As midterm election campaigns gear up, multibillionaire George Soros’ continuing role in electing radical local prosecutors should not go unnoticed. Starting in the middle of the last decade, he has donated tens of millions of dollars to political action committees that forward these funds to preferred candidates. Participants in his network are unified in the belief that not enforcing the law or punishing lawbreakers makes communities safer. They advocate such measures as downsizing police forces, ending “mass incarceration,” repealing mandatory cash bail, downgrading certain felonies as misdemeanors, and refraining from prosecution even if the evidence points to guilt. This approach time and again has failed. In the process, it has lost its appeal. Undaunted, Soros isn’t yielding. Neither should the rest of us.
One pass-through organization here stands out: Justice & Public Safety PAC and its many state affiliates. The group’s founder and president, a woman named Whitney Tymas, has proven highly adept at identifying Soros-friendly candidates and distributing funds to them. In the middle of the last decade, Tymas and her cohorts began a juggernaut. Far-Left lawyers, many of them inexperienced, campaigned for local prosecutor. And they frequently won, planting flags in cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia and St. Louis, and urban counties such as Alameda (Oakland), Cook (Chicago), Fairfax (Virginia) and Hillsborough (Tampa). From the Left’s perspective, the timing was ideal. Media-driven condemnations of “police killings” of black arrestees such as Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and George Floyd reinforced the widespread though facile view that serious crime results from social injustice, not malicious individual intent. A softer, less “racist” approach to policing and justice would be just the tonic, these activists argued. With less policing and punishment, criminals could be integrated into society, and crime rates would go down.
George Soros, a strong believer, plowed large sums of money into radical district attorney campaigns across the U.S. He would get his money’s worth. By 2022, at least 75 Soros-backed prosecutors had taken office. They represented about one in five Americans, and over half of the combined populations of the most heavily populated cities and counties. Once elected, they got to work.
Things did not go according plan, however. Even before 2022, it was becoming evident that crime in reform-minded jurisdictions was increasing, and often dramatically. In the City of St. Louis during the tenure of Soros-funded district attorney Kim Gardner (2017-23) the murder rate reached a 50-year high. Apparently less concerned with murder than avenging personal slights, Gardner at one point filed a federal lawsuit against local police unions and a special prosecutor investigating perjury allegations, accusing them of “a conspiracy to deny the civil rights of racial minorities”; in September 2020, U.S. District Judge John Ross, an Obama appointee, dismissed the case as frivolous. Meanwhile, in the City of Baltimore under Soros-funded Maryland District Attorney Marilyn Mosby, homicides averaged 333 annually during her eight years in office (2015-23), well above the already alarming 229 annual figure of her predecessor’s tenure.
Results like these explain why many of these district attorneys no longer hold their jobs. Gardner and Mosby were among the casualties. Gardner was hostile toward local police and prone to leaving town for conferences. She also appointed attorneys who, possibly at her behest, failed to show up at murder trials, an absence that resulted in the release of defendants and/or the dropping of cases. She resigned in May 2023 in the wake of publicity surrounding a teenage girl who lost both legs after being struck by a speeding car; the driver was a 21-year-old man free on bond on an unrelated robbery charge who had committed nearly 100 prior bond violations. As for Mosby, she not only lost her reelection primary but also became a criminal defendant herself. In January 2022, she was indicted by a federal grand jury in Baltimore on mortgage fraud and perjury charges related to her false statements on loan applications for the purchase of two vacation homes in Florida. She would be convicted on one count each of fraud and perjury by a trial jury in February 2024, though the fraud conviction would be reversed on appeal the following July.
Granted, crime rates in cities with Soros-funded district attorneys – those who remained in office, that is – have fallen markedly these past few years. But this decline has been happening throughout the nation. Part of this welcome trend is no doubt due to Donald Trump’s return to the White House, but it is also due to these prosecutors backpedaling in the face of rising discontent.
