Is George Soro$ Dem Financier: A Former Jewish Nazi? Various sources say conflicting statements we show below starting with Soros himself in this interview the mainstream big tech media has been trying to forget or cover up. Little narrative is required by us since the Smoking gun comes out of Soros’ mouth himself:
Soros is accused of being a Nazi collaborator as a Jew under color of a Christian in Nazi Germany. By his own admission he describes how he confiscated property from fellow Jews headed for the death camps. Soros is infamous for subverting elections and economies in various elections of nations around the world.
A political action committee funded by George Soros has given $50,000 to a candidate for sheriff in Prince William County, the latest in a string of contributions by the Democratic megadonor aimed at pushing criminal justice reform in Northern Virginia.
The donation to the campaign of Democrat Josh King follows more than $1 million in spending by the Soros-aligned PAC that helped tip Democratic primaries for prosecutor in Arlington and Fairfax counties to progressive challengers in June.
King is also running on a progressive agenda as he takes on Republican incumbent Glen Hill in November’s general election. King is promising to divert more offenders from incarceration, increase the diversity of the sheriff’s office and end the Prince William County jail’s controversial agreement, known as 287(g), to help the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency with immigration enforcement.
“Unfortunately, we are still seeing some of the same criminal justice issues from 50 years ago,” King said. “I don’t want kids 50 years from now having the same conversations about police brutality and bias.”
Democrat Josh King received $50,000 from Democracy PAC. (N/A)
In Prince William County, the sheriff runs the jail and provides courthouse security. The Prince William County Police Department provides law enforcement services.
King, who is a sheriff’s deputy in Fairfax County, also served in the Army in Iraq. He is the first Democrat to mount a run for the sheriff’s office in Prince William County in 15 years.
Hill, a moderate Republican who is serving his fourth term, is also a U.S. Army veteran and had a long career in law enforcement before he was elected sheriff in 2004. He is overseeing a $45.6 million renovation of the jail and supports the 287(g) program, saying it helps the county tackle gang issues. Hill did not immediately return a request for comment.
The contribution to King from Democracy PAC, which is Soros’s vehicle for funding races in the 2020 elections, gives the candidate a large advantage moneywise. With the donation, he has raised about $88,000 to Hill’s $61,000 during this election cycle, according to state campaign finance records. King said he plans to use the money for mailers.
King said he hopes the endorsement from Soros leads to other donations and backing for his campaign.
November’s election will be crucial in determining the future of criminal justice in Prince William County. In addition to the sheriff’s race, Democrat Amy Ashworth and Republican Mike May will face off to replace retiring Commonwealth’s Attorney Paul Ebert, who has been prosecutor for more than 50 years.
Billionaire financier George Soros is launching a super PAC ahead of the 2020 election and, at $5.1 million, he has already made the single biggest contribution so far this election cycle compared to any other megadonor.
Super PACs, which are officially known as “independent-expenditure only committees,” are not allowed to make contributions to specific parties or candidates. They may, however, support initiatives independently of campaigns and do so by engaging in unlimited political spending.
According to Politico, Soros was one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors in the last presidential election, with the party’s candidates and causes receiving Soros-sourced financial support to the tune of over $20 million. Compared to the corresponding phase in the 2016 election season, Soros has in the 2020 cycle already doubled his donation amount.
A person familiar with Democracy PAC told Politico that Soros’s family members may also support the initiative with their cash. Soros’s son, Alexander Soros, has in recent years increasingly taken on the role of a Democratic megadonor.
The Hill reported that Soros does not plan to use Democracy PAC to set up an independent political group but instead intends to funnel funds to other organizations.
“He has, unlike Tom Steyer or [Michael] Bloomberg, funded things like Senate Majority PAC and Priorities USA and EMILY’s List and Planned Parenthood and expects to continue to do so,” a person familiar with Democracy PAC told Politico.
Soros has not yet endorsed a candidate for president in 2020.
‘National Impact By and In 2020’
Soros helped fund Democratic efforts to flip Georgia, Arizona, and Florida in the recent midterm elections, The Epoch Times previously reported, noting that the strategy of flipping Republican “red states” to Democrat blue is laid out in his Open Society Foundations documents.
According to a white paper called “U.S. Programs 2015–2018 Strategy,” the progressive organization began funding activist operations in Arizona and Georgia in 2015, with the ultimate goal being to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
“Beginning in 2015 with initial investments, U.S. Programs anticipates seeking to have national impact by and in 2020, through targeted work in a small number of states. States such as Arizona, Georgia, or North Carolina, are quickly changing demographically and rising in political significance,” the document states.
Known as the 2020 Project, Open Society’s funding efforts have been aimed at “building the capacity of community-based organizations to catalyze political engagement throughout the year and not solely around elections,” and they feature coordination “with our anchor and core grantees, Democracy Alliance partners and other donors, and field leaders, such as Planned Parenthood, progressive labor, and other allies.”
According to Epoch Times contributor William Patrick, “Democracy Alliance is a collective of wealthy center-left and left-wing political donors with Soros as its centerpiece. It supports a sprawling activist infrastructure with so-called dark money, which hides donor identities, and requires its grantees to sign nondisclosure agreements.”
Zuckerberg, Soros, and Bloomberg Spent Millions on Ballot Initiatives
According to earlier reports, Soros, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg were three of the dozens of billionaires who dropped millions of dollars into campaigns for ballot initiatives ahead of the last year’s midterm elections.
An analysis of state records by the Center of Public Integrity revealed just how much some elite political players want certain initiatives to pass.
The group found that several weeks before the midterm election, 25 American billionaires had invested more than $70.7 million in campaigns for initiatives in states where they don’t actually reside.
And as the 2018 election heats up, many of Trump Jr.’s tweets center on billionaire and longtime progressive donor George Soros. Specifically, they focus on a conspiracy theory regarding the Hungarian-born Jewish investor: that he’s a Nazi.
PROOF OF GEORGE SOROS NAZI PAST FINALLY COMES TO LIGHT WITH DISCOVERY OF FORGOTTEN INTERVIEW
George Soros has repeatedly called 1944 “The Best Year of his Life.” 70% of Mr. Soros’s fellow Jews in Hungary, nearly a half-million human beings, were annihilated in that year, yet he gives no sign that this put any damper on his elation, either at the time or indeed in retrospect.
When Hitler’s henchman Adolf Eichmann arrived in Hungary, to oversee the murder of that country’s Jews, George Soros ended up with a man whose job was confiscating property from the Jewish population
George Soros and other rich liberals who spent tens of millions of dollars trying to elect Hillary Clinton are gathering in Washington for a three-day, closed door meeting to retool the big-money left to fight back against Donald Trump. Since Soros name is very much in the headlines in 2016, let’s take a look at an interview he gave in 1998 about his Nazi past.
Nazi collaborator Soros gave MILLIONS to Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign
Social unrest groups like Media Matters have taken to the Internet in an attempt to “debunk the claims” and “correct the smears” about rumors of the Nazi past of their patron, George Soros. They say it is just malicious gossip and lies people make up about Soros because they don’t like him. Snopes.com chimes in as well in defense of Soros. But what about the “rumors”? Could they be true, are they true?
As you will see and hear, not only are the rumors true, a long forgotten interview George Soros did on 60 Minutes has him gleefully confessing to his crime.
GYÖRGY SCHWARTZ, BETTER KNOWN TO THE WORLD AS GEORGE SOROS, WAS BORN AUGUST 12, 1930 IN HUNGARY. SOROS’ FATHER, TIVADAR, WAS A FERVENT PRACTITIONER OF THE ESPERANTO LANGUAGE INVENTED IN 1887, AND DESIGNED TO BE THE FIRST GLOBAL LANGUAGE, FREE OF ANY NATIONAL IDENTITY. THE SCHWARTZ’S, WHO WERE NON-PRACTICING JEWS, CHANGED THE FAMILY NAME TO SOROS, IN ORDER TO FACILITATE ASSIMILATION INTO THE GENTILE POPULATION, AS THE NAZIS SPREAD INTO HUNGARY DURING THE 1930S
WHEN HITLER’S HENCHMAN ADOLF EICHMANN ARRIVED IN HUNGARY, TO OVERSEE THE MURDER OF THAT COUNTRY’S JEWS, GEORGE SOROS ENDED UP WITH A MAN WHOSE JOB WAS CONFISCATING PROPERTY FROM THE JEWISH POPULATION. SOROS WENT WITH HIM ON HIS ROUNDS.
George Soros has repeatedly called 1944 “The Best Year of his Life.” 70% of Mr. Soros’s fellow Jews in Hungary, nearly a half-million human beings, were annihilated in that year, yet he gives no sign that this put any damper on his elation, either at the time or indeed in retrospect. During an interview with “Sixty Minutes” Steve Kroft, Soros was asked about his “best year.”
GEORGE SOROS INTERVIEW WHERE HE ADMITTED HE WAS A NAZI COLLABORATOR:
He was only too happy to admit his collaboration with the Nazis,in fact, he called those days the “best time of my life”. Click to watch both videos, in context, to hear his startling confession.
KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.
SOROS: Yes. Yes.
KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from your fellow Jews, friends and neighbors.
SOROS: Yes. That’s right. Yes.
KROFT: I mean, that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many, years. Was it difficult?
SOROS: No, not at all. Not at all, I rather enjoyed it.
KROFT: No feelings of guilt?
SOROS: No, none at all.
The previous interview video show this Snopes article is a contradictory falsehood on steroids.
Was George Soros an SS Officer or Nazi Collaborator During World War II?
Despite politically-motivated rumors to the contrary, billionaire leftist George Soros was neither in the SS nor a Nazi collaborator in the Second World War.
During World War II, George Soros was a member of the SS (a Nazi paramilitary organization) or a Nazi collaborator who helped confiscate property from Jews.
Do you rely on Snopes reporting? Click here to support it.
Was George Soros an SS Officer or Nazi Collaborator During World War II?
Origin
As a prominent political activist and supporter of left-wing causes, Hungarian-born billionaire financier George Soros has frequently been the target of smear campaigns, and none more odious than the persistent — and false — claim that Soros, a Jew, was a Nazi sympathizer, collaborator, and/or paramilitary officer during World War II.
