In the wake of the successful recall of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, LA DA George Gascon is the next Soros-backed DA recall target.
And according to Bari Weiss, the recall is coming from inside the building.
On May 31, 2018, Desiree Andrade was scrolling through Facebook when she saw a local news report about the body of an unidentified man found at the base of a canyon in the forest north of Los Angeles. Andrade’s son, Julian, who was 20, had disappeared two days earlier. So she called the police. “I was giving facial features,” she told me, “and the lady on the other end said, ‘You know, ma’am, facial features aren’t going to work. He doesn’t have a face.’”
Andrade told the dispatcher there was a rose tattoo on Julian’s left hand. A few minutes later, a detective called her back to confirm that the dead man was her son.
Five men were charged in Julian Andrade’s death—beating and stabbing him, and then throwing him off a cliff, and then, when they heard him thrashing about, climbing down to pummel him some more. Two of them had known him in high school. They thought he’d stolen their weed.
He died slowly—from head trauma, blood loss and the cold. By the time his body was recovered, two days later, it had been ripped apart by bears or mountain cats.
Prosecutors told Desiree Andrade it could take up to five years for the case to inch its way through the system but assured her that justice would ultimately be served. Then Covid hit, and everything slowed down. And then, while the city was still hunkered down, George Gascon became Los Angeles County district attorney.
The day after Gascon’s inauguration, on December 7, 2020, Phil Stirling, the lead prosecutor on the case, called Desiree Andrade. She was at her home in Whittier on a conference call. (Like everyone, she was working remotely.)
The new D.A., Stirling explained, had issued nine directives that, among other things, eliminated “enhancements”—extra penalties for more serious crimes. Stirling had been hoping for life without parole for “the three heavies.” (The other two defendants were not thought to have played a central role in the murder.) But without the enhancement—Julian Andrade hadn’t simply been murdered but murdered during the commission of a kidnapping—the best they could hope for, he said, was 25 years in prison, which probably meant 20, since convicts often wind up serving 80 percent of their sentence.
“I felt betrayed,” Desiree Andrade told me.
Her son’s case was one of thousands that, in the waning weeks of 2020, were suddenly, inexplicably downgraded. The stories of justice denied, and the rage and heartbreak of mothers and fathers like Desiree Andrade, combined with a rise in violent crime, ignited a firestorm across the city. In December 2021, angry Angelenos, including Andrade, launched a recall campaign against Gascon.
The campaign has reeled in more than 500,000 signatures. If it gets the 566,857 it needs by July 6, voters will decide come November whether to fire the D.A. (Given that organizers recently mailed out 3.6 million more petitions, including return envelopes, that seems likely.)
The revolt—as was the case in San Francisco, with the campaign against Chesa Boudin, another uber-progressive prosecutor—is coming from inside the house, too.
In February, the prosecutors’ union, the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, conducted a vote to see where its members stood on the recall: Nearly 98 percent supported it. Last week’s recall of Boudin gave the anti-Gascon organizers a major boost. “Everyone is talking about it in the office,” a prosecutor said. “Literally everyone.”
To a person, these prosecutors said that the problem was that Gascon had portrayed himself on the campaign trail as a progressive, and they thought that was a lie. They thought that he was captive to a radical agenda; that he wanted to blow the whole place up; that Black Lives Matter was now in charge of the criminal-justice system in Los Angeles; and that all of this was hurting the people the activists claimed to care about the most.
Check, check, check and check.
They meant people of color, mostly Latino, some black, mostly confined to the east side of the city. The people who lived next to the freeway overpasses, between strip malls and empty lots and homeless encampments, whose kids had spent most of the past two years at home, who were always fending off disaster, who lived among the gang members and drug dealers and the dealers of illegal guns and car thieves and armed robbers. The people who needed them.
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John Lewin, a deputy D.A. who has been in the Major Crimes Division for nearly two decades, said: “What happened is the D.A.’s Office was taken over by somebody who, in my opinion, has no interest in prosecuting criminals.” Another longtime deputy D.A. who voted for Gascon and has since revised his opinion told me: “Voters expect their district attorney to protect the public. Instead, they got a Trojan horse—a D.A. and his coterie of radicals and sycophants who are hellbent on blowing up the criminal-justice system in the name of ‘progress.’”
The recall and all the energy behind it aren’t just about Gascon, prosecutors told me.