Los Angeles County, population 9.5 million-plus, is a good example of Soros-supported prosecutors losing public trust and failing to win it back. District Attorney George Gascon, first elected in 2020 with the help of $4.7 million from the Soros-funded California Justice and Public Safety PAC, had fallen out of favor with voters and political leaders within a few years. Even Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and several of Gascon’s staff attorneys had grown disenchanted. In response, Gasconpartially restored sentencing enhancements that he’d discontinued in 2021. It didn’t do him much good. In November 2024, having already dodged two separate recall efforts, he lost his reelection bid to challenger Nathan Hochman. As a further blow, California voters also approved Proposition 36, which partially rolled back Proposition 47, an initiative passed by voters a decade earlier that removed the felony status for thefts, drug offenses and other crimes with a monetary loss of $950 or less. Gascon, in fact, was instrumental in developing that proposal.
In Philadelphia, with crime exploding – murders reached a record high of 562 in 2021 – the Republican-majority Pennsylvania House of Representatives decided to take action. In November 2022, the House impeached the city’s radical district attorney, Larry Krasner, by a 107-85 vote. The State Senate, though also with a Republican majority, was far from unified about putting him on trial. Krasner filed suit to prevent a trial from happening. And he prevailed. In September 2024, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated the impeachment on procedural grounds, paving the way for Krasner’s reelection that November.
Krasner, who had received nearly $1.7 million in campaign donations from George Soros to win office in November 2017 with a 38 percent plurality, aided by low voter turnout, is a piece of work. Exonerated and again reelected, he’s brimming with confidence – or, as some might say, cockiness. In the wake of the recent death of provocateur Renee Nicole Good during a menacing anti-ICE street protest in Minneapolis, he tweeted: “If any law enforcement agent, any ICE agent is gonna come to Philly to commit crimes, then you can get the F out of here. I will charge you with those crimes. You will be arrested. You will stand trial. You will be convicted.” That’s Larry Krasner’s idea of law and order: punish people who enforce law and order. To be sure, murders in Philadelphia have declined dramatically these past several years; the preliminary figure for 2025 was 220. But that drop owes much to Krasner’s adoption, however reluctantly, of steps to toughen law enforcement and prosecution.
That such people still define criminal justice in many jurisdictions is alarming. But George Soros’ money, whether directly given or routed through PACs, made this possible. He’s been peeling off big bucks for this purpose a long while. In 2014, Soros donated $50 million to the American Civil Liberties Union to promote his ideas on criminal justice reform, a sum 35 percent higher than the ACLU’s revenues for the prior year and double its net assets. How much of this sum went for electing progressive prosecutors is unknown. What is known that he spent at least $19.3 million on such races prior to 2018. And the motive in all cases was radicalizing criminal justice. A 2022 report published by the Alexandria, Va.-based Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund noted: “He [Soros] began to build a network of well-financed, professional but utterly ideologically connected organizations that not only shared his purpose but were dependent on his largesse, and often were his brainchild. These political progeny [with few exceptions] were created out of the ether and funded mostly, if not entirely, by Soros himself.”
The Washington, D.C.-based Justice & Public Safety PAC, an IRS-approved “527” organization, took this mission to a new level. Established in July 2017, Justice & Public Safety believes that punitive approaches to dealing with criminals, even violent ones, have failed and are inherently biased against nonwhites. Career criminals would go straight, the group insists, if they were afforded the same opportunities enjoyed by society’s mainstream. Successful crime control, in this view, requires that police, courts, prisons and social services agencies focus on the “root causes” of crime. By notprosecuting or punishing, we would improve public safety.
This assertion, very much in vogue during and after the black urban riots of the 1960s, gradually became the coin of the realm among law school faculty, defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges and the American Bar Association. Despite the abundant evidence that career criminals are not like the rest of us (see here and here), Justice & Public Safety PAC, and its main benefactor, George Soros, continue to push this egalitarian view.
The Justice & Public Safety website offers very few details about its work and provides no contact information. But its founder and president, Whitney Tymas, isn’t one to hide her disdain for traditional policing or criminal justice. And she has an extensive resume to prove it. After receiving a law degree from NYU, she did lengthy stints as a prosecutor and a public defender. Crucially, beginning in 2011, she directed the Prosecution and Racial Justice Program of a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based, far-Left nonprofit, the Vera Institute of Justice. This initiative, noted the institute, would “help chief prosecutors identify evidence of possible racial or ethnic bias in how their offices make decisions and respond appropriately when it is found.” This anti-white trophy hunt was in line with the institute’s stated mission: “End the criminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty.”
