Chapter 1: Broken Scales CHAPTER 1 BROKEN SCALES In his final minutes as president, Joe Biden gave blanket pardons to five of his family members. The list included three siblings and their respective spouses: James "Jim" Biden and his wife, Sara Biden; Valerie Biden Owens and her husband, John T. Owens; and Francis "Frank" Biden. All three siblings have been suspected of potential crimes. For years reports have indicated that Joe's brothers Jim and Frank Biden used the family name to bag foreign cash and engage in questionable business dealings. Valerie, Joe's sister, leveraged her last name to nab lucrative consulting gigs stateside. Sara Biden, Jim's wife, was accused of laundering money for her husband and brother-in-law when Jim admitted to lending Joe $200,000 without a repayment plan. 1 Controversial as the Biden family pardons were, the uproar was a fraction of what had come before. These were not the first Biden family pardons. Just a few weeks earlier, Joe had granted his son Hunter a full and unconditional pardon dating back more than ten years for any crimes of which he might be accused in the future. America had largely grown numb to Biden family antics, but this news was jarring, especially since Hunter had been investigated for several crimes during Joe's presidency. In June 2024, Hunter was convicted of three felony charges related to a gun offense. Reports of Hunter's criminal misdoings had circulated for years, amplified by a leak of the contents of his laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election. The fact that he was convicted on a gun charge and only a gun charge was notable, as it was Hunter's only alleged crime (to my knowledge) that did not implicate Joe. Hunter got away with any impropriety in his extensive business ties to oligarchs around the world, especially in China and Ukraine. He never registered as a foreign agent even though he clearly took money from influential people and businesses with close connections to foreign governments. The pardons extended all the way back to 2014, right before Hunter's career as an international businessman took off. Anyone who thinks this is a coincidence isn't paying attention. Pardon recipients extended beyond the Biden family. Biden made wide use of preemptive pardons that granted high-profile political allies amnesty from future prosecution. Recipients included Dr. Anthony Fauci (who had overseen the mismanagement of funds that were used for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then lied about it in a Senate hearing), Congresswoman Liz Cheney (who appeared to tamper with at least one witness on the January 6th Committee), and General Mark Milley (who had told the Chinese Communist Party that he would warn them if President Trump had planned to attack). Most if not all of Biden's high-profile pardons extended back to January 1, 2014, a period spanning ten years. The stunning breadth of these pardons all but guarantees that many crimes will go uncovered and uninvestigated. We will probably never learn the full truth of Hunter's influence-peddling, since he was pardoned of all potential wrongdoing before anyone investigated his actions. It was the most far-reaching use of the pardon power in American history, a gross act of hypocrisy--even for an administration that traded in doublespeak and propaganda. But there are only two creatures that never forget a thing: elephants and the Internet. And the Internet to be consistent soon took Joe Biden to task for his about-face regarding the rule of law. Clips quickly flooded social media of Biden and his media allies criticizing Trump for even contemplating granting preemptive pardons on his way out in 2020. Biden and his surrogates repeatedly stated that he would not pardon his son. This, like so many of Biden's utterances over the years, was bullshit. "You sit there and go, if you haven't done anything wrong, then what do you need a preemptive pardon for?" asked lawfare poohbah and Mueller Report henchman Andrew Weissmann on MSNBC. At that time, Biden responded with emphatic bullshit: "It concerns me in terms of what kind of precedent it sets and how the rest of the world looks at us as a nation of laws and justice. You're not going to see in our administration that approach to pardons." 2 In his first administration, President Trump never issued the preemptive pardons liberals had fixated on, not even one. Joe Biden, on the other hand, dished them out like dollar bills at an erotic club. It was ironic, infuriating, and darkly hilarious--the perfect way for Joe Biden to end his failed presidency. His last act confirmed what we already knew: The man who standardized the modern practice of lawfare (more on this momentarily), proved once and for all that two systems of justice exist in the country. I saw it coming, of course. We weren't being entirely tongue-in-cheek at Breitbart News when we began calling them "The Biden Crime Family." I knew from my extensive research into the Bidens that Joe would never let his family members go to jail, so long as he could help it, nor would he let protracted legal entanglements bankrupt them. Unending lawsuits, expensive legal bills, and judicial harassment from your political opponents? That was for the Trump family! For those MAGAts who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th! No