Organization Trends

Soft Eyes for Criminal Justice Solutions: The Soros Prosecutors


Soft Eyes for Criminal Justice Solutions (full series)
Nonprofit Donations | A Tale of Four Cities | The Soros Prosecutors
Status Quo Supporters | Big Winners | Soft Eyes for Solutions


The Soros Prosecutors

A less nuanced approach is the political spending of George Soros. Since 2016, according to research tabulated by the Capital Research Center, the network of political committees funded by Soros have contributed $35 million to the election of left-wing district attorney candidates, and at least 30 of them were still in office as of April 2023.

Color of Change PAC is a political committee loosely affiliated with the eponymous nonprofits. The PAC funds the campaigns of lenient district attorney candidates and received a $1 million donation from Soros in 2022—the largest donation the political committee received during that election cycle. According to CNBC, the Open Society Policy Center, a political advocacy nonprofit funded by Soros, also gave $7 million to the Color of Change advocacy nonprofit in 2022.

Whether you count by total murders or murders per capita, prosecuting attorneys supported by Soros have presided over the rise of some of America’s most homicidal hometowns.

Exhibit A is Kim Foxx (D), the district attorney of Cook County, Illinois, the region that covers Chicago. In 2016 Foxx defeated incumbent DA Anita Alvarez (D) by promising fewer people in prison.

During her reelection campaign in 2020, a Chicago Tribune analysis revealed she had dismissed 30 percent of the felony cases presented to her during her first three years in office. This included 6.1 percent of aggravated firearm battery offenses, 8.1 percent of homicides, 8.1 percent of aggravated battery attacks on police, and 9.5 percent of felony sex crimes.

All of these were healthy increases in leniency over what her predecessor had allowed during a similar period.  During Alvarez’s final four years in office, Chicago averaged 521 annual homicides. In the first four years under Foxx that leaped to 627 murders per year.

George Soros apparently thought the Windy City was blowing in the right direction, because in late February 2020 the Soros-backed Democracy PAC sent $2 million to the Illinois Justice and Public Safety PAC. Within weeks the PAC spent almost $1.9 million of the loot attacking Bill Conway, Foxx’s main rival for the Democratic nomination in the overwhelmingly Democratic Cook County.

Foxx won the four-way March 2020 primary and cruised to reelection in November. Over the next two years, through 2022, the homicide average sharply jumped again to 747 murders per year. More people were being killed in Chicago than any other large American city.

Similarly, in 2016 a Soros-funded PAC ran television spots supporting Kimberly Gardner (D) in her race to become St. Louis City circuit attorney.

Gardner won. By the end of her first four-year term in 2020, St. Louis had more murders per capita than any city in America, by far its highest murder rate per capita in at least half a century, and just a handful of total homicides short of its all-time highest number of souls slaughtered.

Gardner ran for reelection on this record in 2020 and faced a Democratic challenger in the primary. Soros pumped $116,000 in to the Missouri Justice and Public Safety PAC, a committee supporting Gardner. She won again.

But she had competition of another sort . . . in Louisiana.

In December 2020, New Orleans city councilmember Jason Williams won a runoff election for Orleans Parish District Attorney. George Soros gave $220,000 to the Louisiana Justice and Public Safety PAC to use against Williams’s opponent, Democrat Keva Landrum.

According to NOLA.com, Williams had campaigned on being a “progressive prosecutor” who would make “a sharp break with the policies of his predecessor,” retiring DA Leon Cannizzaro. In his inauguration speech, Williams said he would be “more selective about prosecutions.”

A NOLA.com report in December 2019 found “the number of homicides recorded in New Orleans fell dramatically in 2019, bringing unlawful killings to their lowest level in nearly five decades.” This was the third consecutive year of declining murders for a city that had often had one of the nation’s highest murder rates per capita.

That ended two years after Williams replaced Cannizzaro, when New Orleans edged Kim Gardner’s St. Louis to become America’s per capita murder capital.


In the next installment, the outcomes in some cities with Soros-sponsored prosecutors are alarming, but again the full picture is more complicated.

Ken Braun

Ken Braun is CRC’s senior investigative researcher and authors profiles for InfluenceWatch.org and the Capital Research magazine. He previously worked for several free market policy organizations, spent six…
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