That Soros was only nine years old (born in 1930) when the war broke out and all of 14 when Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945 hasn’t dampened his detractors’ enthusiasm for spreading these rumors, including the absurd claim, which first surfaced in November 2016, that Soros literally served as an officer of the paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS) in Germany.
Here are two examples via Twitter:
G.I. Joe @toombstone
George Soros. A SS in the National Socialist German workers party. Nazi party. He served under Hitler. The Democratic Party soul.
This allegation continues to make the social media rounds in the form of a black-and-white photograph of a young man — supposedly Soros — wearing an SS uniform (see above), accompanied by some version of this caption:
.. I give you George Soros. A SS in the National Socialist German workers party. Nazi party. He served under Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. He said it was the best time of his life. The destruction and agony around him was euphoric to him. This man was making policy with Hillary Clinton. And some of you think Trump is dangerous. Wow!
Wow, indeed. But given his age, Soros couldn’t have joined the SS (whose minimum age requirement was 17) even if he had wanted to. Moreover, as a Hungarian Jew he couldn’t have met the SS requirement for pure “Aryan” heritage. Quite to the contrary, Soros and his entire family were obliged to hide their identities and pose as Christians to avoid being forcibly housed in ghettos, interned in concentration camps, deported, or killed during the 10-month Nazi occupation of Hungary beginning in 1944.
The miscaptioned photo is easily debunked using a reverse image search. The young man in the Waffen-SS uniform is actually Oskar Groening, a Nazi who served at the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1942 through the end of the war. More than 70 years after this photograph was taken, Groening was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews.
Was Soros a Nazi Collaborator?
It is also claimed that Soros survived the German occupation of Budapest by becoming a Nazi “collaborator.” Fox News pundit Glenn Beck alleged in November 2010, for example, that the 14-year-old Soros “help[ed] the government confiscate the lands of his fellow Jewish friends and neighbors,” and, worse (in Beck’s view), was unrepentant about it:
So when George Soros was 14, his father basically bribed a government official to take his son in and let him pretend to be a Christian. His father was just trying to keep him alive. He even had to go around confiscating property of Jewish people.
Now, imagine you are Jewish and you have to go and confiscate the property of your fellow Jews. And you are pretending to not be a Jew and if anybody finds out, you’re dead. He actually had to endure watching people sent off to their eventual murders, watching people gathering their stuff, sending them off knowing that they were going to go to their death.
“I don’t want to question the 14-year-old,” Beck disingenuously stated during a series of broadcasts devoted to painting Soros as an evil “puppet-master” of the left. “I would have, however, liked to question the 80-year-old man who has never once said he regretted it,” he added.
Central to Beck’s case were quotes and clips from a 1998 60 Minutes interview (which can be viewed in its entirety here), an excerpt from which was also used as the centerpiece in a commentary on the conspiracist web site InfoWars.com in which host Alex Jones claimed that the teenaged Soros “helped round up thousands of people” and “stole hundreds of millions of dollars” from Hungarian Jews on behalf of the Nazi occupiers.
Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza (who has gone so far as to compare the 14-year-old George Soros to Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele) revived the “Nazi collaborator” claim in his 2017 book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, doubling down on it in a social media campaign to promote book sales:
Portsmouth, Virginia: George Soros covertly funded another leftist district attorney in his bid to control the US justice system. He has routinely backed Marxist candidates with massive donations typically seen only in gubernatorial, congressional, or presidential campaigns. Soros spent more than $9-million on local DA races in 2015-2017 alone, allowing him to influence local criminal justice policies across the country. -GEG
George Soros helped tip another district attorney’s race with more than $100,000 in support of his preferred candidate — and he did it without anybody finding out until after the campaign.
A Soros-funded national political action committee (PAC), Justice & Public Safety, spent more than $100,000 on behalf of Portsmouth, Virginia Commonwealth Attorney Stephanie Morales between Sept. 9 and Nov. 4, the PAC’s FEC filings reveal. Soros’s support for Morales’s campaign has not been previously reported.
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. (RELATED: George Soros Still Quietly Buying District Attorneys’ Seats)
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.
Leaked funding documents reveal an effort by George Soros and his foundations to manipulate election laws and process rules ahead of the federal election far more expansively than has been previously reported.
The billionaire and convicted felon moved hundreds of millions of dollars into often-secret efforts to change election laws, fuel litigation to attack election integrity measures, push public narratives about voter fraud, and to integrate the political ground game of the left with efforts to scare racial minority groups about voting rights threats.
These Soros-funded efforts moved through dozensof 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) charities and involved the active compliance with civil rights groups, government officials, and purportedly non-partisan groups like the League of Women Voters.
The leaked documents also reveal deliberate and successful efforts to manipulate media coverage of election issues in mainstream media outlets like the The New York Times.
Conservatives and Republicans have no opposing effort or source of funds that represents even a small fraction in opposition to level of the Soros-led manipulation contained in the leaked documents.
The documents reveal that the Soros campaign fueled litigation attacking election integrity measures, such as citizenship verification and voter ID. It funded long-term efforts to fundamentally transform election administration — including the creation of databases that were marketed to state governments for use in voter verification. It propped up left-leaning media to attack reports of voter fraud, and conducted racially and ideologically targeted voter registration drives.
The racially targeted voter registration drives were executed at the same time Soros dollars were funding other public relations efforts to polarize racial minority groups by scaring them about the loss of voting rights and the dangers of police officers.
The Soros documents reveal hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into the effort to transform the legal and media environment touching on elections. One document notes that poverty-alleviation programs are being de-emphasized for this new effort. It states: “George Soros has authorized U.S. Programs to propose a budget of $320 million over two years, with the understanding that the annual budget for U.S. Programs will be $150 million beginning in 2013.”
The purpose of the expansion is clear:
The increase in Democracy and Power Fund budget will expand funding of non-partisan voter engagement to catalyze participation from African-American, Latino, immigrant, and youth communities in particular, and to ensure a fair and just redistricting process. The increase in the Transparency and Integrity Fund will expand support for election reform, judicial independence and journalism.
Below are some highlights of this expansive Soros-funded campaign to alter the legal environment and rules of American elections.
Organizations Funded by George Soros And His Open Society Foundations
Organizations that, in recent years, have received direct funding and assistance from George Soros and his Open Society Foundations (OSF) include the following. These include some well known organizations and of particular importance are organizations that impact sportsmen, the environment and wildlife. These are noted with a brief description.
Soros was not a large donor to U.S. political causes until the 2004 presidential election, but according to the Center for Responsive Politics, during the 2003–04 election cycle, Soros donated $23,581,000 to various 527 Groups (tax-exempt groups under the United States tax code, 26 U.S.C. § 527). The groups aimed to defeat President Bush. After Bush’s re-election Soros and other donors backed a new political fundraising group called Democracy Alliance, which supports progressive causes and the formation of a stronger progressive infrastructure in America.
In August 2009, Soros donated $35 million to the state of New York to be earmarked for underprivileged children and given to parents who had benefit cards at the rate of $200 per child aged 3 through 17, with no limit as to the number of children that qualified. An additional $140 million was put into the fund by the state of New York from money they had received from the 2009 federal recovery act. In the United States, Soros donated a large amount of money in an unsuccessful effort to defeat President George W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 2004.
He was an initial donor to the Center for American Progress, and he continues to support the organization through the Open Society Foundations.
Soros the Godfather of the Left
In October 2011, a Reuters story, “Soros: not a funder of Wall Street protests,” was published after several commentators pointed out errors in an earlier Reuters story headlined “Who’s behind the Wall St. protests?” with a lede stating that the Occupy Wall Street movement “may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world’s richest men [Soros].” Reuters’ follow-up article also reported a Soros spokesman and Adbusters’ co-founder Kalle Lasn both saying that Adbusters—the reputed catalyst for the first Occupy Wall Street protests—had never received any contributions from Soros, contrary to Reuters’ earlier story that reported that “indirect financial links” existed between the two as late as 2010.
On September 27, 2012, Soros announced that he was donating $1 million to the super PAC backing President Barack Obama’s reelection Priorities USA Action.
In October 2013, Soros donated $25,000 to Ready for Hillary, becoming a co-chairman of the super PAC’s national finance committee. In June 2015, he donated $1 million to the Super PAC Priorities USA Action, which supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. He donated $6 million to the PAC in December 2015 and $2.5 million in August 2016.
Key Organizations Funded by George Soros
American Civil Liberties Union: This group opposes virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by the U.S. government. It supports open borders, has rushed to the defense of suspected terrorists and their abettors, and appointed former New Left terrorist Bernardine Dohrn to its Advisory Board.
Amnesty International: This organization directs a grossly disproportionate share of its criticism for human rights violations at the United States and Israel.
Bill of Rights Defense Committee: This group provides a detailed blueprint for activists interested in getting their local towns, cities, and even college campuses to publicly declare their opposition to the Patriot Act, and to designate themselves “Civil Liberties Safe Zones.” The organization also came to the defense of self-described radical attorney Lynne Stewart, who was convicted in 2005 of providing material support for terrorism.
Brookings Institution: This organization has been involved with a variety of internationalist and state-sponsored programs, including one that aspires to facilitate the establishment of a U.N.-dominated world government. Brookings Fellows have also called for additional global collaboration on trade and banking; the expansion of the Kyoto Protocol; and nationalized health insurance for children. Nine Brookings economists signed a petition opposing President Bush’s tax cuts in 2003.
Campus Progress: A project of the Soros-bankrolled Center for American Progress, this group seeks to “strengthen progressive voices on college and university campuses, counter the growing influence of right-wing groups on campus, and empower new generations of progressive leaders.”
Center for American Progress: This leftist think tank is headed by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, works closely with Hillary Clinton, and employs numerous former Clinton administration staffers. It is committed to “developing a long-term vision of a progressive America” and “providing a forum to generate new progressive ideas and policy proposals.”
Center for Community Change: This group recruits and trains activists to spearhead leftist “political issue campaigns.” Promoting increased funding for social welfare programs by bringing “attention to major national issues related to poverty,” the Center bases its training programs on the techniques taught by the famed radical organizer Saul Alinsky.
Center for Economic and Policy Research: This group opposed welfare reform, supports “living wage” laws, rejects tax cuts, and consistently lauds the professed achievements of socialist regimes, most notably Venezuela.
Color Of Change: This organization was founded to combat what it viewed as the systemic racism pervading America generally and conservatism in particular.
