If elected to a second presidential term in 2024, former President Donald Trump would investigate “Marxist local district attorneys,” according to a recent policy video he uploaded online.
The former commander-in-chief vowed to “overhaul” the Department of Justice if he wins another term and go after officials engaged in “civil rights investigations,” adding that “Soros prosecutors appear to be engaging in selective enforcement based on illegal racial discrimination” in places like Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. He was referring to left-wing billionaire financier George Soros, who has provided millions of dollars in campaign contributions to leftist district attorneys, including Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
He called for federal subpoenas into various DA offices’ emails, staff, and records to determine if they’ve violated “federal civil rights laws.” Trump highlighted the case involving Daniel Perry, a former U.S. Army sergeant, who was convicted of murder in Austin, Texas, in a case that some conservatives said was unfairly brought by the local district attorney’s office.
Trump also pledged to appoint about 100 U.S. attorneys who are the “polar opposite” of the “Soros district attorneys and others being appointed around the United States.” He said that those officials will be the “most ferocious legal warriors” who will target the worst “communist corruption” this country has ever seen.
“We will have a complete investigation into the use of police state tactics by federal authorities to arrest conservatives and Christians,” he said, adding that Americans should “confront radicalized law schools.”
Amid the controversy, Bragg has not addressed the claims that his campaign received cash from Color of Change. But Soros, in a recent interview, denied having a connection to Bragg, a Democrat.
Color of Change, according to OpenSecrets.org, donated some $500,000 to Bragg’s campaign. He was elected in 2021.
The group argued that it supports such candidates because “real criminal justice reform requires not just winning elections, but also changing laws and increasing funding for communities rather than a reliance on policing.”
“They believe that the criminal justice system is excessively punitive and racially biased and that it is irredeemable,” Sean Kennedy, a criminal justice expert at the Maryland Public Policy Institute, told The Epoch Times last year. “So they’re trying to undermine it from the inside.”
The “rogue prosecutor movement” goes back to the “prison abolition movement,” said Zack Smith, a former federal prosecutor who works with The Heritage Foundation. “There is actually a movement; it’s a Marxist movement that believes we should abolish prisons in the United States,” he said.
“Many members of this movement … bought into the idea that our criminal justice system is systemically racist, that we have a problem with mass incarceration, we arrest too many people, incarcerate too many people. And so because of that, they want to lower prison population, and they want to basically make many, many things that have traditionally been crimes either not be crimes or make the punishment for them very minor, like a speeding ticket, civil infraction,” he said.