Biden was ever going to rot in a cell. Throughout the Biden administration, Democrats tried to bankrupt Trump by filing civil cases against him in liberal districts. Judges and juries who hated Trump awarded absurd penalties to accusers in flimsy cases. And when that failed to alienate Trump from the American public, Biden's DOJ, together with some suspiciously recent DOJ alumni, tried to throw him in jail. Yet, luckily, they all failed. In the end, Trump fought off his most malicious detractors and proved they were powerless against him. At least for the time being. Despite Trump's victory, however, it's still important to consider the damage the left has done to our legal system. Lawfare is a multifaceted tool. The left deploys it at the court to enact change and tarnish their adversaries. They use it at the White House to circumvent constitutional roadblocks. They use it at the ballot box so they don't leave a single close election to chance. Joe Biden, a famously lousy law student (as thoroughly documented in Breaking Biden ), had introduced modern lawfare decades earlier with the "borking" of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and the unsuccessful high-tech lynching of nominee Clarence Thomas. In the intervening years, the Democrats built a lawfare superstructure that remains one of their most potent political weapons. The Democrats always had long odds for the 2024 election. They had a weak candidate at the top of the ticket, then swapped him out for a candidate who was even worse. Republicans had both political and cultural tailwinds and a candidate so strong it looked at times like God himself willed Trump to take back the presidency. The Democrats should have known they were in a losing battle. They should have stood down and lain low. But they are fighters, and they fought to the bitter end. This was a fateful choice because it meant they didn't just lose in November, they exposed their playbook in the process. Now it's on us to identify its elements, dismantle what we can, and prepare for the battles ahead. If we fail, the machine will only get stronger. The left plans to use lawfare to expand voter eligibility to include illegal aliens, eliminate voter ID requirements, and widen the time window in which people can vote. They want to rig the deck so they can't lose. They will game campaign finance laws so that they always have a fundraising advantage. They will pack courts to limit the power of conservative and originalist judges. They will add new left-leaning states, grant mass amnesty to illegal aliens, and more. Scariest of all, they will try to declare the conservative movement an existential threat to "democracy" itself with no legitimate right to exist. If they had their way, 2024 would have been the last real election. Under a second Biden or Kamala Harris administration, the political left would have used their power to cement their gains and guarantee that no sane Republican would ever test the lawfare machine again. Anyone who challenged them would have been subjected to the Trump treatment. It would have been the end of democracy as we know it. In November 2024, we got a stay of execution, but we still have much to fear. The left believes that America is not an exceptional place and that our core institutions are not worthy of respect. Once you understand this fundamental outlook, you can begin to understand how easily they are willing to bend the system to their will. They don't believe in precedent, tradition, and principle: their only pursuit is power. THE LEFT HATES LAW AND ORDER The left has never regarded the rule of law as essential. They consider it a means to an end, and when it doesn't work in their favor, it's viewed as an obstacle on the way to their progressive utopia that can be swept aside. That attitude made the prosecutions of Trump possible. My first conscious experience with the left's anti-law and order culture concerned immigration, and illegal immigration specifically. Our open border was a national disgrace, and I dedicated much of my career to bringing attention to that fact. The left has waged war on immigration enforcement to boost their long-term electoral prospects. They want as many illegal immigrants to come as possible, even though that means violating the law. Growing up in California, I didn't have to be particularly observant to notice the disastrous effects of illegal immigration on our quality of life. The influx of people hurt everything from schools and hospitals to crime and everyday safety. When I got older, I realized that our illegal immigration crisis is fundamentally an issue of lawfare. It reveals the left's contempt for the firm standards that law and order demand. People from around the world sought to enter America by any means necessary to seek work and gain access to the American economy. And Democrats let them. The illegal immigrant population doubled from 1995 to 2005. 3 From 2005 to 2015, for example, chain migration, the process where family and community members follow another immigrant to settle in a new country, added as many new people to the USA as any two years of American births during that decade. 