Constitution Project: This organization seeks to challenge the legality of military commissions; end the detainment of “enemy combatants”; condemn government surveillance of terrorists; and limit the President’s executive privileges.
Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund: Defenders of Wildlife opposes oil exploration in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It condemns logging, ranching, mining, and even the use of recreational motorized vehicles as activities that are destructive to the environment.
Democracy Alliance: This self-described “liberal organization” aims to raise $200 million to develop a funding clearinghouse for leftist groups. Soros is a major donor to this group.
Democracy 21: This group is a staunch supporter of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, also known as the McCain-Feingold Act.
Democratic Party: Soros’ funding activities are devoted largely to helping the Democratic Party solidify its power base. In a November 2003 interview, Soros stated that defeating President Bush in 2004 “is the central focus of my life” … “a matter of life and death.” He pledged to raise $75 million to defeat Bush, and personally donated nearly a third of that amount to anti-Bush organizations. “America under Bush,” he said, “is a danger to the world, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.”
Drum Major Institute: This group describes itself as “a non-partisan, non-profit think tank generating the ideas that fuel the progressive movement,” with the ultimate aim of persuading “policymakers and opinion-leaders” to take steps that advance its vision of “social and economic justice.”
Earthjustice: This group seeks to place severe restrictions on how U.S. land and waterways may be used. It opposes most mining and logging initiatives, commercial fishing businesses, and the use of motorized vehicles in undeveloped areas.
Free Exchange on Campus: This organization was created solely to oppose the efforts of one individual, David Horowitz, and his campaign to have universities adopt an “Academic Bill of Rights,” as well as todenounce Horowitz’s 2006 book The Professors. Member organizations of FEC include Campus Progress (a project of the Center for American Progress); the American Association of University Professors; the American Civil Liberties Union; People For the American Way; the United States Student Association; the Center for Campus Free Speech; the American Library Association; Free Press; and the National Association of State Public Interest Research Groups.
Gamaliel Foundation: Modeling its tactics on those of the radical Sixties activist Saul Alinsky, this group takes a strong stand against current homeland security measures and immigration restrictions.
Green For All: This group was created by Van Jones to lobby for federal climate, energy, and economic policy initiatives.
Human Rights Campaign: The largest “lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender” lobbying group in the United States, HRC supports political candidates and legislation that will advance the LGBT agenda. Historically, HRC has most vigorously championed HIV/AIDS-related legislation, “hate crime” laws, the abrogation of
the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and the legalization of gay marriage.
I’lam: This anti-Israel NGO seeks “to develop and empower the Arab media and to give voice to Palestinian issues.”
Independent Media Center: This Internet-based, news and events bulletin board represents an invariably leftist, anti-capitalist perspective and serves as a mouthpiece for anti-globalization/anti-America themes.
Independent Media Institute: IMI administers the SPIN Project (Strategic Press Information Network), which provides leftist organizations with “accessible and affordable strategic communications consulting, training, coaching, networking opportunities and concrete tools” to help them “achieve their social justice goals.”
Joint Victory Campaign 2004: Founded by George Soros and Harold Ickes, this group was a major fundraising entity for Democrats during the 2004 election cycle. It collected contributions (including large amounts from Soros personally) and disbursed them to two other groups, America Coming Together and the Media Fund, which also worked on behalf of Democrats.
Media Fund: Soros played a major role in creating this group, whose purpose was to conceptualize, produce, and place political ads on television, radio, print, and the Internet.
Media Matters for America: This organization is a “web-based, not-for-profit … progressive research and information center” seeking to “systematically monitor a cross-section of print, broadcast, cable, radio, and Internet media outlets for conservative misinformation.” The group works closely with the Soros-backed Center for American Progress, and is heavily funded by Democracy Alliance, of which Soros is a major financier.
MoveOn.org: This Web-based organization supports Democratic political candidates through fundraising, advertising, and get-out-the-vote drives.
National Abortion Federation: This group opposes any restrictions on abortion at either the state or federal levels, and champions the introduction of unrestricted abortion into developing regions of the world.
National Organization for Women: This group advocates the unfettered right to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand; seeks to “eradicate racism, sexism and homophobia” from American society; attacks Christianity and traditional religious values; and supports gender-based preferences for women.
National Public Radio: Founded in 1970 with 90 public radio stations as charter members, NPR is today a loose network of more than 750 U.S. radio stations across the country, many of which are based on college and university campuses.
Natural Resources Defense Council: One of the most influential environmentalist lobbying groups in the United States, the Council claims a membership of one million people.
NewsCorpWatch: A project of Media Matters For America, NewsCorpWatch was established with the help of a $1 million George Soros grant to Media Matters.
People Improving Communities Through Organizing: This group uses Alinsky-style organizing tactics to advance the doctrines of the religious left.
Planned Parenthood: This group is the largest abortion provider in the United States and advocates taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand.
Project Vote: This is the voter-mobilization arm of the Soros-funded ACORN. A persistent pattern of lawlessness and corruption has followed ACORN/Project Vote activities over the years.
Psychologists for Social Responsibility: This anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-military, anti-American organization “uses psychological knowledge and skills to promote peace with social justice at the community, national and international levels.”
Tides Foundation and Tides Center: Tides is a major funder of the radical Left.
U.S. Public Interest Research Group: This is an umbrella organization of student groups that support leftist agendas.
Affiliates of the George Soros Network
Center for Progressive Leadership: Funded by the Soros-bankrolled Democracy Alliance, this anti-capitalist organization is dedicated to training future leftist political leaders.
John Adams Project:This project of the American Civil Liberties Union was accused of: (a) having hired investigators to photograph CIA officers thought to have been involved in enhanced interrogations of terror suspects detained in Guantanamo, and then (b) showing the photos to the attorneys of those suspects, some of whom were senior al-Qaeda operatives.
Moving Ideas Network (MIN): This coalition of more than 250 leftwing activist groups is a partner organization of the Soros-backed Center for American Progress. MIN was originally a project of the Soros-backed American Prospect and, as such, received indirect funding from the Open Society Institute. In early 2006, The American Prospect relinquished control of the Moving Ideas Network.
New Organizing Institute: Created by the Soros-funded MoveOn.org, this group “trains young, technology-enabled political organizers to work for progressive campaigns and organizations.”
Think Progress: This “project” of the American Progress Action Fund, which is a “sister advocacy organization”of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress and Campus Progress, seeks to transform “progressive ideas into policy through rapid response communications, legislative action, grassroots organizing and advocacy, and partnerships with other progressive leaders throughout the country and the world.”
Vote for Change: Coordinated by the political action committee of the Soros-funded MoveOn.org, Vote for Change was a group of 41 musicians and bands that performed concerts in several key election “battleground”states during October 2004, to raise money in support of Democrat John Kerry’s presidential bid.
Working Families Party: Created in 1998 to help push the Democratic Party toward the left, this front group for the Soros-funded ACORN functions as a political party that promotes ACORN-friendly candidates.
George Soros has won another and another election. This time, in the DC suburbs of Virginia — Arlington and Fairfax. Soros funneled over a million dollars into the local Democrat primaries for prosecutor.
(Compare that to the measly thousands that the local candidates usually raise.)
The incumbent Democrats with prosecutorial experience weren’t left-enough for the Marxist worshipper, so Soros sought to replace them with ideologues.
Soros backed the “progressive” candidates who publicly echoed his neoliberal ideology, even though they lacked local prosecutorial experience, something that local voters have consistently favored when electing their representative prosecutors.
But who cares about what the local residents want when George Soros is puppeteering.
The Soros candidates advocated for ending cash bail, ceasing prosecution of marijuana possession cases, and taking the threat of death penalty off the table in capital cases. Both Soros candidates also supported returning voting rights to more than 200,000 convicted felons in Virginia, the Washington Post reported.
These positions, if backed by local prosecutorial experience, would have probably been enough to prevail with the liberal majority jurisdictions without any help from out-of-state money. But locals want to see experience, their voting record proves that, and the challengers didn’t have any to show. Instead, the neo-leftist challengers had Soros’ cash.
“[Soros’ candidates] have been able to send more mailers and buy TV commercials in the expensive Washington-area market, which is not something that’s typical in local races for prosecutor in Virginia,” the Washington Post reported.
“She’s trying to buy the election,” the Arlington incumbent previously said of her Soros-backed opponent. The incumbent was right. Soros succeeded.
The campaign contribution numbers expose how Soros won the elections.
Let’s look at the PAC contributions for the Soros candidate in Arlington: $615,410 from Justice and Public Safety PAC, $78,845 from New Va Majority, $10,814 from Real Justice PAC. The Democrat incumbent only had individual contributions and raised $191,000.
Without the PACs, the Soros candidate only raised $42,211, showing a tiny fraction of the support that locals gave to the incumbent. PAC contributions amounted to a staggering 96 percent of Soros’ candidate’s funding.
PAC contributions for the Soros candidate in Fairfax looked eerily similar: $459,210 from Justice & Public Safety PAC, $32,341 from New Va Majority, and $10,000 from Real Justice PAC. Again, the Democrat incumbent only had individual contributions.
The math adds up to locals favoring the incumbent Democrats and out-of-state PACs favoring the neoliberal challengers. So who funds these PACs? According to The Washington Post, George Soros funded Justice and Public Safety PAC. According to Virginia records, Soros’ Justice and Public Safety PAC then funded New Va Majority.
Both of these PACs are the top two donors to the two challengers in the prosecutor primaries. The third PAC was funded by Cari Tuna, wife of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Tuna and Moskovitz reside in California, and Soros in New York. None of these wealthy election meddlers live in Virginia.
The out-of-state cash support was unprecedented in the Northern Virginia communities. One of the incumbent Democrats called on the practice to be banned. “Over 72% of my opponent’s fundraising has come from a single Super PAC,” the Democrat incumbent said in a forum a few weeks back. “In most states, this type of direct coordination between a campaign and a Super PAC would be illegal, and it should be in Virginia as well … Less than 10 percent of his financial support has come from within Fairfax County.”
Political law practitioner and campaign finance expert Dan Backer disagreed with the incumbent’s assessment of out-of-state contribution criminalization. “It is unconstitutional to prohibit money from out of state donors — what the Democrat incumbent stated is factually wrong,” Backer told TownHall.
