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Exclusive: Inside the “largest ever effort” to defeat George Soros-backed prosecutors

Protecting Americans Action Fund (PAAF), the GOP’s largest group dedicated to combatting George Soros-backed prosecutors, has spent more money against liberal district attorneys this year than ever before, it confirmed exclusively to the Washington Reporter. 

PAAF, an organization led by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, has spent $2.5 million this cycle to date, in key races across the country, from Hillsborough County, Florida, to Hamilton County, Ohio, to El Paso County, Texas, Maricopa County, Arizona, and beyond. PAAF spent its millions on targeted television, radio, mail, and digital campaigns across 13 jurisdictions. 

The group’s largest investment this cycle was in Hamilton County, where it spent $400,000 on a television ad buy supporting the incumbent, Hamilton County Prosecuting Attorney Melissa Powers; Hamilton County is the largest county in Ohio with a conservative prosecutor in office. PAAF’s ad campaign there highlights how Powers’s opponent, Connie Pillich, has “never prosecuted a single criminal. Not one.”

Its second largest Hillsborough County, where it is spending $300,000 on an ad campaign against former State Attorney Andrew Warren, who was removed from office by Gov. Ron DeSantis. “Andrew Warren: a second chance for him would be dangerous for us,” the narrator says.

“While George Soros works to elect radical progressive prosecutors, we are proud to spend nearly $2.5 million electing commonsense prosecutors who know their job is to enforce the law,” PAAF’s Executive Director Ada Furciniti told the Reporter. “In the last two years, Protecting Americans Action Fund has defeated numerous candidates from George Soros’s network, and we look forward to more victories for conservative prosecutors in November.”

Elsewhere, PAAF is spending $150,000 on ads to support Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell in Arizona; Mitchell was a top priority for the group last cycle as well. It is also spending $150,000 in support of El Paso District Attorney Bill Hicks. In one of its Ohio races, it is spending $100,000 against “disgraced Lorain County prosector J.D. Tomlinson.” 

For multiple cycles, Miyares’s group has prioritized local prosecutors races; Soros’s network has supported many far-left prosecutors who critics like Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) say are “refus[ing] to enforce the law as it’s written. And they’ve abolished bail in some places, including New York, where we just saw an assault on a sitting congressman with a deadly weapon, and the criminal was released hours later,” Cotton said, referred to the 2022 assault on then-Rep. Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.). “If the Democrats release a criminal who attacks a sitting congressman, they’ll do it to you and to your family as well.”

“The only good Soros prosecutor is a defeated Soros prosecutor,” Cotton told the Reporter. “Pro-crime left-wing radicals have no business holding any public office anywhere in our nation.”

Others, like the Manhattan Institute’s Senior Fellow Rafael Mangual, added to the Reporter that “so-called progressive prosecutors have, through victories in what are often low-turnout races, been able to unilaterally redirect criminal justice policy leftward in cities across the country, harming public safety in the process.”

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