4 Our southern border was abandoned for decades. Until Donald Trump came down that escalator on June 16, 2015, to announce his campaign for president, both political parties seemed comfortable with massive demographic change, mostly for political reasons. Democrats thought they benefited from a new influx of families that would eventually support Democrats once they gained the right to vote, and Republicans feared being branded "racist" if they dared to speak out against lawlessness. Migrants crossed our border without even offering the courtesy of signing the proverbial guest book. One party considered it, in essence, not not legal. The other political party was too afraid to address the problem because they feared political fallout. For the elite on both sides, the flow of migrants lowered the cost of their gardeners, nannies, and an assortment of other laborers. The Democrats saw their path to a permanent majority, and they moved to try to secure it by manipulating the language to end any debate on the issue. "Illegal aliens" were rebranded "undocumented workers." Illegal alien children became "Dreamers," named after the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act of 1991. When I was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2005 to 2008, it was popular to say that "no human being is illegal," because the literal and accurate term illegal alien was deemed dehumanizing. These euphemisms were designed to mask the reality of the situation. The term illegal alien refers to their immigration status, not their humanity. Duh. Illegal immigrants were "undocumented" because they had broken the law to get here. It was that simple. And as to the term "Dreamer," President Trump said it best in his 2020 State of the Union speech: "Americans are dreamers too." America had the most idiotic immigration policy in the world. We left our border open for years. And until Trump, not a single mainstream political figure with the power to change things was willing to address the issue. It was madness. From the day he took office in 2016, Donald Trump's administration provided a brief moment of sanity in an otherwise insane sixty-year period, implementing policies such as "Remain in Mexico," Title 42, and building new sections of border wall. However, Joe Biden undid all that the moment he got into power. Biden's decision to deliberately undo Trump's efforts to secure our border made clear to the rest of the world what most of them already knew: America's southern border was a lawless place. The whole border mess started when Senator Ted Kennedy shepherded the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 through congress. The bill prioritized chain-migrants and capped legal immigrants from our hemisphere, thus leading to widespread illegal immigration. This proved to be a political benefit for Democrats. Half a century later, Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden refused to enforce our laws, again to benefit Democrats. Changing the law and refusing to enforce it were both considered viable options so long as it helped Democrats win. But Democrats weren't the only ones who benefited. The Mexican cartels that smuggle drugs and human beings into our country benefited too, while American communities suffered as crime and fentanyl flooded our streets. The debasing of our immigration system is perhaps lawfare's greatest triumph to date. One major political party, the Democrats, has gone to great lengths to not enforce a set of laws because they believed that would help them electorally. And until recently, establishment and globalist Republicans were comfortable with this lawlessness because the influx in people lowered the cost of blue-collar labor, which could potentially save them money. (Plus, the left has successfully framed the debate so that for many years, if you raised the issue of illegal immigration, you were likely to be called a racist and a xenophobe in the press. Republicans have not traditionally had a strong enough stomach to handle bogus charges of racism.) The scope of the immigration laws that the left openly violated is immense. As I wrote in Breaking Biden , our refusal to enforce a border "sends a message to foreigners that if you violate our rules, you might get prioritized ahead of those who abide by them." Not only does an open border broadcast to the rest of the world that we don't even have respect for our own laws, but it also leads to humanitarian crises downstream. It created a black market for fentanyl, which has been trafficked over our border in quantities large enough to kill every American, devastating countless American communities. What's more, the conditions for the migrants themselves are often dangerous and always filthy and degrading. Families are separated. Females are raped and assaulted. And when they arrive, they often work for wages that are below our minimum wage, some of which must be sent to their cartel traffickers. It's all horrific and a stain on our country. Yet the Democrats will go to terrific lengths to keep things exactly as they are. In President Trump's first term, Democrats harped on the "kids in cages," referring to unaccompanied alien minors who were sometimes housed in fenced-off warehouses while they were processed. They paid no mind to the fact that these facilities were often built during the Obama-Biden administration, a story we broke at Breitbart News in 2014. 