Backer’s assessment of the law is supported by a recent decision out of the United States District Court in South Dakota, which held that a state’s ban of out-of-state contributions is a violation of the First Amendment and the Commerce Clause. Soros’ election meddling was thus legal and will continue to remain legal.
Soros didn’t limit his meddling to Virginia; he has been doing this throughout the United States. Just a few days ago, Tucker Carlson accused George Soros of “hijacking” a local Philadelphia election for prosecutor and for “remaking this country” with his campaign contributions. Soros carried out the Philadelphia interference with the same modus operandi as in Northern Virginia. Same was seen in California and Texas. This has been happening in front of our eyes throughout the United States for at least three years.
The question still remains: why is George Soros meddling in local prosecutorial elections in liberal-majority neighborhoods?
Arlington and Fairfax were already liberal-majority jurisdictions, with 77 percent and 65 percent voting for Hillary over Trump in 2016, respectively. Philadelphia, for comparison, was even more extreme, with 82 percent voting for Hillary. So what piqued Soros’ interest? I believe he simply saw these jurisdictions as opportunities to easily inject his brand of extreme neoleftism, and prosecutor races, which are normally ignored by megadonors, was the easiest point of infiltration.
Consider the example of a concurrent prosecutorial race in Northern Virginia’s Prince William County. Soros stayed out. While Prince William also voted for Hillary over Trump in 2016, their margin was much lower, at 57 percent. The indication is that the Prince William locals may not be as left-leaning as those residing in Arlington and Fairfax. Neoliberal infiltration would have been more difficult.
The result of hand-picking prosecutors is the most direct way of effectuating change. Prosecutors choose who to prosecute, which crimes to prosecute. They train local law enforcement. Soros, at a minimum, believes this is the key to effecting the BLM movement’s politics, an anti-cop movement which has received millions in donations from the socialist billionaire. Soros probably sees many “progressive change” opportunities like this with his hand-picked crop of social justice proponents, soon to become county prosecutors.
The revelation that locals are losing control of their county elections will hopefully be a wake-up call. Alarm of George Soros victories in Virginia and Pennsylvania should ring loud throughout the United States. Paul Revere’s “the British are coming” was once a sound alarm.
May we heed the warning that George Soros is coming, loud and clear.
Hungarian-American financier George Soros has poured over $5 million into his latest independent political action committee (PAC) ahead of the 2020 US presidential election.
Billionaire Soros’ June $5 million contribution toward his super PAC, Democracy PAC, ties the Freedom Partners Action Fund’s donation to Americans For Prosperity Action for the highest check cut by an individual or organization for the 2020 election season, according to the US Federal Election Committee (FEC).
Tom Steyer, another billionaire, who is also a presidential candidate vying for the Democratic nomination, ranks third and fifth in the same category, with checks totaling $3.2 million and $2.5 million, respectively.
Democracy PAC’s funds now sit at $5.1 million, according to FEC receipts. Soros made his first transfer, totaling $100,000, back in February.
“He has, unlike Tom Steyer or [Michael] Bloomberg, funded things like Senate Majority PAC and Priorities USA and EMILY’s List and Planned Parenthood and expects to continue to do so,” an unnamed source close to Democracy PAC told Politico.
Soros personally donated over $20 million to the Democratic Party in the last presidential election.
The billionaire’s philanthropist son, Alexander Soros, is also expected to funnel funds into Democratic coffers, as he has done in the past.
The financier has since remained relatively silent, but Soros was one of several tycoons to sign an open letter to both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates back in June that claimed the 2020 hopefuls had a “moral, ethical and economic responsibility” to tax the richest 1% of American households at a rate much higher than that expected for middle and low-income families.
George Soros’ quiet overhaul of the U.S. justice system
Progressives have zeroed in on electing prosecutors as an avenue for criminal justice reform, and the billionaire financier is providing the cash to make it happen.
Billionaire financier Geoge Soros has channeled more than $3 million into seven local district attorney campaigns in six states over the past year. | AP Photo
While America’s political kingmakers inject their millions into high-profile presidential and congressional contests, Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals — reshaping the American justice system.
The billionaire financier has channeled more than $3 million into seven local district-attorney campaigns in six states over the past year — a sum that exceeds the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors.
His money has supported African-American and Hispanic candidates for these powerful local roles, all of whom ran on platforms sharing major goals of Soros’, like reducing racial disparities in sentencing and directing some drug offenders to diversion programs instead of to trial. It is by far the most tangible action in a progressive push to find, prepare and finance criminal justice reform-oriented candidates for jobs that have been held by longtime incumbents and serve as pipelines to the federal courts — and it has inspired fury among opponents angry about the outside influence in local elections.
“The prosecutor exercises the greatest discretion and power in the system. It is so important,” said Andrea Dew Steele, president of Emerge America, a candidate-training organization for Democratic women. “There’s been a confluence of events in the past couple years and all of the sudden, the progressive community is waking up to this.”
Soros has spent on district attorney campaigns in Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas through a network of state-level super PACs and a national “527” unlimited-money group, each named a variation on “Safety and Justice.” (Soros has also funded a federal super PAC with the same name.) Each organization received most of its money directly from Soros, according to public state and federal financial records, though some groups also got donations from nonprofits like the Civic Participation Action Fund, which gave to the Safety and Justice group in Illinois.
The Florida Safety and Justice group just poured nearly $1.4 million — all of which came from Soros and his 527 group — into a previously low-budget Democratic primary for state attorney in Central Florida before Tuesday’s vote. The group is backing Aramis Ayala, a former public defender and prosecutor, in her campaign against incumbent Jeff Ashton, whose jurisdiction covers over 1.6 million people across two counties in metro Orlando.
One TV ad from Florida Safety and Justice boosts Ayala, touting her “plan to remove bias so defendants charged with the same crime receive the same treatment, no matter their background or race.” The Soros-funded group is also attacking Ashton with ads saying he “got rid of protections that helped ensure equal treatment regardless of background or race. … Take two similar traffic incidents that happened on the same night. A white man got off with a slap on the wrist, while the black man faces prison.”
Opponents of Soros’ favored candidates have laced into the billionaire, saying that his influence has wildly tipped the scales of local elections and even charging that he made residents less safe.
“As a candidate and citizen of Caddo Parish, if an outsider was that interested in the race, I wanted to know exactly what he had in mind for the criminal justice system if he were to win,” said Dhu Thompson, a Louisiana attorney who lost a district attorney race to a Soros-backed candidate, James Stewart, in 2015. Soros gave over $930,000 — more than 22 times the local median household income — to the group boosting Stewart.
“I know some of his troubling opinions on social issues, especially the criminal justice system,” Thompson said. “I’ve never known him as an individual who was very strong on some of our crime and punishment issues. I felt it was very detrimental to the safety of Caddo Parish, and that’s why I took such a strong stand against him.”
A Soros representative declined to comment on his involvement in the DA races.
Progressive operatives and activists say that the recent uptick in news coverage of racial justice issues, especially police-involved deaths of African-Americans, helped sparked intense new interest in the powerful role of district attorneys, who did not indict officers in some high-profile cases. So has the longer-term reform push to shrink the U.S. prison population and promote treatment over punishment for drug users.
Reform groups have spent years advocating criminal justice policies and legislation that would reduce incarceration rates. Liberal donors have long given to policy-focused nonprofits; the Soros-chaired Open Societies Foundation, for example, works on drug policy and criminal justice reform and has supported other reform groups like the California-based Alliance for Safety and Justice — which, despite its similar name, has had no involvement in district attorney races, a spokeswoman said.
Prosecutorial discretion gives district attorneys a huge say in the charges and sentences that defendants face. But reform efforts have not traditionally focused on harnessing that power.
“They are often a very invisible part of the criminal justice system and the political system,” said Brenda Carter, director of the Reflective Democracy Campaign, an arm of the progressive Women Donors Network. “Many people can’t name their district attorney. It’s not an office people think about a lot.”
Carter’s group commissioned research in 2015 that found that 95 percent of elected local prosecutors in the U.S. are white and three-quarters overall are white men. It also highlighted a Wake Forest University study that found that a vast majority of prosecutors — 85 percent — run for reelection unopposed.
“I found that to be shocking, and I think people are waking up to the untapped potential for intervention in these seats to really change the day-to-day realities of criminal justice,” Carter said. “It’s been really gratifying for us to see the research taken up and run with by different groups around the country.”
Armed with that knowledge, progressive groups including Color of Change began researching potentially interesting district attorney races around the country, multiple sources said. (The organization declined to comment.)
“It’s hard to find this information!” exclaimed Steele, the Emerge America president. “You can’t just Google ‘hot DA races.’ So part of the issue is identifying what potential races there are.”
Soros’ spending started on these races about a year ago, when he put over $1 million into “Safety and Justice” groups that helped elect two new district attorneys in Louisiana and Mississippi and reelect a third — Hinds County, Miss., DA Robert Shuler Smith — who has since been charged by the Mississippi attorney general with improperly providing information to defendants.
The other Mississippi district attorney Soros’ spending helped elect, Scott Colom, has now represented a four-county stretch of the eastern part of the state for eight months. Colom said in an interview that he has focused on prosecuting violent crime in his new position while trying not to burden local prisons with first-time, low-level drug offenders.
“I’ve expanded the charges eligible for pre-trial diversion,” Colom said, adding that the number of people in the program in his jurisdiction has doubled since he took office seven months ago. “It’s all focused on the individual person, on trying to find a plan with the best chance possible of avoiding criminal behavior.”
“I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who think prison is too nice and we need to spend more on it,” Colom continued. “But it seems like a large majority of people out there get it and realize there have to be priorities. Just because a fella commits a crime doesn’t mean the best outcome is sending them to jail. … As much as possible, I want to take people from being tax burdens to taxpayers.”
After the Louisiana and Mississippi races, Soros next piled money into two of the biggest jurisdictions in the country: Houston’s Harris County (his lone losing effort so far) and Chicago’s Cook County, where he funded one of several groups that helped Kim Foxx defeat incumbent state’s attorney Anita Alvarez in a high-profile primary campaign dominated by the 13-month delay between the police shooting of Laquan McDonald and the indictment of the police officer involved.
In late spring, $107,000 from a Soros-funded New Mexico super PAC helped Raul Torrez win his Democratic district attorney primary by a 2-to-1 margin in Albuquerque’s Bernalillo County. Torrez’s Republican opponent dropped out of the general election soon after, citing the potentially exorbitant cost of opposing the Soros-backed candidate in the general election.