George Soros knew an ally when he saw one. That’s why he became a heavy donor. During 2016-22, his Open Society Foundations donated a combined $11,024,679 to the Vera Institute, $10.3 million of which was disbursed in 2016 alone. While minuscule compared to the more than $800 million in federal grants provided to the institute during 2008-21, these sums was pretty hefty.
In November 2016, Whitney Tymas and Robert J. Smith, director of the Harvard Law School-backed Fair Punishment Project, published an article in The Nation (“Election Night Saw Victories in Local Criminal-Justice Reform – This Should Be the Beginning”), that served as a preview of Justice & Public Safety PAC. Despite the dark cloud over America, the authors were optimistic, pointing to victories by progressive candidates across the U.S. for district attorney. One triumph in particular caught their eye. “Amid a sea of bad news,” Tymas and Smith wrote, “there emerged an island of hope. It came, from of all unlikely places, Jefferson County, Alabama, home to Birmingham. On Wednesday morning, Brandon Falls, the incumbent Republican district attorney, conceded that he lost his seat to Charles Todd Henderson, who became the first Democrat to be elected district attorney in over a decade.” The authors had good reason to celebrate. During his campaign, Henderson vowed to “end mass incarceration of those with drug addictions and mental illness.” He also stated that he is “not supportive of the death penalty nor incarcerating our children in adult jails and prisons.” He would be unable to put his proposals into play. Just days before taking office, he was indicted for perjury in a case involving a personal dispute. Henderson would be convicted in October 2017.
Envisioning an America where law enforcement and criminal justice merge with far-Left politics,Tymas and Smith wrote:
(T)his string of successes shows the enormous promise of focusing on both criminal justice reform and American progressivism more broadly at the local level. While significant advances in climate change and immigration reform require congressional action, criminal justice reform is an entirely different beast. The center of gravity for meaningful reform tends to be local…
Criminal justice reform is not among many progressives’ priorities, but this local analysis shows why it should be…(I)n places like Durham, North Carolina, traditional Democratic strongholds with large black populations situated in swing states, investing in local criminal justice reforms could help with voter turnout in 2018 and 2020. Given the narrow margins that tend to accompany wins in states like North Carolina, voter mobilization in these locations is incredibly important for progressives. Investment in criminal justice reform at the local level creates a strong infrastructure that includes organizers, church leaders and civil rights organizations. Unlike “out of town, swoop down, get out the vote” efforts, local power in the criminal justice space draws on strong preexisting relationships, communications channels, and mobilization infrastructure. Most important, though, creating the energy to mobilize around local races serves as an insurance policy against national candidates who are less than inspiring.
In effect, the authors were advocating that police chiefs, sheriffs and prosecutors use law to build political cadres to transform America into a model egalitarian society. Rule of law, as understood for centuries, effectively would be overturned. Money, the fuel for this transformation, was needed. George Soros was happy to provide it.
The Open Society Foundations’ grants/past web page does not indicate any donations to Justice & Public Safety PAC. But the website of a New York City-based investigative journalism collective, ProPublica, does. According to ProPublica’s “527 Explorer” page, George Soros, with his own money or that of his Open Society Foundations, donated $25.4 million to Justice & Public Safety during 2017-24, a figure excluding pre-2020 contributions not made electronically. The second and third largest donors for this period, respectively, were the Alex Soros-run Democracy PAC ($3.7 million) and the Run George Run Committee ($2.17 million), the latter apparently a Georgetown University student running club. As Justice & Safety PAC had received a combined $35.4 million from recorded sources through 2024, the Soros family accounted for around 82 percent of the total.