5 Yet once the Democrats saw an opportunity to weaponize the use of the "cages" against Trump and his supporters, they took it, framing it as white nationalism. 6 It's all dishonest. A disgrace, frankly. But as a practical matter, these lies are pernicious because they lead to more lawlessness, which is exactly what the institutional left wants. Our lack of a wall and inadequate border enforcement are the beginning of the lawlessness. Our asylum system is routinely abused with the "catch and release" policy that was in place both before and after Trump's first term. In essence, if a border crosser encounters law enforcement, all they need to do is claim that they are seeking asylum and they are welcomed to stay until they are given a hearing, which is likely years off. What's more, the asylum claimant almost certainly had passed through another country that has similar asylum rules as the USA, so they don't need to be here; they simply want to be here. Joe Biden expanded the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) programs during his presidency, which allowed foreign nationals from countries like Nicaragua and Venezuela to be paroled into the country with little or no vetting. He even had a smartphone app, CBP One, that made the process go smoother for the illegal alien . Donald Trump had cut aid to the "Northern Triangle" countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) for allowing migrant caravans to head toward the U.S. unabated. He also put Title 42 in place, which allowed for the swift removal of any alien who had recently been in a country with a contagious disease (which in the post-COVID era was all of them). Joe Biden canceled all of those upon taking office. These basic details are probably familiar to anyone reading this book, but it is nonetheless important to identify what it represents: The mainstream viewpoint among Democrat policy makers is that padding their voter rolls is more important than living in a society that respects its own laws. They believed an open border was their path to a permanent majority, and that is reason enough for the lawlessness. They had the choice between the rule of law and chaos, and they chose chaos. Upon taking office a second time, Donald Trump immediately began restoring rationality to the process. Illegal immigration was a fixable problem--it's just that nobody wanted to fix it. Trump proved that the border could be closed within weeks, thus also proving that it was left open by design. THE SHOPLIFTER VOTE Crime is political for the left. Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris both had moments in their career when they were tough on crime when it served them politically, and at other moments they sided with the criminals over the citizens. The challenge for modern Democrats is that while a commitment to keeping crime to a minimum is a de facto priority for all politicians, the left flank of their movement has insisted on engaging in sociological experiments that have caused rising crime and deeper safety concerns in our streets. Many Democrats, particularly among the base, regard crime as a symptom of racial and economic injustice and think that criminals ought to be treated with leniency. Society, not the perpetrator, really caused the crime, so any punishment is inherently unjust. The laws on the books are inherently problematic, they say, and ought to be subverted when possible. This poses a political conundrum for them: Crack down on crime and lose the left, or indulge the woke and watch cities fall apart. In blue areas, laissez-faire approaches to crime are politically beneficial. In the single-party, Democrat-run state of California, for example, some shoplifting is de facto legal. This is because state law says that stealing $950 or less of merchandise is merely a misdemeanor, which disincentivizes law enforcement and prosecutors from investigating these petty crimes and enforcing the law. 7 Mundane items such as candy, shampoo, and shaving supplies are often kept behind lock and key at stores to reduce the pilfering, but that accomplishes only so much. Video footage of mobs clearing out stores routinely go viral online, eliciting outraged and embarrassed responses. Only recently has there been any broad interest in changing these laws. Since moving back to the Los Angeles area four years ago, I have witnessed petty theft on multiple occasions, including in wealthy enclaves. I've seen clerks pathetically plead with thieves to stop, knowing that a call to law enforcement is a time-consuming dead end. There is only one conclusion to draw from this set of facts: The shoplifter vote is a very influential part of the Democrat coalition. Democrats, Kamala Harris in particular, are famously associated with the movement to "defund the police." They have also championed bail reform. States like New York ended cash bail for nonviolent crime, including felonies. The left sees the concept of cash bail as racist. They contend that "communities of color" are overpoliced and that bail is set at higher levels for them (these arguments are typically offered without noting the nature of the crimes committed and whether the defendant is a repeat offender, both of which will factor into how high the bail is set). Efforts to end cash bail, 8 led by far-left activists such as the Kamala Harris-backed Minnesota Freedom