While Soros has spent heavily in 2015 and 2016, a broader national push into local prosecutor campaigns is expected to intensify in the next few years, thanks to longer-term planning and candidate recruitment. A Safety and Justice group has already organized in Ohio, according to campaign finance filings there. But it has not yet disclosed raising or spending any money.
“There’s been a realization that there’s not very much we can do this year, when you’re coming up to an election,” said Steele. “You have to have the right candidates. That’s a big piece of the puzzle and why I’m part of this conversation. … A lot of the conversations I’m having are about 2017 and 2018, about looking forward to next year in Virginia and other places.”
That means more local candidates should prepare for the shock of one of the biggest donors in American politics flooding their neighborhoods with ads.
Colom, the Mississippi prosecutor, says he has never met Soros — like other district attorney candidates supported by the Democratic billionaire this year. He said there was no hint that hundreds of thousands of dollars were coming to aid his campaign until advertising started pushing the same criminal-justice reform message that Colom had been touting — albeit on a much cheaper scale.
“The first I heard of it, someone told me they liked my radio ad, and I was thinking, that doesn’t sound like one of mine,” Colom said.
Money from PAC funded by George Soros shakes up prosecutor races in Northern Virginia
Parisa Tafti, left, a defense lawyer who works on wrongful convictions, has launched a Democratic primary challenge to unseat Arlington County Commonwealth’s Attorney Theo Stamos, right, a prosecutor for the past 30 years. (Tafti campaign; Arlington commonwealth’s attorney’s office/Tafti campaign; Arlington Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office)
A political action committee funded by Democratic megadonor and billionaire George Soros has made large contributions to two upstart progressive candidates attempting to unseat Democratic prosecutors in Northern Virginia primary races.
The generous support for Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney candidate Parisa Tafti and Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney candidate Steve Descano could shake up contests that rarely receive such national attention.
Tafti and Descano welcomed the contributions. But incumbents Theo Stamos and Raymond F. Morrogh denounced their opponents for taking the money, saying it made them beholden to the agenda of a political operative with no roots in Virginia.
The challengers received another high-profile push Monday, when a group of professional football stars who advocate for racial and social justice hosted a forum that featured Tafti and Descano. Morrogh and Stamos were also invited by the Players Coalition but had scheduling conflicts.
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Raymond F. Morrogh is the Commonwealth of Virginia’s attorney in Fairfax County. (Campaign of Raymond F. Morrogh)
Soros-aligned PACs have given heavily to local prosecutor races across the country in recent years, helping tip contests to reformist Democratic candidates in Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston and elsewhere.
Criminal justice reform activists like Soros have targeted prosecutor races as one of the most direct routes to changing policy because the local offices wield wide power over who gets charged, what charges they face and who goes free on bond.
Tafti and Descano each received more than $50,000 in in-kind contributions from the Virginia Justice and Public Safety PAC this year, according to recently released campaign contribution figures. In-kind contributions pay for polling, mailers and other campaign services. A mailer funded by the PAC went out to Arlington residents over the weekend.
Steve Descano, a Democrat, is running for commonwealth’s attorney in Fairfax County. (Jayrol San Jose/Campaign of Steve Descano)
The PAC is now far and away both candidates’ largest donor, and the contributions represent sizable chunks of the $139,000 and $146,000 Tafti and Descano have raised, respectively. And thanks to the PAC’s donations, each candidate has now raised more than the incumbent in the race — both Morrogh and Stamos have raised roughly $106,000.
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Tafti and Descano have staked out positions to the left of the incumbents on a range of issues, promising to end marijuana possession prosecutions, do away with cash bond and forgo death penalty prosecutions. In recent debates, both have highlighted racial disparities in prosecution, particularly for low-level drug and driving offenses.
Tafti and Descano declined to be interviewed about the donations or say how the money would be spent, but they did issue statements.
“I have the support of virtually every grassroots activist organization that supports reform in our community in addition to the support of a wide array of individuals who understand the need for change in our local criminal justice system,” Tafti said in the statement. “I welcome the support of any organization that believes in my campaign.”
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Stamos said taking such a large donation from a billionaire undercut Tafti’s progressive credentials.
“I would say that out-of-state money that wants to control the outcome of a local election is disturbing,” Stamos said in an interview. “This is a community that values local civic engagement and local experience. No amount of special interest money will make up for those deficiencies.”
Stamos pointed to her 30 years of experience as a prosecutor and her role in creating a drug court and other efforts. She said the declining jail population in Arlington was proof she had pushed a progressive agenda.
Descano, a former federal prosecutor and Army helicopter pilot, said the donation from the Soros-funded PAC validates his push to remake the prosecutor’s office in Fairfax County.
“If we want real criminal justice reform where it matters most, then that change starts here at home,” Descano said in his statement. “That’s why I’m so encouraged by all of the support my vision for progressive criminal justice reform has received.”
Morrogh, who like Stamos has run on his more than 30 years of experience, issued a brief statement on the PAC donation, saying, “Public safety is not for sale in Fairfax County.” He has also said he has progressive bona fides, pointing to his work helping divert veterans and the mentally ill from the criminal justice system.
Officials with Virginia Justice and Public Safety PAC declined to comment. It’s unclear if the contributions represented one-time expenditures or if the support will continue as the June 11 primary nears. Tafti and Descano also declined to say whether more funding was coming.
Some Northern Virginia defense attorneys said they were wary of helping a challenger when the incumbents control their clients’ fates. Stamos has actively solicited the endorsement of lawyers who represent clients in Arlington, several said.
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“It puts defense attorneys in a very awkward position,” said Julia Leighton, a former D.C. public defender who lives in Arlington.
The Players Coalition is not endorsing or contributing money in either race, but both Tafti and Descano appeared Monday evening at a town hall in Fairfax hosted by the group. Host Chris Long of the Philadelphia Eagles was sympathetic to the challengers, calling statistics on marijuana prosecutions and drug treatment availability in Arlington “wild” and “actually shocking.”
“More and more people are waking up to the fact that our criminal justice system is in serious need of reform,” Long said, and “the prosecutor more than any other government official has the ability to shape criminal justice policy.” He urged the audience to “go engage people” to vote in the primary.
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DETROIT (ChurchMilitant.com) – George Soros, the progressive-liberal billionaire who funds abortion and LGBT activism, has been funding the successful campaigns of local-level politicians.
On November 7, Democrat candidates swept many state and county level elections with some getting campaign cash from Soros and his organization the Open Society Foundations (OSF).
President Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016 has been seen as an upset of Establishment politics in Washington and while he’s attempting to reform the judicial branch by addressing over 100 vacancies in the federal court, Soros and others have been pushing for big changes in local and state elections.
In Pennsylvania, progressive Democrat Larry Krasner clinched the election for district attorney over Republican favorite Beth Grossman, despite the fact that Krasner even described himself as “completely unelectable,” having represented progressive groups Black Lives Matter and Occupy Philadelphia.
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It was reported that Soros gave nearly $1.7 million to a political action committee (PAC) that had been run by a Washington law firm that fronted other Soros-funded PAC’s that shut down immediately after the candidate’s election.
Soros has used his extensive wealth to fund progressive ideas throughout the world, especially in majority Catholic countries where abortion is illegal. Through the OSF, he has been funding the push to repeal Ireland’s 8th Constitutional Amendment which declares an unborn child a human being with the same dignity and rights as the mother.
Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orban, has been trying to break the country free from Soros’ political manipulation. In October, a Hungarian parliament member declared Soros’ influence “satanic,” saying:
We see this with abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage and the forced politicization of gender theory. The Soros mercenaries do not cite the Holy Father’s thoughts on this. We see the great European attacks against families, in which Soros and his comrades want to destroy the independence and values of nation states for the purpose of watering down the Christian spirit of Europe with the forced settlement of tens of millions of migrants. But the fight against Satan is a Christian duty. Yes, I speak of an attack by Satan, who is also the angel of denial, because they are denying what they are preparing to do — even when it is completely obvious. They frantically try to prove that there is no quota, there is no compulsory settlement and the Soros Plan does not exist.
Despite the fact the Democratic National Convention (DNC) is in free-fall after DNC insider Donna Brazile revealed the Hillary Clinton campaign manipulated the party’s primary to take fellow Democrat Bernie Sanders out of the running, people are still voting for Democrats at the local level.
Not all news out of Pennsylvania is bad, however. Republican incumbent Sallie Mundy held on to a seat at the state’s supreme court.
An organization funded by liberal billionaire George Soros and chaired by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s daughter is fighting lawsuits brought forth by election integrity groups in a number of cities.
Demos, a New York City-based progressive public policy organization, is assisting unions in pushing back against election lawsuits filed in North Carolina and Florida. The group is also writing letters of interest in another lawsuit in Pennsylvania. Amelia Warren Tyagi, Warren’s daughter, chairs the board of Demos.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation, an Indiana-based legal group that litigates to protect election integrity, filed a lawsuit against Wake County, N.C., on behalf of Voter Integrity Project NC, a research organization dedicated to fair elections, after the county had failed to accurately maintain their voter rolls.
The county also failed to provide records related to the maintenance of their voter rolls and possible noncitizen voting, as required by federal law.
“According to publicly-available data, Wake County has more registered voters on the rolls eligible to cast a ballot than it has citizens who are alive,” PILF wrote. “The complaint states that ‘voter rolls maintained by the Defendant for Wake County contain or have contained more registrants than eligible voting-age citizens. The number of registrants in Wake County, North Carolina has been over 100 percent of eligible voting-age citizens.”
A motion to dismiss the lawsuit was filed February 21 by the Wake County Board of Elections and three attorneys. Senior U.S. Judge W. Earl Britt ruled in favor of the Voter Integrity Project and denied the request.
Cameron Bell, a legal fellow at Demos, is assisting the attorneys on the case. One of the main goals of Demos is to reduce the role of money in politics and to guarantee “the freedom to vote,” according to its website. Demos received hundreds of thousands in funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
Individuals from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a progressive nonprofit in North Carolina, are also assisting on the lawsuit. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice has also received funding from Soros.