It was about all the right-thinking people who had backed him—George Soros; Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti; Bernie Sanders; Elizabeth Warren; and, of course, Patrisse Cullors, the BLM co-founder who had piloted the movement into a successful house-hunting enterprise—and it was about the moment that birthed him. With the tailored suits and the retro sunglasses, Gascon was radical chic. He was cool. Hollywood had been in love with him. (“Jackie Lacey is so out of step with right now,” a Democratic bundler told me a few months before Gascon’s election, referring to the black, female incumbent D.A., whom Gascon defeated.) Gascon was the antidote to over-incarceration and George Floyd. He was the prosecutor who didn’t like prosecutors—like the other Soros-backed D.A.s who had recently taken office: Boudin; Larry Krasner, in Philadelphia; and Kim Foxx, in Chicago. Like other “reform-minded” prosecutors, as The New York Times put it, in Austin, Orlando, Columbus and beyond.
Eric Siddall, a deputy D.A. and the vice president of the prosecutors’ union, said no one had ever thought that much about the district attorney before. There was a system, and sometimes it moved a little in one direction or another, but it always basically worked the same way, and now it seemed to be imploding in slow motion. “It’s never been as politicized as it has been by George Gascon or Chesa Boudin or Larry Krassner or Kim Foxx,” Siddall said.
“It was kind of a perfect storm,” said Richard Doyle, who used to run the D.A.’s Compton branch. “I don’t think the voters understood how radical the changes were that he was proposing. I think that allowed him to sneak in the back door.”
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In the mass email, Gascon also announced a new mission statement. Moving forward, the D.A.’s Office would advance “an effective, ethical and racially equitable system of justice.” He called the office “a learning organization that believes in reduced incarceration.”
“In Gascon’s and his supporters’ twisted view, it is the offenders committing the violent crime who they consider to be the victims,” John Lewin, the deputy D.A., said. “They draw no distinction between those individuals who are committing the violence and those individuals who are having the violence committed upon them.”
Gascon assured prosecutors that decarceration would lead to lower recidivism rates and that the data backed him up. Prosecutors, including many who called themselves liberal Democrats, were skeptical.
It didn’t help that Gascon’s inner circle mostly included former public defenders who thought the D.A.’s Office and the Los Angeles Police Department were shot through with systemic racism—who basically assumed the deputy D.A.s, many of whom were black or Latino, were enthusiastic enforcers of or, at best, cogs in the prison industrial complex.
One of those former public defenders, Tiffiny Blacknell, who was now Gascon’s community and government affairs liaison, had been especially vocal. On her Instagram, Blacknell, who is black, had posted a picture of herself in a t-shirt that said, “THE POLICE ARE TRAINED TO KILL US,” and another photo of herself in a shirt that said, “THEY CAN’T KILL US ALL.”
The true believers carrying water for Gascon seemed to imagine themselves doing battle with a white gerontocracy—stiff, staid, backward-looking prosecutors who just did not get it. “They think we’re dinosaurs and we’re standing in the way of change,” a deputy D.A. told me.
“Without even knowing us, he basically spelled out that we were an office of systematic racism,” added deputy D.A. Maria Ramirez. Ramirez is suing the D.A.’s Office for demoting her for, she claims, refusing to toe the party line.
The change could be felt across the county.
Richard Doyle, the head of the Compton branch office, was directed by one of Gascon’s lieutenants, Mario Trujillo, to drop felony charges against three BLM protesters who had dragged a metal barricade onto some metro tracks, threatening to derail a train full of passengers. When Doyle protested, he was slapped with a “letter of reprimand” and later transferred to the Environmental Crimes Division. (Trujillo did not reply to requests for comment.)
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Phil Stirling, the lead prosecutor on the Andrade case, pointed out what pretty much everyone in the city’s rougher neighborhoods already knew: “Ninety-nine percent of the victims of gang murders and gang rapes and gang robberies and gang beat downs are minorites—black and brown people,” he said. “That’s what’s crazy about this whole racist prison bullshit.”
But that “racist prison bullshit” has had a profound and negative impact. Since Gascon took office, roughly 300 deputy D.A.s have left. On top of that, job applications are down. The D.A.’s Office usually hires every two to three years, and it gets about 2,000 applications each hiring season. This year, 240 people applied for 60 spots, a longtime deputy D.A. told me. “And you should see who these people are,” he said. “It’s people who no one else will hire.”
Everywhere the racist ideas of social justice have been tried, it is poor minorities who are hurt worst by the crime and chaos it brings. That, in fact, seems part of the entire point: To destroy the foundations of America’s Constitutional system of ordered liberty so that radical, neo-Marxist ideas can be imposed.
To the Soros network, the destruction of so many American lives is a feature, not a bug.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
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