Interestingly, the Justice & Public Safety PAC email address indicated by ProPublica is [email protected]. This is an obvious reference to the Seattle-based law firm of Perkins Coie LLP, whose Washington, D.C. office served as de facto headquarters for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and pursuant to that purpose, the assembly of a fake dossier on Donald Trump through a former British spy, Christopher Steele. Why would Whitney Tymas put her group’s email address in the hands of a highly partisan, Democratic Party-connected law firm? The question answers itself: Because it’s a highly partisan, Democratic Party-connected law firm! Indeed, through 2024, Justice & Public Safety PAC had spent $1.24 million on Perkins Coie services.
The Perkins Coie website is permeated with a racial egalitarianism that would make any DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) enthusiast proud. “In 2020 and 2021,” the firm announces, “our nation experienced significant change, characterized by a renewed and profound examination of the race inequality that has persisted throughout our history and continues to impact the daily lives of people of color. This reckoning began with the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others. It continued with a broad social movement that extended across our country.” Actually, this “broad social movement” consisted of riots, shakedowns and false prosecutions driven by revenge for the deaths of three black criminal suspects – Floyd, Taylor and Arbery – who, respectively, died from a fentanyl overdose during a lawful police arrest for passing counterfeit money (Minneapolis), a lawful police bust at her apartment for aiding in her boyfriend’s drug trafficking (Louisville), and a lawful citizen’s arrest on a justified suspicion of a prior crime (Brunswick, Ga.). But one digresses.
Perkins Coie goes that extra mile to abolish all traces of social and economic inequality by race. It contributes at least $500,000 annually to “community-led” organizations that promote racial equality; has developed pro bono programs “to address racial inequality in policing, criminal justice, and economic justice”; sponsors a fellowship program for its associates to spend a year working in a civil rights organization; and formally observes Juneteenth, creating “an opportunity for reflection, education, and service to promote racial equality.”
Yet the $1.24 million Justice & Public Safety PAC has sent to Perkins Coie pales before the $23.7 million it has sent to its largest recipient, Berlin Rosen, a New York-based public relations firm with offices in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Berlin Rosen offers ground-level support for Soros-bankrolled district attorney campaigns, with Justice & Public Safety acting as a middleman. The web page for the political ad agency’s Cultural Competency program is a celebration of race and gender wokeness:
We hear more and more about organizations engaging with diverse audiences, wanting to expand their reach and lift up the values behind their brands. The social reckonings of the past few years have compelled so many to say they need to do more – us included – and for many, the hard work of culture change is truly happening.
In effect, Berlin Rosen is telling its clients and employees, “Never let a good riot go to waste.” A few paragraphs down, the firm gets specific about what gets top priority:
Our team’s lived experience, combined with Berlin Rosen’s longstanding work on key issues – race and social justice, climate change, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, workers’ rights, and more – position us to help clients navigate tough moments and provide meaningful engagement with internal and external audiences. Our team has partnered with many organizations, from Nike to GLAAD, to advocate for equity and push industries to adopt policies that are responsive to stakeholders of all identities and experiences.
Need one say more? Berlin Rosen is an ideal fit for George Soros and Whitney Tymas.
The consequences of election victories for the dozens of Soros-backed candidates who downplayed the importance of policing, prosecution and incarceration have been little short of disastrous. Appropriately, many of the voters who put them in office have turned against them. Here are a few examples of these district attorneys, all of whom are gone from office.
Cook County, Ill. (Chicago). Kim Foxx, Cook County State’s Attorney during December 2016-December 2024, if unintentionally, may have created more opportunities for crime in Chicago than anyone since Al Capone. She easily won election, benefiting from the incendiary racial climate in the wake of the Chicago police shooting death of a knife-wielding black teenager, Laquan McDonald, plus a $2 million donation from George Soros routed through Illinois Justice & Public Safety PAC. Foxx had pledged during her campaign to deemphasize policing, prosecutions and sentencing. Once in office, she raised the existing felony threshold for retail theft from $300 to $1,000. Surprise, surprise – the number of reported shoplifting incidents in Cook County more than tripled from June 2020 to June 2024, rocketing from 360 to 1,102. Homicides also substantially increased, too. About 4,000 occurred over the first six years of Foxx’s tenure, an increase from about 3,000 over the six previous years. This was very much a consequence of her habit of giving criminals a free pass. According to a study by the Marshall Project, Foxx declined to prosecute more than 5,000 cases that would have been pursued by her predecessor, Anita Alvarez. Foxx’s piece de resistance, as it were, was her dropping felony charges in 2019 against Chicago hate crime hoax artist Jussie Smollett in exchange for community service. Smollett later would be charged by a special prosecutor with making false statements to police, and was convicted by a jury in December 2021 on five of six counts. Despite a remarkably light sentence, it apparently wasn’t light enough. In November 2024, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned the verdict on double jeopardy grounds. Kim Foxx did the public a favor by not running for a third term. Her successor, Eileen Burke, is at least something of an improvement.