PILF filed a separate lawsuit in Broward County, Fla., against Brenda Snipes, the county’s supervisor of elections, for violations of federal roll maintenance. PILF brought the lawsuit forward on behalf of the American Civil Rights Union, an Alexandria, Va.-based legal group that has been described as the conservative ACLU.
Broward County, like Wake County, has more registered voters on their rolls than the number of eligible citizens who can vote in 2014, PILF said.
Cameron Bell, the Demos attorney who is involved in North Carolina, also interjected in Broward County. In addition to Bell, Scott Novakowski and Stuart C. Naifeh, counsel from Demos, are involved in Florida.
Individuals from Project Vote, a nonprofit that formerly teamed up with the scandal-plagued and now defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), are also in Broward County.
Demos and Project Vote additionally wrote amici in a Philadelphia lawsuit but has not intervened.
“Just like when leftist financiers tried and failed to block voter ID laws from coast to coast, the checkbooks are open again to preserve the status quo where poor record maintenance is concerned,” Logan Churchwell, PILF’s spokesman, told the Washington Free Beacon. “When you view vulnerability as currency, it must come natural to want to protect not only the weaknesses in a system, but the actors who exacerbate them.”
Marc Elias, the former top campaign lawyer for Hillary Clinton, led challenges against voter identification laws in numerous states leading up to the 2016 elections. The effort was bankrolled by millions of dollars from Soros. Elias recently joined the board of Priorities USA Action, the largest liberal super PAC that backed Clinton, to spearhead their nonprofit arm’s efforts against voter laws.
Last year, after documents from Soros’ Open Society Foundations were leaked, the Washington Free Beacondiscovered a memo that spoke of Soros’ goal of enlarging the electorate by 10 million voters by 2018.
SKDKnickerbocker, a progressive communications representing Demos for media inquiries, did not return a request for comment by press time.
Joe Schoffstall is a staff writer for the Washington Free Beacon. Previously, he spent three years with the Media Research Center and was most recently with the Capitol City Project. He can be reached at Schoffstall@freebeacon.com. His Twitter handle is @JoeSchoffstall.
August 5, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Liberal mega-donor George Soros has launched a new super PAC ahead of next year’s elections, through which he hopes to help Democrats retake the United States.
The new outfit, dubbed Democracy PAC, will not directly support politicians but instead keep other left-wing groups funded, Politicoreports. Soros has so far invested $5.1 million in the PAC, the single biggest check of the cycle and more than double what he spent by this point in 2016.
For an idea of what type of groups Democracy PAC may finance, a source told Politico that Soros “has, unlike Tom Steyer or [Michael] Bloomberg, funded things like Senate Majority PAC and Priorities USA and EMILY’s List and Planned Parenthood and expects to continue to do so.” It will most likely not favor a candidate in the Democrat presidential primary, as Soros has said primaries “divide the Democratic Party.”
Soros spends his millions on a wide range of left-wing causes such as abortion, euthanasia, and population control, as well as same-sex “marriage,” transgenderism, and more. His New York-based Open Society Foundations spends $940 million annually in 100 different countries, including $150 million per year funding the left-wing American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the leading abortion company Planned Parenthood, and other liberal groups.
Promoting abortion on demand in America and abroad has been an area of particular emphasis for Soros. According to the Media Research Center, he has donated more than $21 million to Planned Parenthood since 2000, and gave 2017’s so-called Women’s March on Washington almost $90 million via donations to more than 100 partnered organizations such as NARAL and the National Abortion Federation.
In addition to his efforts to sway U.S. elections, Soros’ money has also helped support articles attacking orthodox Catholic universities, as well as the journalism nonprofit Poynter, which labeled numerous mainstream right-of-center news outlets (including LifeSiteNews) as “UnNews.” Soros is also an aggressive supporter of the European Union who has spent money in hopes of influencing the elections of multiple European nations.
George Soros, 86, is a Hungarian-American business magnate, philanthropist, and longtime political financier of progressive causes. (Photo: Caro/Heinrich /Newscom)
As part of his quest to overhaul the American justice system, liberal billionaire George Soros is targeting local prosecutor races like the one in Harris County, a large jurisdiction that includes the city of Houston.
Morris Overstreet, a former judge who was the first African-American elected to statewide office in Texas since Reconstruction, was one of the beneficiaries. Overstreet received $100,000 from Soros in the race for Harris County district attorney.
But in a rare lost bet for Soros, Overstreet was defeated easily in the Democratic primary in March by Kim Ogg, a white woman from a prominent political family who has practiced law in Harris County, where she was born, for nearly 30 years.
Ogg had condemned the Soros donation to Overstreet intended to defeat her, calling it “a last-minute money dump to try to buy the nomination.”
Today, Ogg is the Harris County district attorney-elect after going on to beat the Republican incumbent, Devon Anderson. She won the general election with the aid of about $878,000 from the Soros-funded Texas Safety and Justice PAC.
Soros pledged allegiance to Ogg after his preferred candidate lost.
The money helped buy television ads accusing Anderson of botching a case in which the district attorney’s office ordered a rape victim jailed to guarantee she would show up in court to testify against her attacker.
Associates of Soros helped craft the message of the ads, Ogg’s campaign confirmed to The Daily Signal. The campaign said Soros’ contributions to Ogg equaled more than half of the $1.5 million she raised in total.
This past week, less than a month before she takes office, Ogg expressed a different view of Soros’ campaign contributions.
“Before, I was dismayed he was buying the election,” Ogg said in an interview with The Daily Signal, adding:
It was a last-minute dump [of funds supporting Overstreet]. In my instance, his people came to talk to me after I won the primary, so it was not a last-minute dump. Soros is only half of the story here. My agenda and platform was really set before he spent money in my race, but I am appreciative of the money, as I was with every other dollar.
On Jan. 1, Ogg will begin to try fulfilling the vision she ran on, promising a “significant culture change” defined by taking a more lenient approach to marijuana possession cases, focusing tax dollars on punishing violent criminals, and making it easier for defendants to get out of jail on bond in a county where 70 percent of inmates cannot afford to free themselves before trial.
It’s a set of goals that would seem to match Soros’ preference for how prosecutors do their jobs, using their powerful roles and vast discretion not only to protect public safety but also reduce prison populations and repeat offenses.
Despite these overlapping interests, Ogg insists she doesn’t have a mandate from Soros. In fact, she says she’s never spoken to or met with him.
“I don’t know George Soros,” Ogg said, then repeated: “I don’t know George Soros.”
“I made no promises to Soros or his supporters. The money that helped expose issues here is always a benefit, but I believe voters made their decision not based on the name or identity of a contributor, but on the poor policies and public safety record of my opponent. Plus, I have my own reputation here. In cases of David vs. Goliath, I often represent David. I believe my reputation is intact.”
‘Staggering Amount of Money’
Soros, 86, an American hedge fund manager and philanthropist, is No. 22 on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires, with a net worth estimated at $20 billion. He finances a variety of liberal political causes, including ones related to education, immigration, climate change, and the environment.
Soros’ philanthropic network, the Open Society Foundations, has spent more than $13 billion over the past three decades on initiatives to defend human rights abroad and shape the democratic process in Eastern Europe.
Soros gave an unprecedented $27 million to various 527 groups trying to defeat President George W. Bush in his 2004 re-election campaign, describing the effort as a “matter of life and death.”
Soros also helped launch the Democracy Alliance, a group of major liberal donors seeking to advance progressive policymaking by investing in organizations such as Center for American Progress, Media Matters for America, and Organizing for Action, which was set up to advance the agenda of President Barack Obama.
Soros has not personally spoken with or met any of the candidates he supported in district attorney races this year and last, his advisers say.
In most of the dozen prosecutor races he helped finance, Soros did not coordinate at all with the candidate he supported, they said. Instead, he operated independently by giving money to various state-level political action committees (PACs) and a national “527” unlimited-money group, each identified by a variation on “Safety and Justice.”
The form of his contributions depended on local and state campaign finance laws, Soros’ advisers say, and in some cases, as in Harris County, the collaboration was more direct.
Soros’ efforts are part of a new, broader push by progressives to locate, prepare, and fund challengers to unseat incumbent prosecutors. Such upsets are notoriously difficult to achieve in local district attorney races, where name recognition and outside interest are usually low and voters give deference to the candidate with a record.
“Criminal justice reform efforts must take many forms,” Whitney Tymas, an adviser on Soros’ project challenging sitting prosecutors, said in a statement to The Daily Signal. Tymas added:
Changing laws and redirecting funding streams is critical. Because of the enormous discretion vested in those who enforce the laws, including prosecutors, it is also important to elect officials who are committed to public safety and equal justice. These officials are a key leverage point in a complicated system.
David Alan Sklansky, a Stanford University professor and former federal prosecutor, told The Daily Signal that only a “handful” of races for the 2,500 district attorneys’ offices nationwide included candidates with “reform-oriented” agendas, and of those that did, most did not involve contributions from Soros.
“In a number of high-visibility district attorney races around the country, incumbents this year were unseated by challengers who promised a more moderate approach to criminal justice, backing away from a simple ‘tough on crime’ agenda and paying more attention to fairness, proportionality, and equity,” Sklansky said. “Many of these successful candidates also pledged to improve the investigation of police shootings, to rein in prosecutorial misconduct, and to be more vigilant in avoiding and correcting wrongful convictions.”
Still, Soros’ role in local prosecutor races is significant. It touches counties big and small, urban and rural; northern, southern, western, eastern, and midwestern. In total, Soros spent nearly $11 million on 12 district attorney races this election cycle, campaign filings show.
A Democrat candidate supported by Soros ultimately won in 10 of the 12 races.
The trend of outside funding worries opponents of Soros’ tactics, including veteran district attorneys who say the outsize contributions threaten prosecutorial independence, which is especially important in a role as powerful and all-encompassing as theirs.
“The amount of money we are talking about is staggering,” said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney of Clatsop County, Oregon, since 1994 and a board member of the National District Attorneys Association.
“And it’s amplified because it’s extremely difficult to raise money as a prosecutor,” Marquis told The Daily Signal, adding:
To ask for money when you are a prosecutor, there is something inherently icky about all of it. The argument on one side is this is good, and it’s just turning on a searchlight and looking at these issues. But that’s naive in the extreme because it’s the money that is funding debates and actual discussions. If you are able to pay for and tell your side of the story over and over again on television ads, you are going to win.
