The Daily Caller – by Peter Hasson
George Soros helped tip another district attorney’s race with more than $100,000 in support of his preferred candidate — and he did it without anybody finding out until after the campaign.
A Soros-funded national political action committee (PAC), Justice & Public Safety, spent more than $100,000 on behalf of Portsmouth, Virginia Commonwealth Attorney Stephanie Morales between Sept. 9 and Nov. 4, the PAC’s FEC filings reveal. Soros’s support for Morales’s campaign has not been previously reported.
Soros has repeatedly backed left-wing district attorney candidates with massive donations typically only seen in gubernatorial, congressional or presidential campaigns. Soros spent more than $9 million on local DA races in 2015-2017 alone, allowing the New York resident to influence local criminal justice policies all across the country.
Justice & Public Safety PAC’s spending on behalf of Morales (known as “in-kind” contributions) included more than $82,000 on polling, media advertisements and direct mail leaflets in the crucial last two weeks of the campaign. The PAC did not return The Daily Caller’s request for comment.
Soros’s financial backing of Morales gave her an enormous fundraising edge over her challenger, Portsmouth attorney T.J. Wright. The $106,000 Soros spent on Morales’s behalf single-handedly more than doubled all contributions to Wright’s campaign, according to Wright’s campaign filings.
Morales first won the seat in a special election in 2015, taking 48 percent of the vote. Her Soros-funded campaign did far better than her first campaign and won 63 percent of the vote — despite Morales losing three of her most influential backers in July.
Soros’s efforts to tilt local contests have often become campaign issues — when they’ve become public. But Soros’s support for Morales never became public during the campaign, possibly because Morales filed her campaign finance reports on paper, rather than online, making it more difficult for reporters to scrutinize the filings.
Reports that are filed online are uploaded into a statewide data base of campaign finance reports, making them easily discoverable. Manually filed reports, on the other hand, require either personally visiting the city registrar or requesting them via mail.’