Fund, 9 have led to a national crime wave. Meanwhile, the media covered for Democrats, pretending that the rise in crime was an illusion conjured up by conservative media. They insisted that the violent crime rate dropped in 2022, 10 for example. But the FBI quietly revised the stats to show a 4.5 percent increase for the year. 11 The data ultimately matched what we had been reporting via anecdote after anecdote at Breitbart News : There was a big jump in violence under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. This blatant disregard for law and order and public safety created an endless fount of content for conservative media. At Breitbart News , for example, we highlighted a 2023 study from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice that found that 72 percent of violent crime suspects in New York City who were freed without bail went on to commit more crime. 12 Other recent headlines we've published: New York Bail Law Freed Illegal Alien Wanted by Feds, Now Accused of Rape 13 Watch: Migrants Brutally Attack NYC Cops, Get Freed from Jail Without Bail 14 "Sanctuary Church" Helps Free from Jail Illegal Alien Charged with Migrant Mob Attack on NYPD Officers 15 New York: Five Illegal Migrants Escape After Being Released on Bail Following Jewelry Store Theft 16 "No cash bail" is one of the tenets of the "criminal justice reform" movement, which aspires to reduce perceived structural issues in the way the law is enforced in the country. Proponents of "criminal justice reform" see overcriminalization as the problem, not lax law enforcement. They believe that the law is applied unfairly against minority groups. In other words, law and order is racist. Thus, by merely entertaining the idea that society ought to enforce the law, you run the risk of being branded as a racist or worse. Foisting this belief on the public is its own form of lawfare. As time has gone on, the Democrats have gotten increasingly tolerant of criminals, so long as you don't defraud people of too much money. California State Senator Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (D) introduced a bill in early 2025 that would decriminalize welfare fraud under $25,000. 17 "This bill is about keeping families out of the criminal justice system from making administrative errors on raising the threshold for welfare fraud prosecutions," she wrote on social media. You see, in the warped minds of at least one blue-state Democratic lawmaker, stealing $25,001 from the government is fraud, but $24,999 is an "administrative error." 18 This isn't merely disrespecting the principles of law and order to pander to the criminal class, it shows outright contempt for taxpaying citizens. SOROS-FUNDED DAS The primary culprit for the legal revolution in our cities is what we in conservative media have labeled "Soros-funded DAs" and "Soros-funded prosecutors." This group of district attorneys and prosecutors received financial support from the famed leftist billionaire philanthropist and chaos agent George Soros. "The Soros empire spent at least $40 million to elect its prosecutors. It then invested an additional $77,663,316 to twenty leftist nonprofits to coordinate and control the prosecutors, bringing the total Soros spending to at least $117,663,316," according to a report called "Law & Disorder" from the conservative Media Research Center (MRC). "At least 30 percent of the U.S. population currently lives under the boot of the Soros prosecutors who were pressured to sign pledges vowing to adhere to various Soros priorities. The Soros machine orchestrated 33 of these 'joint statements' and pledges, which were signed by 123 of the 126 Soros prosecutors," the MRC continued. More than any other man, the leftist billionaire, currency manipulator, and philanthropist George Soros is responsible for the ruinous effect crime has had on our metropolises in recent years. He spent lavishly on approximately seventy-five radical left-wing prosecutors in 2022, but that number might be much higher, according to a report by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF). The report notes that more than 72 million people, including half of America's fifty most populous cities and counties, live in one of the affected areas. 19 How does he do it? "Soros uses a series of shell organizations, affiliates, and pass-through committees to steer contributions to both candidates and his robust support network for progressive prosecutors, which provide gravitas and perks to preferred prosecutors," the LELDF wrote. 20 Soros consistently ranks among the top funders of leftist political activity in America. Though George Soros is in his mid-nineties, his thirty-nine-year-old son Alexander, who chairs his father's far-left Open Society Foundations, is poised to continue the family business for decades to come. In 2024, Alexander Soros became engaged to Hillary Clinton's longtime aide and confidante Huma Abedin, instantly making them one of the most powerful couples in all of polictics. Among George Soros's stable of radicals was San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Boudin was so unpopular that he was recalled by the voters of the far-left California city in 2022. Boudin has far-left activism coursing through his veins. His parents were both convicted Weather Underground terrorists who took part in one of the most famous violent robberies in our nation's history: a botched heist of an armored Brinks truck in 1981 that left a guard and two police officers dead. 21 The purpose of the heist was to abscond with millions of dollars that would fill the organization's coffers so they could fund more radical activism. 