DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign reportedly seeks to frame her as a law-and-order candidate, however, the deep-pocketed donors propelling her candidacy have a history of supporting efforts to reduce the power of law enforcement.
Harris’ close advisers have settled on a strategy of highlighting the vice president’s career as a district attorney and attorney general in California, according to CNN. Despite the Harris campaign’s plans, many of the donors backing her have opposed efforts to empower law enforcement and supported organizations that advocate for defunding the police.
“Not only does Kamala need to defend her support of [President] Joe Biden’s failed agenda over the past four years, she also needs to answer for her own terrible weak-on-crime record in California,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “A vote for Kamala is a vote to allow illegal immigrants from all over the world to invade our country, a vote to defund the police, abolish [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and bail violent criminals out of jail.”
The Soros Connection
George Soros, the self-admitted architect of a plan to overhaul America’s criminal justice system by installing prosecutors with a more lenient view on crime, and his son Alex both endorsed Harris for president shortly after Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, The Wall Street Journal reported.
In addition to electing so-called reform prosecutors, the Soros philanthropic network has also pumped millions into anti-police groups, including some that have called for reduced spending on law enforcement.
Open Society Foundations, which George Soros founded and Alex Soros took over in 2023, donated tens of millions to anti-police groups in 2021, including Black Lives Matter-aligned organizations that call for defunding the police and the New Venture Fund for the Community Resource Hub for Safety and Accountability, which publishes materials on both defunding and abolishing the police, Fox News Digital reported. Soros also supported campaigns in Minneapolis to abolish its police department following the death of George Floyd.
Democracy PAC and Democracy PAC II, political action committees funded and controlled by the Soros family, have spent tens of millions this election cycle to help get Democrats elected and gave millions to Democratic super PACs that worked to get Biden elected in 2020, Federal Election Commission records show.
Many of the prosecutors supported by Soros have come under fire from people living in their jurisdiction for their approaches to criminal justice.
Former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who received support from Soros-aligned groups, was recalled in 2022 after city residents accused him of not prosecuting crimes like burglary, car thefts, and murder, as well as for releasing repeat offenders who went on to commit additional crimes.
Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon, who Soros spent millions supporting through his California Justice & Public Safety PAC, faces a tough reelection bid amid criticisms of his handling of crime, which included opting not to prosecute crimes like trespassing, resisting arrest, making criminal threats, drug possession, or loitering to commit prostitution.
Netflix, Nonprofits, and Criminal Justice Reform
Nonprofit head Quinn Delaney and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, major Democratic donors who announced their support for Harris shortly after Biden ended his reelection effort, joined Soros in working to elect Gascon and Boudin.
Delaney, alongside three other California-based donors, poured millions into electing the two prosecutors in 2020, Politico reported. Hastings and his wife Patty Quillin donated $1.75 million to support Gascon, according to Deadline.
Hastings donated $7 million to a pro-Harris PAC, the largest donation he has ever given a candidate, Business Insider reported. Delaney, meanwhile, pumped $1 million into a pro-Harris super PAC that she ran in 2020 and has been identified as a “key backer” of Harris post-dropout by The New York Times.
Delaney and Hastings have also thrown their wealth behind opposing ballot measures in California that would have empowered law enforcement.
Hastings and his wife in 2020 spent $2 million opposing California Proposition 20, which would have increased penalties for property crimes, as well as $1 million in support of a ballot measure that would have abolished cash bail, according to Forbes. Delaney, on the other hand, in 2024, donated to a committee opposing a California ballot measure that would have increased penalties for retail theft, Politico reported.
Delaney heads the Akonadi Foundation, an Oakland-based nonprofit that focuses on “ending the criminalization of people of color,” according to its website. Akonadi runs a program called “All In For Oakland,” which works to remove police officers from schools and close juvenile prisons and donates funds to Black Lives Matter-affiliated organizations.
While Harris’ campaign is reportedly prepared to present her as the law-and-order candidate, the vice president presented as a reformist during her time in the Senate.
Harris told “The View” in 2020 that the defund the police movement was about “reimagining how we do public safety in America,” adding that “we have confused the idea that to achieve safety you put more cops on the street instead of understanding to achieve safe and healthy communities, you put more resources into the public education system of those communities, into affordable housing, into home ownership, into access to capital for small businesses, access to health care regardless of how much money people have,” The Sacramento Bee reported.
Harris, in a 2020 radio interview, praised the defund the police movement, saying that the “whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” according to CNN. She also praised Los Angeles’ move to cut its police department’s budget by $150 million during an interview a day prior.
Golden State Cash
Karla Jurvetson, another wealthy Californian whom The New York Times reported is throwing her support behind Harris, was labeled by a Republican operative as a “major funder of the squad and just about every politician on Capitol Hill who wants to defund the police” due to her political contributions to left-wing members of Congress, according to The New York Post. She is also a donor to Color of Change PAC, a committee that works to defund police departments, The Washington Free Beacon reported.
Jurvetson was the 24th-largest individual Democratic donor during the 2020 election cycle, giving a considerable sum to Harris at the time, according to Influence Watch.
Andrea Dew Steele, yet another Californian Democratic donor, has been hard at work laying the foundation for Harris’ campaign since before Biden even dropped out, The New York Times reported. Dew Steele, who is a personal friend of Harris and served on her national finance committee in 2020, has spent the past few weeks funneling donors to Democrat-aligned groups in preparation for a possible Harris campaign.
“We were trying to make sure that we were ready for this moment,” she told The New York Times. “I was just trying to prepare the ground.”
Dew Steele is the founder of Emerge America, an organization dedicated to electing women to office at all levels of government. The group has backed several liberal prosecutors, including Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton and former Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins, both of whom received backing from Soros’ network, as well as San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott, who declined to prosecute many of those who were arrested in her city during the 2020 George Floyd riots, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
“The prosecutor exercises the greatest discretion and power in the system. It is so important,” Dew Steele told Politico in 2016, speaking about Soros’ strategy of funding left-wing prosecutors. “There’s been a confluence of events in the past couple years and all of the sudden, the progressive community is waking up to this.”
Many of the prosecutors funded by Soros decline to prosecute what they deem to be low-level crimes like drug possession, vandalism, or trespassing.
“I applaud Emerge America for working to get more women in law enforcement positions,” then-California Attorney General Harris said in 2015, when the group first launched, according to MSNBC. “Having served for eight years as San Francisco’s District Attorney and now as the Attorney General of California, I can tell you that women’s voices are desperately needed in the criminal justice system.”
Susie Tompkins Buell, another prominent donor whom The New York Times reported has come out in support of Harris, and Delaney both serve on Emerge America’s advisory board.
The vice president’s proximity to the defund the police movement persists in her staffing decisions with Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s spokesperson, having tweeted “defund the police” on June 3, 2020.
Harris has spent much of her career threading the needle between appeasing leftists and not making an enemy of law enforcement, according to The Wall Street Journal. In 2020, for instance, Harris distanced herself from her past as a prosecutor at the urging of her sister, CNN reported.
The Harris campaign did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. Jurvetson could not be reached for comment. None of the other donors named above responded to requests for comment.
