Justice and Public Safety PAC, which was created to support Krasner and listed its address as the Democrat law firm Perkins Coie in the nation’s capital. Perkins Coie was used by Democrats to pay Fusion GPS for its infamous “piss-gate” dossier compiled by Trump-hating rent-a-spy Christopher Steele.
Also last year, a Soros PAC spent $106,000 on behalf of Portsmouth, Virginia Commonwealth Attorney Stephanie Morales (D) without anyone noticing during the campaign.
Black Lives Matter booster and New York Daily News troll Shaun King, a white plagiarist who pretends to be black, hailed Morales on Twitter as, “One of the most righteous, woke prosecutors in the nation, y’all.”
This tells you all you need to know about Morales.
Soros’s plans for sweeping local district attorney races in 2018 was discussed behind closed doors last November at a meeting of the super-rich leftists of the Democracy Alliance at upscale La Costa Resort in Carlsbad, California. The Democracy Alliance, which Soros co-founded, is a donors’ collaborative whose members secretly fund left-wing political infrastructure projects, such as think tanks, leadership institutes, and activist groups.
Democracy Alliance president Gara LaMarche, a former Soros lieutenant, wrote in a letter to conference attendees that President Trump’s victory a year ago was “the most cataclysmic election of modern history.”
There was a 55-minute “Talk with George Soros” listed on the official schedule obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, as well as an hour-long discussion titled, “Prosecutor Races — Winning Big in 2018?”
The Left already dominates large swaths of the courts and the legal profession, but that’s not good enough for Soros. He funds efforts to encourage states to fill their respective supreme courts with judges recommended by invariably left-wing lawyer-driven commissions, as John Gizzi wrote for Capital Research Center (my employer) in 2010.
Soros, who turns 88 in August, boasts of giving $32 billion of his own personal fortune to his philanthropy, the Open Society Foundations. Of that total, $18 billion was donated last year, reducing Soros’s net worth to $8 billion. This $18 billion mother-of-all-money-bombs essentially guarantees OSF will remain one of the most important players in left-wing activism long after Soros is gone.
And whatever damage Soros does to law enforcement will long outlive him.