22 Boudin's father, David Gilbert, and mother, Kathy Boudin, were convicted on felony murder charges and given lengthy sentences. Gilbert was granted clemency by then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2021. 23 Boudin used his misfortune of having incarcerated parents as justification for his soft-on-crime policies. Yet, while he may have been a victim of unfortunate circumstances, his parents were not. Yet, the fact that they were imprisoned became an excuse for him to engage in a form of lawfare. Call it "refusal to enforce the law... fare." Boudin, like many of Soros's minions, wanted to end cash bail and shift law enforcement resources away from nonviolent crime. 24 He declined to press charges for the majority of assault arrests. 25 He claimed a decline in reported crime on his watch, but the voters saw through that charade. The declining numbers didn't convey a decline in crime but rather the absence of all hope. Law enforcement had gotten so weak that residents decided not to bother to report certain crimes, knowing that nobody would show up to help. Boudin proved too radical for even leftist San Francisco, which recalled him by a double-digit electoral margin. Soros also funded District Attorney Pamela Price of Alameda County, which is in the East Bay region of Northern California and includes crime-riddled Oakland. She embraced the "defund the police" strategy and paid the price for it, first in her personal life (her own laptop was stolen from her car), 26 and then at the ballot box. The LELDF estimated that Soros spent $2 million on electing Chicago's Kim Foxx, $1.1 million on New York City's Alvin Bragg, $1.3 million on Philadelphia's Larry Krasner, and $4.7 million on Los Angeles's former DA George Gascón, among others. 27 Of America's criminal coddlers, George Gascón is perhaps the most infamous. He served as the DA of San Francisco from 2011 to 2019, succeeding Kamala Harris, with disastrous results. He prosecuted only 40 percent of misdemeanor cases during his two terms, which led to a wave of low-level crimes and a surge in car break-ins. Nonetheless, Gascón portrayed his refusal to prosecute misdemeanors as an accomplishment, according to the Los Angeles Times , 28 and it helped him get elected in L.A. Gascón has a bleeding heart for people who break the law. "By putting people even for short terms, in jail, when they are poor, they lose their jobs, the safety net is not there and then they lose their homes," he said. Yes, he takes pride in letting criminals run wild. This sentiment is not only delusional, it's cruel to the law-abiding amongst the citizenry. Reports such as this from Fox News's Los Angeles-based Bill Melugin quickly became the norm: "LAPD arrested a man for stabbing the neck of a construction worker, nearly killing him. Despite a prison recommendation from Probation Dept., L.A. D.A. George Gascón's admin agreed to give him diversion instead. He is now charged with murdering his neighbor last week." 29 L.A., the city of angels, quickly became a paradise for criminals. Murder rates spiked as they declined nationally, nearly doubling from 2019 to 2021. 30 Car thefts increased by 65 percent over the same period. 31 "It's been an absolute disaster for the community," Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said of Gascón's time in office. "It's been a disaster for public safety. It's been a disaster for law enforcement." 32 Gascón arrived in Los Angeles in 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter antipolicing movement. He was quickly endorsed by the Democrat Party establishment and then-Mayor Eric Garcetti, who withdrew his prior endorsement of the more moderate DA Jackie Lacey, Los Angeles's first black DA. After he won, Gascón seemed to get even more radical. Right away he issued a special directive that prevented his office from seeking the death penalty, sentencing enhancements, and cash bail for nonviolent criminals. 33 His policies put criminals back on the street, ready to offend again. In L.A., criminals call it a "Gascón Special." It's when you commit a crime--typically theft--knowing that even if you're arrested, you're likely back on the street the next day. In May 2023, the New York Post reported that Gascón, who built a reputation for operating as an "authoritarian," had accumulated a 10,000-case backlog. The environment in his office was described by prosecutors as toxic. "In my career as a prosecutor, I've never had victims' families actually hate us until I came into this office," one former deputy district attorney told the Post . 34 Things got so bad that there was an open rebellion among rank-and-file prosecutors. Gascón survived two recall attempts. The second one probably would have succeeded if not for a technicality that allowed county officials to disqualify it from the ballot. The voters finished Gascón off in 2024, when he was whupped at the polls by challenger Nathan Hochman by a staggering 61.5-38.5 percent spread. 