‘Couldn’t Compete’
Matthew McCord faced an uphill challenge to counter his Soros-backed opponent.
McCord, a Republican who ran for district attorney in Henry County, Georgia, was not an incumbent and did not have a prosecutor’s record to run on.
He had $60,000 in his campaign fund and a supportive family, but in September he decided that wasn’t enough. McCord dropped out of the race after learning Soros had contributed $100,000 to a political action committee supporting his opponent, Democrat Darius Pattillo.
“The joke was people were saying to me, ‘You need to fight to the death,’ and I said, ‘To whose death, mine?’” McCord told The Daily Signal in an interview. “Soros apparently had a single-minded mission to make sure I was not successful. I couldn’t compete.”
McCord, a municipal judge and local lawyer, said he ran on a platform similar to Pattillo, a deputy chief assistant district attorney in nearby DeKalb County. McCord said both candidates called for relieving overburdened courts and crowded jails by providing more alternatives to prosecution for low-risk offenders as well as better community outreach.
Pattillo did not respond to a request for an interview from The Daily Signal.
“I am viewed as a fairly centrist conservative,” McCord said. “I don’t know there was much difference between my approach to justice and his [Pattillo]. When did progressives and liberals get a monopoly on the idea of criminal justice reform? Soros doesn’t even know me. He didn’t ask me what my views were or what I would do.”
Soros so far has backed only Democrats in district attorney races, but his advisers insist his support for candidates isn’t based on political party and say Soros would consider making a large contribution to a “reform-minded” Republican prosecutor.
McCord said he doesn’t know if he will run again for district attorney—his dream job. But he said he knows what would stop him from trying.
“I’d rather be a private citizen doing the right thing than be a bought man,” McCord said.
‘A Little Bit of Love’
Prosecutors drive critical decisions in the criminal justice system, choosing when, whether, and against whom to bring criminal charges, as well as making recommendations for sentencing and setting the terms of plea negotiations.
These decisions are receiving more scrutiny at a time where there is a growing bipartisan consensus around the need to reduce incarceration, provide more alternative punishments, and expand rehabilitation opportunities for low-level drug offenders.
As part of this effort, Soros, along with progressive groups advocating racial justice and gender equality, is trying to elect more minority prosecutors in response to what he sees as an insufficient response by incumbent district attorneys to the fatal shootings of black men by police officers.
Several candidates who Soros backed are members of minority groups.
The Reflective Democracy Campaign, an arm of the progressive Women Donors Network, found in a 2015 study that 95 percent of elected local prosecutors were white.
“Of course, what was happening with Black Lives Matter and police shootings was a huge wake-up call [for progressives, who began] realizing how much power these offices have and the need for us to be focused on getting great people elected,” Andrea Dew Steele, president of Emerge America, a candidate-training organization for Democratic women, said in an interview with The Daily Signal.
“District attorney races have historically just been completely ignored, like most down-ballot races, in the progressive and Democratic community,” Steele said. “I am just thrilled to see that if you give a little bit of love to these races, a small investment yields a huge outcome.”
In Chicago’s Cook County, Soros funded one of several groups that helped Kim Foxx, who is black, defeat the incumbent state’s attorney, Anita Alvarez, in the Democratic primary. Foxx then easily beat her Republican general election opponent.
Alvarez drew widespread criticism for her handling of the 2014 fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald, a black 17-year-old. She took 13 months before charging the Chicago police officer who shot and killed McDonald, a delay that sparked protests.
“Soros’ funding was a big factor in my loss, obviously,” Alvarez, the first female and first Hispanic candidate to be elected as Cook County’s top prosecutor, said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “Some people want to say I lost my election simply because of the McDonald video, but I felt this movement prior to my charging that officer. When you have these outside influences, it’s scary because they don’t know the climate—that Chicago has a serious violent crime problem, a serious gun problem.”
In Chicago’s Cook County, incumbent State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez was defeated by a candidate who received support from George Soros. (Photo: Abel Uribe/MCT/Newscom
Under Alvarez’s leadership, Cook County created a nationally recognized pretrial diversion program. Diversion is intended to promise low-risk defendants a second chance. Eligible individuals are not prosecuted, but instead receive supervision services such as counseling and job training, and can have their criminal record expunged.
Such diversion programs exist in almost every state, but Cook County’s is considered especially innovative because defendants pay no fee to participate, meaning poorer individuals can benefit from the services.
“It would have been a wonderful thing if George Soros actually would have looked at my record,” Alvarez said. “He probably would have liked what he saw.”
Soros’ money also helped Aramis Ayala upset incumbent Jeff Ashton in the Democratic primary for Florida state attorney for Orange and Osceola counties.
The Soros funding paid for TV ads and mailers accusing Ashton of carrying out racially disparate policies—a claim he denied.
Ayala, a black woman, became the first African-American elected as a state attorney in Florida.
“Race does not explicitly play a role, but in seeking candidates who understand the injustices of the current system, many of them turn out to be African-American or Latino, because it is people of color who have been disproportionately affected by those injustices,” Tymas, the Soros adviser, told The Daily SIgnal.
‘Couldn’t Stop Them’
Last year, Scott Colom took a risky approach to his run for district attorney in a four-county stretch in Mississippi.
Colom, who is black and a Democrat, promised voters he would promote more rehabilitation and less incarceration for drug offenders, especially young people—although he also said he’d be tough on violent criminals.
Voters validated Colom’s agenda. It also was backed by Soros, who gave almost $400,000 to a Mississippi PAC supporting Colom’s campaign to defeat a long-entrenched incumbent, Forrest Allgood, an aggressive prosecutor whose record had been heavily criticized.
That PAC also backed the re-election campaign of another local prosecutor, Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith.
Colom now has served a year as district attorney of Mississippi’s 16th District. He has implemented some of his proposed policies, including expanding eligibility for pretrial diversion to defendants arrested for offenses such as selling marijuana.
In an interview with The Daily Signal, Colom said personal experience shapes his worldview. He grew up in Columbus, Mississippi, and watched high school classmates go to prison.
While in law school, Colom interned with the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, witnessing poverty and gaining an understanding of how government policy can hold people back.
“I had the courage to run on this criminal justice reform message based on my own personal convictions, before I had any idea there would be any national money, or a George Soros, supporting me,” Colom said. “I decided to run this way having no idea on how it polled. This is how I believed I should be elected.”
Colom, like Ogg in Harris County, said he didn’t know how Soros learned about who he is and what his positions are.
Colom said he never has been in contact with Soros, or anyone associated with him—and does not plan to connect with him now. He said he learned about Soros’ contribution only after seeing and hearing television and radio ads supporting his election.
Colom said the nearly $400,000 in outside money likely helped him, but that he also raised $150,000 on his own and knocked on doors every day from 3 to 7 p.m. during campaign season.
“This was a trying experience,” Colom said. “The most difficult thing I have done was to run for this office. It is important people get the whole picture of how I ran, not just one aspect of it.”
Colom added:
I don’t know George Soros. Do I think his spending money to spread my message helped me? I think any time your message spreads to more people, that helps that candidate get their message out. But what I emphasize is, the message has to be something someone agrees with. The people agree with my message. The people understand if you can avoid sending someone to prison and avoid the scar of a felony record, you should do that.
Colom’s candidacy for attorney general in Mississippi’s 16th District was one of the first such races that Soros has supported. As the Soros effort spreads, Colom says, it’s a difficult thing for candidates to counter.
“His support is not even something I can accept or decline,” Colom said. “They spend money independent of me. I couldn’t stop them. Honestly, I wouldn’t know who to ask if I wanted them to stop.”
Overcoming ‘Radical Agenda’
Pete Weir was able to halt Soros’ momentum by winning.
Soros dedicated $1.2 million to defeat Weir, the incumbent Republican district attorney of Gilpin and Jefferson counties in suburban Colorado.
Soros contributed to a PAC running negative ads against Weir in support of Democrat challenger Jake Lilly, a former prosecutor and Iraq War veteran. One mailer said the incumbent “can’t be trusted to keep us safe from sex offenders.”
In an interview with The Daily Signal, Weir said he overcame Soros’ influence by emphasizing his 37 years of criminal justice experience. The record, he said, includes a longtime dedication to reform—the cause that Soros says he is promoting.
“There was a backlash and outrage over the negative ads directed to me and an outrage over the prospect of an East Coast billionaire trying to buy our justice system,” Weir said, adding of Soros:
He knows nothing about our community, and what the criminal justice issues are in our counties. But it didn’t change my tactics or the way we campaigned on a positive message, on my experience. What he could not overcome were the relationships we had built in the community.
Weir said he spent about $80,000 on his re-election campaign, using that money to spread the message that his office is “progressive,” combining “aggressive prosecution when it’s called for with innovative, problem-solving courts.”
Weir is a member of the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice, which has helped pass state legislation reducing prison sentences for drug crimes.
He says he will continue to support reforms as prosecutor, because it’s what residents of Gilpin and Jefferson counties want. Even if he shares some of Soros’ goals, he said, those efforts should be dictated by local officials.
“It sounds immodest to say, but you would be hard-pressed to find another prosecutor in Colorado who has led reform efforts realizing we can do a better job in more areas,” Weir told The Daily Signal. “As a prosecutor community, we realize the system is imperfect and changes can and should be made. But to see some East Coast billionaire who has no idea of local interests acceding to a radical reform agenda at the expense of our democratic process is incredibly dangerous.”
‘Be More Political’
Soros and allied progressive groups say they will continue grooming and supporting prosecutor candidates who share their goals.
Steele, of Emerge America, says she already is looking ahead to the 2018 elections, with plans to recruit and train at least 25 Democratic women to run in district attorney races.
Women, she says, are uniquely sensitive to the consequences of incarceration and, as prosecutors, are likely to use their powers more carefully.
“I am hopeful that Emerge will have women running for district attorney in 2018 and make it onto Soros’ radar screen,” Steele said. “The George Soroses of the world can’t get the outcomes they desire unless you have great candidates. So what we are doing is a critical piece.”
She does not apologize for the aggressive outreach, arguing that because a state’s top prosecutors are elected, the process to become one is inherently political.
“All of these races are political,” Steele said, adding:
You have to run a race in order to win. I would say these races need to be even more political. Because the progressive community wants to see certain outcomes, less mass incarceration, that’s the outcome. In order to see that, we need to win races, and get qualified, good people running for these offices that had previously been uncontested.
