George Gascon turned Los Angeles into a laboratory for letting criminals walk free.
Voters fired Gascon in 2024, and dozens of his Soros-funded colleagues across the country followed.
George Soros just found something a recall election cannot touch.
How Soros Funded Soft-on-Crime Prosecutors Across America
Globalist billionaire George Soros spent a decade building the most expensive criminal justice operation in American political history.
The pitch was always identical: elect prosecutors who treat cash bail as bigotry, felony charges as overreach, and repeat offenders as victims of a broken system.
Gascon took Los Angeles. Chesa Boudin – the son of Weather Underground terrorists – took San Francisco, where he prosecuted just three drug cases in 2021 as overdose deaths surged across the city. Larry Krasner won Philadelphia on a campaign that drew 90 percent of its funding from Soros-linked groups. Chicago got Kim Foxx. Manhattan got Alvin Bragg.
San Francisco recalled Boudin after less than one term, Foxx quit rather than face voters again, and Kimberly Gardner resigned in disgrace in St. Louis.
Of the 75 Soros-linked prosecutors identified since 2022, 50 have left office or been replaced by someone tougher on crime.
In 2024 alone, 12 of 25 Soros-backed district attorneys on the ballot were defeated or recalled.
Soros read those numbers and went looking for something voters could not reach as easily.
The DSA Dark Money Strategy Targeting Local Judicial Elections
A new report from the Center for American Institutions documents where the money went next.
The target is local judges – the ones deciding bail hearings, eviction cases, and who walks out the door tonight.
DSA chapters are now running organized slates of candidates across the country, pulling public defenders off their caseloads and putting them on the bench, city by city.
In Los Angeles, a Soros-connected nonprofit called La Defensa put public defenders through a political training program and ran them as a slate – the self-styled "Defenders of Justice."
Three won seats in 2024.
In Pittsburgh, a coalition called the "Slate of Eight" targeted ten open seats on the Court of Common Pleas in 2021 and took five of them.
Their stated goals included ending cash bail, refusing to try teenagers as adults, and eliminating probation for juveniles.
DSA-backed Pittsburgh magistrate Mik Pappas set a Chinese national free without bail after an arrest for indecent sexual assault.
The defendant boarded a plane and left the country.
Another DSA-endorsed Pittsburgh magistrate, Xander Orenstein, turned loose a defendant facing assault charges.
The same man later stabbed someone to death.
In Nevada, DSA Judge Erika Ballou ignored a Nevada Supreme Court order to return a prisoner to custody, got suspended by the Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline in 2025, and resigned.
Ballou is gone, but the strategy lives.
One journalist sympathetic to the movement wrote that these activists are playing a long game, with the explicit goal of building power across every level of the bench.
How a DSA Judge on Your Local Bench Becomes a State Supreme Court Justice
Soros lost the DA wars because voters could see the results in their neighborhoods – the crime numbers, the early releases, the brazen dismissals of charges that used to mean prison time.
They voted accordingly. Judges are a different problem.
Most voters cannot name a single judge in their jurisdiction.
These races sit at the bottom of the ballot, in primaries where organized money can move a few hundred votes and flip a seat nobody is watching.
The DSA figured that out before Republicans did.
A recalled DA is gone in one election cycle.
A DSA-backed 35-year-old judge elected to a six-year term today is a state supreme court justice by the time the next generation of American voters casts its first ballot.
Fox News Digital reported in July 2026 that the Soros family has already pumped more than $1 million into PACs backing new soft-on-crime prosecutors for the 2026 cycle – while simultaneously pursuing the judicial strategy underneath it.
The Center for American Institutions report put it directly: "Nothing in the Republican stable matches the Democratic Party's network of interlocking nonprofits," and the Soros-run groups remain "the biggest and most complete political/financial complexes" in the game.
Soros is not rebuilding the DA project. He is taking the lessons from losing it and building something harder to burn down.
Sources:
- Paula Baker and Donald T. Critchlow, "How Socialist Democrats Use the Soros Strategy to Fill Local Courts With Woke Judges," The Federalist, September 23, 2026.
- Adam Shaw, "Soros Network Rebuilds Progressive Prosecutor Push After String of Election Losses," Fox News Digital, July 28, 2026.
- Charles Stimson, "George Soros's Prosecutors Wage War on Law and Order," Heritage Foundation, June 22, 2023.