35 Despite his shocking track record, Gascón is probably only the second most well-known "Soros-funded prosecutor" behind Alvin Bragg. Bragg figures prominently later in this book for his prosecutions of Donald Trump. "New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), the prosecutor behind charges against former President Donald Trump, has built a record of dropping felony charges, decreasing felony convictions, downgrading felonies to mere misdemeanors, and not bothering to request bail for suspects accused of felonies," John Binder wrote for us at Breitbart News . Bragg's DA office has specifically shunned the "broken windows policing" strategy associated with much safer times in the Big Apple, where officers were tasked with focusing on low-level crimes like vandalism and loitering. Bragg specifically permitted drug misdemeanors, turnstile jumping, trespassing, prostitution, driving with a suspended license, obstructing officers, and more, Binder notes. 36 According to one report, he downgraded most--about 52 percent--of felony cases to misdemeanors in 2022, a drastic increase compared to his predecessor. He also got a far lower percentage of convictions in felony and misdemeanor cases while declining to prosecute far more cases. 37 So, what was Bragg doing while he wasn't enforcing the law? He was targeting Donald Trump. And as a rule, Bragg prioritized harassing normal citizens over maintaining public order. He released a man who assaulted NYPD officers without bail. 38 He pursued charges against a bodega owner who killed an assailant in what was clearly self-defense. 39 He pressed manslaughter charges against Daniel Penny, a Marine veteran who put a fatal chokehold on a psychotic homeless man threatening passengers. Witnesses said the deceased, Jordan Neely, who had been hospitalized more than a dozen times, was screaming at passengers that someone was "going to die." 40 But in Alvin Bragg and George Soros's world, Jordan Neely did nothing wrong. Daniel Penny is the bad guy for standing up for his fellow passengers. Law and order is not one of their values. But, apparently, chaos is. Chicago's Kim Foxx is another Soros-funded operative. Her list of misdeeds seems endless. As Cook County state's attorney for Illinois, she dismissed more than 25,000 felony cases. 41 She refused to charge gang members in a Chicago veteran's murder, 42 leading federal prosecutors to take on the case. She sided with Jussie Smollett during his 2019 hate-crime hoax, most notably by dropping the initial sixteen charges against the Empire actor without offering any explanation. 43 When the Illinois Supreme Court reversed Smollett's conviction, Foxx gloated even though she acknowledged he was guilty. 44 There are other Soros-backed prosecutors who practiced lawfare but didn't receive notoriety, such as St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, who admitted to misusing public funds. She also was reprimanded by the Missouri Supreme Court for ethics violations when she tried to prosecute Missouri Governor Eric Greitens (a Republican, of course) and oust him from office. She also appeared to engage in another brazenly political prosecution when she prosecuted Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a prominent Republican couple, who pointed firearms at Black Lives Matter protesters who smashed their way into their gated community. 45 She was kicked off of that case after using it in fundraising emails. 46 (The McCloskeys would plead guilty to misdemeanors and were eventually pardoned by Republican Governor Mike Parson.) 47 The "controversies" section of Gardner's Wikipedia page was over three thousand words long as of the time this book was written, which is exceedingly rare for left-wing public figures. In other words, even the bad guys know she's a bad guy. LOWER THE CRIME RATE WITH ONE EASY TRICK The Soros DAs represent a broader attitude on the American left that holds that law and order is racist and must be undermined at all turns. This attitude took over the establishment media, which portrayed police officers as racially bigoted murderers. 48 The Washington Post 's Pulitzer Prize-winning Fatal Force database, launched in 2015, presupposes that police officers are driven primarily by racism. Others in the media say the same thing. Routine policing procedures are products of "systemic racism." In other words, the entire system needs to collapse for racism to end in America. These conclusions are wildly dishonest. Racism is not the primary driver of police behavior, and studies prove it. Evidence suggests that compliance, not skin tone, is by far the most common determining factor in whether a police encounter escalates. Suspects who comply with police officers don't face escalatory action; those who don't risk death. Selective media coverage intent on pushing a narrative has costs. The claim that all cops are racist, for example, caused a severe decrease in proactive policing across the country. This is known as the Ferguson Effect, named for the increase in violent crime in many U.S. cities after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. 49 Following several high-profile incidents of supposed police brutality, police reduced proactive enforcement; increased crime rates followed. A 2017 Pew Research study showed a large uptick in violence against police officers in the intervening years, including a dramatic rise in officers shot and killed. 