Tag Archives: district attorney

Featured, Government Accountability, International, Politics, US

Soros PAC Continues Routing Funds to Local District Attorney Races

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Washington, D.C. – For years, billionaire progressive philanthropist George Soros has been aiming to steer local elections in favor of certain candidates for district attorney— by infusing their campaigns with financial support from Soros-funded political action committees.

The Daily Caller reports that the most recent election victory by a Soros PAC-funded candidate in a district attorney race saw the Justice & Public Safety PAC, funded by Soros, provide more than $100,000 to the campaign of Portsmouth, Virginia Commonwealth Attorney Stephanie Morales between Sept. 9 and Nov. 4, according to the PAC’s FEC filings.

Interestingly, the Soros-related funding never arose to become a campaign issue, as has taken place previously when the information becomes public, potentially due to Morales not filing her campaign finance reports online but on paper instead. The Daily Caller notes that online reports are more readily available, in contrast to manually filed reports that are generally accessed by a mail request or by visiting city hall.

During the 2017 election campaign for Philadelphia DA, Soros pumped at least $1.45 million into the campaign of civil rights attorney Larry Krasner, who won the election in a landslide with a reported 75 percent of the vote, according to the Associated Press.

The report by the Daily Caller notes:

“Soros has repeatedly backed left-wing district attorney candidates with massive donations typically only seen in gubernatorial, congressional or presidential campaigns. Soros spent more than $9 million on local DA races in 2015-2017 alone, allowing the New York resident to influence local criminal justice policies all across the country. 

Justice & Public Safety PAC’s spending on behalf of Morales (known as “in-kind” contributions) included more than $82,000 on polling, media advertisements and direct mail leaflets in the crucial last two weeks of the campaign. The PAC did not return The Daily Caller’s request for comment.

Soros’s financial backing of Morales gave her an enormous fundraising edge over her challenger, Portsmouth attorney T.J. Wright. The $106,000 Soros spent on Morales’s behalf single-handedly more than doubled all contributions to Wright’s campaign, according to Wright’s campaign filings.”

With money essentially equating to a more prominent voice during the course of an election campaign, the targeting of local elections is a powerful method of affecting domestic policy on the ground.

Although “democracy promotion” is the stated mission of Soros’ Open Society Foundation, which funds Soros-affiliated NGOs across the world, a number of these organizations have reportedly been intimately connected to color revolutions in Europe, the Arab Spring, and a number of other political uprisings across the globe, as revealed in allegedly hacked emails.

A report by F. William Engdahl, featured in New Eastern Outlook, elaborates on Soros’ reported use of NGOs as a tool to meddle in the internal affairs of states:

“The totality of what is revealed in the three hacked documents show that Soros is effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kiev. Soros Foundation’s Ukraine branch, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His IRF doled out more than $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine’s independence from Russia in 1991. Soros also admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests that brought the current government into power.

Soros’ foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his American wife who had been in the US State Department. In 2004 just weeks after Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation had succeeded in getting Viktor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine, Michael McFaul wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post.”

McFaul, former US Ambassador to Russia, detailed some of the buzzwords and organizations utilized to intervene in the domestic politics of a country in the name of “democracy” in his op-ed for the Post:

“Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities — democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc.— but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored certain U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and several others to provide small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded International Renaissance Foundation did the same.”

It’s important to remember that if these tactics can be successfully employed abroad, they can just as easily be implemented domestically in the United States, under similar auspices.

Government Accountability, Politics, US

DA Kicks Prosecutor off Case for Offering Mentally Ill Woman Sterilization Plea Deal

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Nashville’s duly-elected District Attorney Glenn Funk, a former defense attorney, promised to take an active role in controversial cases. According to The Tennessean, he recently fulfilled that promise by personally taking over a child neglect case after his Assistant District Attorney Brian Holmgren offered mentally ill defendant Jasmine Randers an unusual plea deal —  either she would be sterilized or face a minimum of 15 years in prison.

Randers, a 36-year-old California-born woman who suffers from schizoaffective disorder and who has been in-and-out of psychiatric care since she was 15, brought her lifeless 4-year-old daughter Issabelle to a Nashville hospital. Though her daughter’s cause of death is unknown and could not be determined by autopsy, Holmgren charged her with aggravated child neglect, citing the facts that she did not possess formula bottles at the time of her child’s death and that she took a taxi to the hospital rather than an ambulance. At the time of her death, Issabelle was a healthy weight, showed no signs of trauma, and had food in her stomach.

Said Randers to The Tennessean, “I believe I was very sick and I, I guess, she was very sick, and I came here without a lot of money… And she ended up dying prior to the hospital where she was pronounced dead. Ever since then we’ve been trying to figure out how much I was responsible for that.”

Randers’ criminal case initially pitted Assistant District Attorney Brian Holmgren, a nationally-renowned child abuse prosecutor and member of the international advisory board of the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, against Assistant Public Defender Mary Kathryn Harcombe. Holmgren said he would only offer Randers, who was facing at least 15 years in prison for aggravated child neglect, an opportunity to take a plea deal if she would agree to submit to a sterilization procedure. Harcombe, who found the offer to be “inherently coercive,” reported the plea deal to District Attorney Glenn Funk, Holmgren’s boss.

After reviewing the facts, Funk disagreed with Holmgren’s approach and took over the case. “I have let my office know that [sterilization] is not an appropriate condition of a plea… It is now policy that sterilization will never be a condition of deal-making in the district attorney’s office.”

Noting the fact that a group of doctors unanimously found that Randers suffered from serious mental disabilities that would justify an insanity defense, Funk agreed to a deal in which Randers would be found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Police Accountability, Politics, US

Raising resisting arrest to felony charge could happen in NYC

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The commissioner of the NYPD, Bill Bratton, has made the suggestion of raising the charge of resisting arrest to a felony.

At a joint hearing on Wednesday with the four State Senate committees, Bratton made the suggestion along with a number of other recommendations. “I think a felony,” said Bratton according to the Observer, “would be very helpful in terms of raising the bar significantly in the penalty for the resistance of arrest.”

Currently, resisting arrest in the state of New York is a misdemeanor charge, but Bratton said the current penalties for the charge are not enough to deter the nearly 2,000 resisting arrest charges per year in the city. According to the New York Post, the charge rarely gets prosecuted in court, but if it were raised to a felony this could change. “We’re asking district attorneys to treat them more seriously than they have been treated in the past.” said Bratton.

Bratton did acknowledge some of the cases involving the charge may not be legitimate, however.

A report published in December last year by the WNYC by retired criminal justice professor Sam Walker, says, “There’s a widespread pattern in American policing where resisting arrest charges are used to sort of cover – and that phrase is used – the officer’s use of force… Why did the officer use force? Well, the person was resisting arrest.”

According to this same article, not all officers fall into this category of using the charge as a “cover.” Records uncovered by Walker show the number of NYPD officers who are involved in civilian complaints related to an officer’s use of force, are a very small percentage.

“If there are 10 lawsuits — lawsuits — there’s something wrong here,” said Candace McCoy, a professor at the Graduate Center and John Jay College at the City University of New York in the same report. “And if this person has not been reprimanded and controlled there’s something wrong.”

Some of the other suggestions made by Bratton, which did not generate as much controversy, are having heavier penalties for individuals who fatally attack law enforcement officers, installing bulletproof glass in police vehicles, and possible punishments for people who publish personal information of officers.