Virginia AG Jason Miyares leads GOP efforts to oust liberal district attorneys
Sarah Westwood
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Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is leading a charge to get Republicans more involved in district attorney races to stop the spread of liberal criminal justice reform at the local level.
Conservatives are playing catch-up on what has until recently been an under-the-radar campaign to elect liberal prosecutors, an effort that led to progressive district attorneys everywhere from San Francisco to Philadelphia.
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“You have a lot of these left-wing special interest groups that will come in and they’ve learned a very smart tactic,” Miyares told the Washington Examiner in an interview this week. “They’ve realized, ‘I don’t have to win a governor’s mansion. I don’t have to change control of my state Senate or my state assembly. I’ve just got to go into certain areas, I’ve got to elect very left-wing social justice warriors as these prosecutors.’”
Miyares said liberal groups can drop relatively modest sums, as little as $100,000, into district attorney races and have “a huge impact” on the direction of law enforcement in a jurisdiction.
In some places, that has led to a rapid increase in crime.
Miyares chairs the Protecting Americans Action Fund, a political organization aiming to correct an imbalance that has existed in prosecutor campaigns for several years.
Liberal billionaire George Soros has poured millions of dollars into dozens of district attorney races since at least 2016. In all, Soros-backed political action committees have invested $40 million into electing 75 progressive prosecutors, a Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund analysis found.
Some of those prosecutors have gone on to make politically controversial decisions.
In Portland, Oregon, for example, the Soros-backed district attorney decided shortly after taking office in 2020 to drop most cases involving rioters who destroyed parts of the city a few months earlier.
Other progressive DAs have stopped prosecuting entire categories of crimes or sought far lighter punishments than their predecessors for more serious offenses.
Miyares said his team “realized … that there was a vacuum.”
“We realized there was not another organization dedicated to elect these kind of commonsense prosecutors,” he said.
The Protecting Americans Action Fund and its partner nonprofit group, the Protecting Americans Fund, raised $4 million in 2022 for prosecutor races. The organization invested in more than 12 competitive races and flipped five district attorney offices from liberal to conservative, the group said.
But Republicans have a long way to go to increase their impact on a critical number of district attorney offices. GOP candidates focused more heavily on crime in the midterm elections, sometimes pointing to the far-left positions of district attorneys as a foil.
In New York, former Rep. Lee Zeldin mounted a strong challenge to Democratic Gov. Kathy Kochul in the gubernatorial race in part by hammering her on her association with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whom critics have accused of worsening crime in the city.
Some state leaders have room to remove prosecutors who say they won’t enforce certain laws.
In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis removed a Tampa-area district attorney over statements the prosecutor had made about planning not to take up abortion-related violations. That prosecutor appealed his termination.
But in other states, including Virginia, governors have few options to counter the decisions of liberal district attorneys.
Miyares said Republicans should learn to talk more about the emotional damage crime can do, rather than repeat statistics.
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“I think it is so important to talk about … the victims in it,” he said. “I think sometimes, candidly, Republican candidates can sound like accountants, and they don’t talk about the real impact these types of cases can have on individuals.”
“Don’t talk about the rise in larceny,” Miyares added. “Talk about the small business owner who can’t meet payroll because 10% to 15% of what’s on their shelf is being stolen from them.”