After watching a majority of their hand-picked district attorneys lose elections or get recalled over the past two years, the Soros political network is pouring fresh millions into the same strategy, backing progressive prosecutors who view crime as a social symptom rather than a public-safety crisis.
Democracy PAC, the political action committee run by Alex Soros, transferred roughly $1.7 million to the federal and non-federal arms of Justice & Public Safety PAC between March 2025 and April 2026, according to Federal Election Commission disbursement records reviewed by Fox News Digital. The spending marks a renewed push to shape local criminal justice policy through district attorney races, the same approach that produced a wave of soft-on-crime prosecutors across the country and a corresponding wave of voter backlash.
The money has already found its first target. Justice & Public Safety PAC spent six figures backing Norfolk, Virginia, Commonwealth Attorney Ramin Fatehi in the state's 2025 election cycle. Fatehi has opposed cash bail, resisted prosecuting crimes like shoplifting, and joined a coalition of prosecutors who aimed to prosecute federal immigration agents, a record that reads like a checklist of progressive criminal-justice priorities.
Fatehi laid out his philosophy in a 2021 interview that makes the ideological stakes plain:
"The old-fashioned view about public safety was not taking into account externalities. It was focused on the idea of crime as an evil unto itself. Where I part ways is in recognizing that crime is a symptom. It's a symptom of structural racism, of systematic community disinvestment, of redlining, unequal school policy, the lack of jobs, lack of transportation, a lack of opportunities, intergenerational barriers to wealth building, the disinvestment in the treatment of the mentally ill."
That is the worldview the Soros network is bankrolling: crime is not something a prosecutor fights, it is a sociological condition a prosecutor manages. Shoplifters are not lawbreakers. They are victims of "intergenerational barriers to wealth building." The person whose store got robbed does not appear in the framework at all.
And Fatehi is not an outlier. He is the latest entry in a roster of Soros-backed prosecutors whose records follow the same pattern. Justice & Public Safety PAC has previously provided financial backing to former Alameda County, California, District Attorney Pamela Price; former Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon; Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner; former St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner; and former Cook County, Illinois, State Attorney Kim Foxx.
The track record of those prosecutors explains why the Soros network had to rebuild in the first place. Of the 25 district attorneys with Soros-linked backing who appeared on ballots in 2024, twelve were either defeated or recalled, nearly half. Sean Kennedy, policy director at the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, told Fox News Digital that of the 75 Soros-linked prosecutors his organization has identified since 2022, fifty have either left office or been replaced with more moderate officials.
Those are not abstract numbers. They represent jurisdictions where voters watched the experiment play out and decided they had seen enough.
Gascon's tenure in Los Angeles stands as the most visible example. He ordered his prosecutors not to pursue many sentencing enhancements, according to the Los Angeles Times. He drastically reduced the number of misdemeanors his office tried. Crime rates climbed. Internal dissent followed. Rank-and-file prosecutors in his own office voted nearly unanimously to support a recall effort against him, Politico reported. Voters defeated him in 2024.
In Philadelphia, Krasner presided over a historic homicide spike while reducing prosecutions. In St. Louis, Gardner's office collapsed under its own dysfunction. Across the country, the pattern repeated: progressive prosecutors reduced enforcement, crime worsened, and the communities bearing the consequences eventually revolted at the ballot box.
None of those defeats appear to have changed the underlying strategy. George Soros transferred control of his roughly $25 billion philanthropic and political network to Alex in 2023. The Open Society Foundation, the family's advocacy arm organized as a 501(c)(4), brought in nearly $160 million in 2024, according to tax documents filed with the IRS. Democracy PAC channels funds into political races. Justice & Public Safety PAC distributes them to individual candidates.
The structure allows enormous sums to flow from a single family's wealth into hyper-local races, commonwealth attorney contests, county district attorney primaries, where a few hundred thousand dollars can tilt an outcome. Voters in Norfolk or Alameda County are not choosing between two local lawyers. They are choosing between a local candidate and a nationally funded ideological project.
George Soros spelled out the project's rationale in a July 2022 essay published on his personal website. He argued that progressive prosecutors can improve public safety by using resources to address root causes of crime rather than jailing offenders for long periods. He wrote that "black people in the U.S. are five times as likely to be sent to jail as white people" and called it "an injustice that undermines our democracy."
The argument frames incarceration itself as the problem. It treats prosecution as a lever for social policy rather than a tool for public order. And it has been tested, extensively, in cities that gave Soros-backed prosecutors the chance to govern. The results were measured in homicide counts, in shoplifting waves that gutted retail corridors, in prosecutors who refused to enforce the laws they swore to uphold.
Alex Soros has given no indication that the electoral losses prompted any rethinking. He recently revealed that he voted for Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor, a choice that places him squarely on the progressive left of Democratic politics. The Open Society Foundation did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
The 2026 cycle is the next proving ground. With $1.7 million already flowing through the PAC pipeline and the machinery rebuilt, the Soros network is betting that voters in new jurisdictions will buy what voters in Los Angeles, St. Louis, and a dozen other cities already rejected. The strategy has not changed. The prosecutors have not changed. The talking points about "root causes" and "structural racism" have not changed.
What changed is that fifty communities decided they wanted their laws enforced. The Soros network's response was not to listen. It was to reload.