San Francisco. Chesa Boudin, the son of convicted Weathermen terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, chose a career of prosecuting crime. Well-credentialed (Chicago, Oxford, Yale), he ran for the city’s district attorney in 2019 and was elected. Like all Soros-supported prosecutors, he saw crime as the product of unjust social conditions. Toward that end, he refused to seek charges for possession of contraband found during “pretextual” traffic stops, suspended criminal proceedings for up to 24 months for primary caregivers charged with misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies, eliminated mandatory cash bail in favor of “risk-based” assessments, and created extra hurdles to filing charges against defendants accused of assaulting police. Criminals took note. Local police data showed a 46 percent increase in burglaries during his first year. And the number of homicides rose from 41 to 56during 2019-21. City voters, especially of Asian ancestry, came to oppose him. They collected enough signatures for a ballot recall in June 2022, which passed by 55 percent to 45 percent.
Bexar County, Tex. (San Antonio). The San Antonio area is fairly safe compared to many metropolitan areas. But the tenure of Joe Gonzalez as Bexar County prosecutor doesn’t seem to be one of the reasons. Having won office in November 2018 on the strength of nearly $1.5 million from George Soros, he instituted a Soros-style reform program. San Antonio and surrounding communities paid a price. In 2020, Gonzalez’ second year in office, Bexar County’s total crime rate stood at 1,397 incidents per 100,000 population. Two years later, in 2022, the figure had risen to 8,600 incidents per 100,000 population. That’s a 516 percent increase. During the same period, the rates for Texas and the U.S., respectively, increased by 24 and 47 percent. Gonzalez this June announced that he will not seek a third term. That would seem a sound idea.
Summarizing the string of departures of progressive district attorneys that began in 2022, Thomas Hogan, formerly an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and before that, a district attorney in Chester County, Pa., wryly commented: “It may be that having a Soros-backed prosecutor in your city is like getting chickenpox in the old days: everybody gets it once, but then you develop immunity. Thus, George Soros’s legacy for American criminal justice will probably waver somewhere between that of a recession and a depression.”
Perhaps so, but a downturn isn’t a collapse. While a dozen of the 25 Soros-backed candidates in 2024 defeated or recalled, the fact is that the rest of those candidates won. Given the increases in crime following their initial election, a more desired number should be zero. Moreover, George Soros might shift a portion of his attention to state races. According to Federal Election Commission records analyzed by the New York Post, Soros family members have contributed a combined $71,000-plus to the election campaigns of New York State’s reprehensible attorney general, Letitia James, whose pending reelection campaign could be waylaid by a mortgage scandal of her own making. Moreover, the Open Society Foundations since 2016 has given $23.7 million to the Working Families Party, plus another $865,000 to the party’s New York branch. The WFP, given its radical platform and close ties to Attorney General James, might well move some of that money to Leftist candidates, independent of Justice & Public Safety PAC.
“Criminals know right from wrong,” observed the late clinical psychologist Stanton Samenow in his classic book, Inside the Criminal Mind. “In fact, some know the law better than their lawyers. But they believe that whatever they want to do at any given time is right for them. Their crimes require logic and self-control.” The people who run and benefit from George Soros’ financial network refuse to acknowledge this. They view desperation in the face of social injustice as the primary motive for crime. And so do many Americans, especially those fixated on eradicating “white racism.” As long as this is the case, many felonies will continue to go unpunished by people who should know better.
Carl F. Horowitz is a senior fellow at NLPC.