Marquis, of the National District Attorneys Association, says he doesn’t doubt the sincerity of Soros and of progressive groups. He emphasizes that many members of the association, which represents state-level district attorneys across the U.S., support reform.
Indeed, the National District Attorneys Association made headlines earlier this year when it endorsed compromise legislation in Congress meant to reduce mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenders in the federal prison system.
Yet Marquis said he worries that despite these efforts, some incumbent members of the association could lose their jobs to better-funded challengers.
“This is the source of great conversation among district attorneys,” Marquis said. “A lot of us are sitting around saying, ‘What if it’s me next? What if I am targeted?’”
Under attack, billionaire George Soros plans to redouble his efforts
George Soros, the billionaire investor and liberal donor, sat in his hotel suite by Lake Zurich last week, lamenting the turn much of the world has taken in recent years: “Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.”
His favored presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost to President Donald Trump, whose “America First” platform runs counter to the globalism Soros embraces. Trump, he said, “is willing to destroy the world.” The European Union, which Soros once hoped would be so successful that he could end his charitable work in the region, is contending with the impending loss of Britain and a rise of anti-immigrant sentiment. And Soros himself has emerged as a political target in elections from Hungary to California, where his donations have been used as a cudgel against the causes he supports.
The 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, who has poured much of his fortune into promoting liberal values around the globe, is now confronting a wave of nationalist sentiment washing against issues he has championed.
But rather than recede from public life in his twilight years, Soros has decided to push even harder for his agenda, he told The Washington Post in a rare interview.
“The bigger the danger, the bigger the threat, the more I feel engaged to confront it,” Soros said Thursday. Wearing an open-collar shirt, he spoke animatedly for an hour, sitting at a table in his suite after an appearance at a Human Rights Watch conference.
Soros’ willingness to remain in the fray comes as he faces renewed vilification from a wide-ranging group of opponents that includes actress Roseanne Barr and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has been accused of being an all-powerful puppet master, a Nazi sympathizer and the person controlling the Democratic Party.
He acknowledges that the attacks can blunt his impact.
“It makes it very difficult for me to speak effectively because it can be taken out of context and used against me,” Soros said.
For all the billions of dollars at his disposal, Soros is also being forced to reckon with limits on his political influence in the United States. He acknowledged that he did not see Trump’s election coming. “Apparently, I was living in my own bubble,” he said.
Soros, who plans to spend at least $15 million in 2018 races, has already faced some setbacks this cycle. His bid to replace several district attorneys in California with challengers seeking changes to the criminal justice system was largely unsuccessful in Tuesday’s elections. “We ran into a brick wall in California,” he said.
Soros said he is certain in his assessment of Trump, whom he describes as a “narcissist” who “considers himself all-powerful.”
George Soros told The Washington Post this week that he plans to “redouble my efforts.” (Jasper Juinen / Bloomberg)
But he does not appear settled on the strategy to defeat him. Soros said he disapproves of a campaign by fellow liberal billionaire Tom Steyer to push to impeach the president, saying he would only support such an effort if Democrats retake Congress this year and gain Republican support.
Soros, who said he wants to avoid dividing the party, also refused to pick favorites among the emerging crop of 2020 Democratic presidential contenders. But there is one prospective candidate he said he hopes does not get the nod: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.
He blames Gillibrand for pushing the resignation of former senator Al Franken “whom I admire,” Soros said, “in order to improve her chances.”
Franken resigned in January after a number of women alleged that he touched them inappropriately. Gillibrand was a leading voice urging her fellow Democrat to quit.
She declined to comment.
Earlier this year, Patrick Gaspard, the former Obama White House political director who now runs Soros’ Open Society Foundations, said he asked the billionaire how he viewed the organization’s role at a time when so much of Soros’ work is under assault.
“This is the moment we were built for,” Soros responded, according to Gaspard.
The Hungarian-born Soros, who became one of the world’s wealthiest people by managing hedge funds and betting on currency changes, has given away billions of dollars to groups promoting human rights, democracy and liberal causes.
His New York-based Open Society Foundations now spends $940 million a year in 100 countries, promoting values such as free speech and free elections, according to the group. In the United States, the Open Society spends $150 million a year financing groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood.
For a period of time, Soros was the largest private donor in Russia, funding initiatives such as an anti-torture program, according to the foundation. Two years ago, Putin’s government effectively banned Soros’ group from distributing funds in the country, calling it “undesirable” and “a threat to the fundamentals of the constitutional system.”
Last week, Putin suggested that Soros’s spending around the world resembles the kind of political interference that U.S. intelligence officials blame on Russia.
“He intervenes in things all over the world,” Putin told Austrian television. “But the State Department will tell you that it has nothing to do with that, that this is the personal business of Mr. Soros.”
Elsewhere in Europe, Soros has also come under attack. This year, Viktor Orban, the right-wing prime minister of Hungary, won reelection after charging that Soros wanted to flood Europe with Muslim immigrants. Orban said one of his first efforts would be to pass a “Stop Soros” bill, aimed at cracking down on organizations he views as countering his agenda.
“I’m painfully aware that they are against the ideas that I stand for,” Soros said of his critics around the world.
2016 and Trump
In the United States, Soros was initially seen as an ally by Republicans who shared his opposition to communist dictators. He made modest donations to support the GOP in the 1980s and 1990s, according to campaign finance reports.
But he turned decisively against Republicans after President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 based on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.
Since then, his political spending – a fraction of the money he gives away every year – has made him one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable and generous donors.
In 2016, he poured at least $25 million into mobilizing Democratic voters in an effort to bolster Clinton and other candidates on the left, a Soros spokesman said.
In the final days of the White House race, Trump spoke in his closing television ad about sending a tough message to “global special interests” who wanted to control Washington, as images of Soros and other financial leaders who are Jewish flashed on the screen amid footage of Clinton.
Soros, who describes himself as an agnostic Jew, said he considered the ad “a coded anti-Semitic message.”
On Election Day, Soros gathered with friends to watch returns in his Fifth Avenue duplex, overlooking the reservoir of New York’s Central Park.
As the returns came in, “the party turned into a wake,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, who was one of the guests.
Soros said he spent months studying what went wrong in the election. He said he concluded that while Clinton would have made a “very good president,” she was not a good campaigner. “She was too much like a schoolmarm,” Soros said. “Talking down to people . . . instead of listening to them.”
But he said he also diagnosed a larger problem: the increasing ease with which people’s opinions can be manipulated. “It is so much easier to destroy trust than to build it up,” Soros said.
Soros has known Trump for years. Decades ago, the two men dined together several times at the Berkshire estate of a mutual friend, Soros said.
“I had no idea he had political ambitions, but I didn’t like his behavior as a businessman,” he said.
At one point, he said, Trump asked him to be the lead tenant in a new office building he was developing in New York City.
“Name your price,” Trump said, according to Soros. Soros said he declined because he was concerned that being so closely associated with the developer, whose Atlantic City casinos were financially troubled at the time, would hurt “my reputation.”
The White House and the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.
Soros said that if Democrats win in a “landslide” and forge a bipartisan relationship with moderate Republicans, as he expects, then he would favor impeaching Trump “because he is endangering the United States and the world.”
But even then, there would be a cost, he said: “This would make [Vice President] Mike Pence the president, who is much more competent in representing the far right, whose views with which I disagree, than Trump himself.”
This cycle, Soros has focused his political investments on congressional races and mobilizing voters on the left. His largest donation this year has been $5 million to Win Justice, a voter-mobilization group focused on minorities, women and young voters in Florida, Michigan and Nevada.
He has also continued to invest in district attorney races, saying prosecutors are “the linchpin of the judicial system” and key to his effort to reduce prison sentences. He sent $1.45 million to a group that supported civil rights attorney Larry Krasner in his successful race for Philadelphia district attorney last year. A spokesman said Krasner had never met Soros or anyone in his organization.
Soros’ recent efforts in California were not so successful. Three of his candidates for district attorney in California lost their primaries, and a fourth faces a runoff.
His financial support became a political issue in some of the campaigns. Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, who defeated her challenger Tuesday, claimed that the city was “under attack” from the billionaire, “who has brought his war against law enforcement” to Sacramento.
The breadth of Soros’ spending has made him a frequent target of critics on the right, who suggest he is secretly backing movements that appear to be driven by the grass roots.
Former congressman Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican who is a CNN commentator, suggested on Twitter in February that Soros and other activists, rather than students, were behind a protest in the wake of a Florida high school shooting in which a gunman killed 17 people.
A spokesman said Soros had no involvement with the protest.
Kingston said in an interview that he was merely raising the question of whether Soros was involved.
“Some names invoke an emotional outcry from the red-meat crowds, and certainly he is one of them on the right,” Kingston said. “The left has theirs. He does get that sort of sinister, that is, that kind of myth about him, that he plays in the shadows. Maybe that’s wrong.”
Last month, Soros’ name went viral again when Barr tweeted that he is “a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews to be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth.”
Among those who retweeted her was the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
Soros, who said he used false papers at age 13 to survive the Nazi occupation of Hungary, calls such claims “a total fabrication,” adding that they “annoy me greatly.”
But he is not fazed, he said.
“I’m proud of my enemies,” Soros said. “When I look at the enemies I have all over the world, I must be doing something right.”
The Washington Post’s Alice Crites and David Weigel contributed to this report.
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@toombstone
Organizations that, in recent years, have received direct funding and assistance from George Soros and his Open Society Foundations (OSF) include the following. These include some well known organizations and of particular importance are organizations that impact sportsmen, the environment and wildlife. These are noted with a brief description.
Drum Major Institute: This group describes itself as “a non-partisan, non-profit think tank generating the ideas that fuel the progressive movement,” with the ultimate aim of persuading “policymakers and opinion-leaders” to take steps that advance its vision of “social and economic justice.”
Center for Progressive Leadership: Funded by the Soros-bankrolled Democracy Alliance, this anti-capitalist organization is dedicated to training future leftist political leaders.
Joe Schoffstall is a staff writer for the Washington Free Beacon. Previously, he spent three years with the Media Research Center and was most recently with the Capitol City Project. He can be reached at Schoffstall@freebeacon.com. His Twitter handle is @JoeSchoffstall.
