California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is raising eyebrows on a national level by taking a tough stance against George Soros-backed prosecutor Pamela Price of Alameda County, which includes the crime-ridden city of Oakland.
Price faces a recall effort on the November ballot, as does “progressive” Oakland mayor Sheng Thao, whose home was recently raided by the FBI in an apparent corruption probe. Breitbart News described Price’s record in 2023:
Soros, who has funded radical prosecutors across the country, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars backing Price in 2018. She won in 2022 and immediately backed “criminal justice reform” of the kind that has upended law enforcement around the country.
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[C]rime has become so bad in Oakland — the largest city in DA Price’s jurisdiction — that police have encouraged the public to use airhorns to warn thieves away, and normally left-wing-minded residents are blasting a failed progressive utopia.” Even the local NAACP chapter has demanded more police and more aggressive action against crime on the streets of Oakland.
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New concerns have arisen recently about Price after it was revealed that she had hired her boyfriend to a six-figure salary job, though he had faced accusations in the past of extorting local businesses.
Newsom has supported Soros-backed prosecutors in the past, notably District Attorney George Gascón of Los Angeles. But Price appears to be a convenient target as Newsom tries to project an image of being tough on crime.
Politico reported Wednesday:
Gov. Gavin Newsom is rescinding an offer to dispatch attorneys to help prosecute drug crimes in Oakland, accusing Alameda County’s embattled progressive District Attorney Pamela Price of effectively refusing the state’s help.
“Despite our outreach, your office has yet to make use of these resources,” Newsom’s Cabinet Secretary Ann Patterson wrote in a letter to Price’s office, obtained exclusively by POLITICO, informing her they would redeploy the attorneys to the California Department of Justice.
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Newsom’s reversal deals a high-profile blow to Price as she fights a recall election fueled by concerns about crime. The aggressive intervention also opens an unusually public rift between a publicly elected prosecutor and the state’s most powerful politician, underscoring how crime has become a volatile and divisive issue for California Democrats.
Newsom is trying to fight a referendum that qualified for the November ballot that would amend parts of Proposition 47, a 2014 “criminal justice reform” initiative that many critics blame for the ongoing crime wave within the state.
But he is also eager to be seen as tough on crime, particularly retail theft, which has caused large retailers and chain stores to pull out of some California cities.
In a related story, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday that Oakland has been reporting misleading crime statistics for years, often comparing year-to-date statistics for the current year to full-year statistics from previous years to create the impression, often false, that crime had fallen.
Newsom is considered a likely future presidential contender — whether in 2028, when the presidency will likely be an open seat, or in 2024, as a replacement for an ailing President Joe Biden, who some are urging to quit the race.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