50 Obama's Department of Justice enacted enhanced federal oversight over local police forces, entering into what is known as consent decrees with law enforcement agencies across the country. He did this fifteen times (in comparison, George W. Bush did this three times during his eight years as president). This meant that Obama was leveraging federal authority to ensure that law enforcement agencies reformed. 51 Apparently, his definition of "reform" was to enforce the law less strenuously. The left's war on law enforcement hit its peak after George Floyd was killed in 2020. That summer will always be remembered for riots that broke out nationwide. But the hostility against cops also caused officers to quit and retire in droves. Retirements nationwide rose 45 percent. Resignations jumped 18 percent from April 2020 to April 2021, according to the New York Times . 52 NYPD's head count was at record lows in 2024, 53 though it finally began to recover in other parts of the nation. 54 Democrats have also counted high-profile criminals among their most prolific donors. Disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, for example, sought to outpace even George Soros among Democrat donors. 55 Jeffrey Epstein, Sean "Diddy" Combs, and Harvey Weinstein are household names who all gave heavily to the party that opposed law and order. Volumes have been written on their wrongdoings, and I can guarantee more are yet to come. To be fair, the Republicans are imperfect on this issue as well. Plenty on the right hobnobbed with Epstein. Donald Trump himself tried to pursue criminal justice reform via his son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose father is a convicted felon. Yet this was a relatively minor part of Trump's agenda and was met with skepticism from his base. There are valid criticisms to be made about America's prosecutorial complex. America has the most incarcerations and one of the highest incarceration rates in the world among countries from where we can get reasonable data. 56 It's not wrong to want to lower those numbers. But the policies carried out in recent years in Democrat-run cities decreased the incarceration rate by increasing crime. A robust police force acting as a deterrent is better than what Democrats want: to keep law enforcement to an absolute minimum. A HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY The Democrats' leniency toward criminals in our streets, insistence on keeping our southern border open, and inconsistent application of hate-crime laws have ceded the issue of equality before the law to Republicans. There is some evidence, however, that big swaths of rank-and-file Democrat voters are fed up with at least some of their party leadership's leftist instincts on the subject. Californians, for example, overwhelmingly voted to stiffen penalties for criminals by passing Proposition 36 in 2024. The ballot initiative, which increased penalties for repeat offenders, introduced tougher punishments for offenses involving fentanyl, and cracked down on aggravated theft and "smash-and-grab" looting. It passed by a margin above two-to-one despite vigorous opposition from top Democrats, including Governor Gavin Newsom. 57 Kamala Harris notably abstained from taking a stance in favor or against. 58 Of twenty-five Soros-backed district attorneys who were on the ballot in 2024, twelve were recalled or lost their elections. 59 Still, the party brass is no longer in touch with voters on the issue of crime. Despite losing a statewide ballot initiative, liberals doubled down on undermining law enforcement after the 2024 election. Within days the Los Angeles City Council moved to become a sanctuary city, prohibiting "any City resources, including property or personnel, from being utilized for any immigration enforcement." 60 Yet there is a budding awareness that voter sentiment has shifted. Democrats are now in an electoral conundrum where a tough stance on illegal immigration could risk alienating base voters, but the opposite will certainly cost them votes from political centrists. 61 This troubling reaction presents a historic opportunity to Republicans. There is nothing more fundamental to the quality of life for Americans than the reassurance that you and your loved ones won't get mugged in your own neighborhood, and that if you are, the perpetrator will be brought to justice. Yet, this viewpoint is seemingly unspeakable at high levels of Democrat politics. The shoplifter vote must be a larger bloc than I had imagined. Republicans can take command of this conversation, expose the Democrats for who they are, and show the country what left-wing policies have wrought on our cities. If they do that, Republicans will earn the trust of new voters across demographics. It doesn't matter what you look like or what else you believe: All decent Americans in their heads and in their hearts want the law-abiding protected and the long arm of the law to come down hard on the crooked. That is, of course, unless you're a part of the Democrat Party. Excerpted from Breaking the Law: Exposing the Weaponization of America's Legal System Against Donald Trump by Alex Marlow All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
