Soros-funded prosecutor George Gascon recently debated his challenger for reelection as Los Angeles County district attorney. Gascon’s onstage performance was a perfect reflection of his failure as the head of the nation’s largest DA office: It was abysmal.
Former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman has led Gascon in the polls by 25 percentage points since August, so it’s not surprising that many Angelinos have had enough of Gascon’s pro-criminal, anti-victim, cop-hating policies and rhetoric.
Gascon, one of the rogue prosecutors whose campaigns were underwritten largely by liberal financier George Soros, proved himself an inarticulate, foppish debater against Hochman in the televised debate co-hosted by KNX News (97.1 FM) and the Los Angeles Times.
Hochman, a former Republican running against Gascon as an independent, prosecuted drug dealers, human traffickers, and corrupt public officials as an assistant U.S. attorney in California. He ran the Justice Department’s tax division in the final year of George W. Bush’s eight-year presidency.
If Gascon loses the race Tuesday to Hochman, the Democrat only has himself to blame. The former district attorney of San Francisco, Gascon unleashed a crime tsunami across the largest county in the United States and thought the liberal residents of Los Angeles either would support his approach or not notice the spike in crime.
Topics of the Gascon-Hochman debate included crime rates, juvenile crime, the death penalty, and better solutions for public safety.
A reporter for the Los Angeles Times asked about crime rates, citing statistics from both the California Department of Justice and the Los Angeles Police Department for 2019 to 2023.
Those statistics show an 8.5% increase in overall crime in Los Angeles County during Gascon’s tenure as district attorney, which began in December 2020.
In response, Hochman referenced the California Department of Justice and noted that violent crime and property crime during Gascon’s term are both up by double digits and shoplifting is up 133%. Fentanyl is the No. 1 killer of young people in LA, which has become the capital of human trafficking.
Hochman called such statistics “a record of public safety failure.” It was a strong point.
The solution, Hochman said, was to get rid of Gascon’s “blanket policies”—which one of us wrote about here—and empower prosecutors to do their jobs by holding criminals accountable.
When given a chance to respond, Gascon filibustered, saying that he had been working on crime statistics for decades while his opponent represented wealthy people.
That non-answer didn’t fly with the LA Times reporter, who followed up saying: “Mr. Gascon, the question was, ‘How does the DA actually impact day-to-day crime rates, and what would you do to lower violent crime?’ You didn’t answer the question.”
Ouch. When you lose the LA Times, you know you’re in hot water.
Gascon, clearly caught off guard, gave a strange response. He said that “the DA actually has very little impact on the micro level when it comes to violent crime.”
Gascon’s answer suggested that policies of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office don’t create incentives or disincentives for residents to violate or comply with the law, which defies common sense.
His answer is doubly troubling because of Gascon’s repeated false assertions on the campaign trail that crime has gone down on his watch, suggesting that his policies resulted in lower crime rates.
When the debate moderator asked Gascon about the official numbers, the incumbent district attorney blatantly disregarded the facts. He stated that although there was an increase in crime during the COVID-19 pandemic, “the good news is that violent crime is … down locally.”
This despite the fact that the reporters, the moderators, Hochman, and Angelinos know that simply is not true.
As if Gascon’s narrative weren’t confusing enough, he admitted that “we have a problem” with crime in Los Angeles, but then argued that “a lot of the unsafe conditions that we have today are the product of years of mass incarceration.” He didn’t explain how people in jail or prison cause crime to go up.
When the debate turned to the subject of juvenile crime, Gascon claimed that under his supervision, juveniles “don’t get a free pass” and are prosecuted as the law dictates.
But that was another lie as well.
In his first week in office, Gascon issued Special Directive 20-09, entitled “Youth Justice,” which made diversion the default for anyone under 18 who commits a crime.
The goal of Gascon’s directive, by its own language, was to keep “youth out of the criminal justice system.” The most radical aspect of the directive was that it prohibited prosecutors from transferring younger offenders to adult court, no matter how violent the crime.
All juveniles accused of a misdemeanor wouldn’t be prosecuted unless “deemed necessary,” and even in those cases, they would be sent to diversion programs.
Gascon said, without a hint of irony, “If you’re a victim of a crime, or you know someone who is a victim of a crime, … I’m here for you.”
Gascon let down scores of victims, including a 10-year-old girl and a 4-year-old girl who were sexually assaulted by 17-year-old James Tubbs in separate incidents. One of us chronicled such cases in a chapter on Gascon in the book “Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities.”
Gascon, knowing that Tubbs had referred to his 10-year-old victim as a “piece of meat,” allowed him to be tried as a juvenile even though Tubbs had numerous criminal convictions. The prosecutor handling the case also had notified Gascon that Tubbs, who was convicted, had “the hallmarks of a sexual predator.”
When the topic of the death penalty came up during the debate, Gascon noted that he had no intention of upholding and applying California law, which authorizes the ultimate punishment for the most heinous crimes.
Twice in the past 15 years, voters in California have been asked in a referendum whether they wanted to eliminate the state’s death penalty. In both instances, voters decided to keep the death penalty on the books.
But, like all rogue prosecutors whose campaigns are underwritten largely by liberal financier George Soros, Gascon thinks he has the right to ignore any criminal law he personally doesn’t like. It doesn’t matter that elected district attorneys are responsible for enforcing the laws as written.
And what was Gascon’s reason for not seeking the ultimate punishment in appropriate cases? He trotted out the old trope that “the death penalty isn’t a deterrent.”
That’s debatable at best. Some studies indicate that the death penalty has a deterrent effect on violent crime when applied in the most egregious cases. Facts have never been Gascon’s strong suit, though.
From his inability to be honest about rising crime rates to his refusal to accept the fact that his policies (some adopted by other rogue DAs), contributed to the persistent spike in crime across America, Gascon showed viewers of the debate that nothing would change in Los Angeles County should he be reelected.
The co-hosts and reporters at the debate gave Gascon every opportunity to lay out a new approach for a second term as district attorney. But Gascon failed to see the long hanging curveball and doubled down on his vapid and tiresome political banalities.
For these reasons, among many, Gascon not only lost the debate, he seems to have lost the trust of Angelinos, making his removal from office quite likely.
If voters reject Gascon, he will join a growing class of Soros-supported rogue DA rejects that includes Chesa Boudin, Marilyn Mosby, Kim Gardner, Andrew Warren, Monique Worrell, Rachel Rollins, and Kim Foxx.
In each case, the beneficiaries have been the residents who were supposed to be protected by those rogue prosecutors and whose safety suffered under a failing social experiment.
The Heritage Foundation is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not reflect any institutional position of Heritage or its Board of Trustees.
