Texas DA Candidate Backed by Soros-Funded PAC Defeats Democrat Incumbent

Another Democratic candidate for district attorney backed by a Georg Soros-funded political action committee won in Texas over the Democrat incumbent. The Texas Justice & Safety PAC reportedly donated almost a million dollars to Bexar County District Attorney candidate Joe Gonzales.

On Tuesday, Gonzales handily defeated Democrat incumbent DA Nicholas “Nico” LaHood by the margin of 59 percent to 41 percent. The Democratic nominee will now face Republican Tylden Shaeffer in the November general election in the San Antonio area race.

During early voting, the San Antonio Express-News reported that the Soros-backed Texas Justice & Safety political action committee donated almost one million dollars to the Democrat challenger. Most of those donations came in the form of in-kind contributions to support mailers and get-out-the-vote efforts in the last few weeks of the campaign.

During his concession speech, LaHood called the contributions “$1 million worth of lies,” San Antonio’s KTSA reported.

“It’s not a million dollars over a year, it’s over three weeks. That’s a lot of money,” the defeated Democrat DA told reporters after receiving the disappointing election results. “It was used in a very dishonest way, in my opinion. I think the facts speak for themselves and that’s too much to overcome obviously.”

Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott tweeted the article saying, “George Soros is officially messing with Texas. He’s given almost $1 million to just one candidate. He’ll stop at nothing to make Texas liberal. We must muster the resolve & resources to fight this take over attempt. #tcot #txlege @TexasGOP #PJNET.”

The attacks on Texas candidates by Soros-funded groups are nothing new. In 2014, Breitbart Texas Editor-in-Chief Brandon Darby wrote that Texans for Public Justice targeted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton six days before his 2014 March primary.

A Soros-funded group backed Democrat Harris County district attorney candidate Kim Ogg who handily defeated incumbent Republican Devon Anderson in November 2016. As reported by Breitbart Texas, Anderson got herself in trouble with the Republican pro-life base after a Planned Parenthood lawyer publicly boasted that prosecutors maintained a “dialogue” with him “throughout” grand jury proceedings. Houston’s Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast Clinic was being scrutinized after an undercover video purportedly showed their research director “discussing the sale of whole intact aborted babies to a company that resells them to medical researchers.” The videographer, the head of the Center for Medical Progress, David Daleiden, was instead indicted. Judges later dropped the misdemeanor and felony charges against the pro-life advocate.

Candidates backed by Soros-funded organizations have prevailed in many races, including those against less embattled incumbents. The Washington Times reported on November 16, 2016, that “Mr. Soros, a leading Black Lives Matter funder, sunk more than $7 million into at least 11 local prosecutorial races in 10 states in an effort to implement criminal justice reform from the inside.” He prevailed in nine of those races. Two Republicans dropped out before the general election.

These Soros-financed political targets also included: Bernalillo County, New Mexico; St. Louis; Maricopa County, Arizona; Cook County, Illinois; Jefferson County, Colorado; Orange/Osceola counties, Florida; Hinds County, Mississippi; Lowndes County, Mississippi, and Caddo Parish, Louisiana.

A DA Republican candidate in Georgia jumped out of the race in September when Soros donated almost $150,000 to Georgia Safety & Justice to help Henry County Democrat DA candidate Darius Pattillo, according to the Washington Times.

Republican Matthew McCord told The Washington Times that he withdrew for himself and his Party. “They rented space, they had a staff, they were using a Washington, D.C.-based PR firm. So what I knew was they could say whatever they wanted to say about me. It didn’t matter if it was true, and I would have no way to respond.” “I’ve always been fairly centrist. I have a foundation that I started that has paid to send minority kids to school. And they were already trying to paint me as a white racist,” he added. “It’s deplorable.”

In 2017, two Soros-backed candidates won in Philadelphia and Portsmouth, Virginia. The Hungarian-American poured $1.45 million to help Democrat Larry Krasner and more than $100,000 to help Stephanie Morales, respectively.

Breitbart News reported in October that a legal group “massively funded” by Soros has “sought to fundamentally transform the role of U.S. Attorneys from one of prosecuting criminals to activists that enact a so-called progressive criminal justice agenda.” The project encouraged federal prosecutors “to reduce or avoid sentences for drug offenders, make decisions about seeking jail time on individual cases based upon federal incarceration levels and use their pulpits to ‘spread change’ and work with outside ‘community organizations’ to root out the ‘causes of violence.’”

The San Antonio district attorney’s race is different. In this case, the Soros-funded PAC targeted a Democrat district attorney.

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX, Gab, and Facebook.