LOS ANGELES, California — Nathan Hochman took office Tuesday as the new District Attorney of Los Angeles County, replacing George Soros-backed left-wing radical George Gascón.
He was sworn in by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Hollywood action movie star and anti-Trump Republican who is also the last member of the GOP to have been elected to major statewide office, leaving under a cloud of personal scandal and fiscal mismanagement in 2010.
Hochman, a Republican-turned-independent who endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race and backed the prosecution of President-elect Donald Trump, took the oath of office at the Los Angeles Hall of Justice.
He delivered a speech in which he thanked his family and his campaign staff. Unlike Gascón, who used his inaugural speech to launch radical “criminal justice reforms,” Hochman promised to support line prosecutors and police.
He said that he opposed “extreme policies” on “both ends of the political pendulum,” including defunding police on the left, and “mass incarceration” on the right. He said that he would focus on deterrence, rather than incarceration.
He announced the reversal of previous “blanket extreme policies” that prevented prosecutors from seeking sentence enhancements or accompanying victims of crime to parole board hearings, vowing a focus on the facts and the law.
Hochman also said that he would form task forces to deal with specific areas of crime, such as home break-ins, and that he would form partnerships with community groups to enhance public safety and trust in law enforcement.
Hochman’s victory was one of several in California and nationwide in which Soros-backed prosecutors were defeated or replaced by “tough on crime” prosecutors. There were 21 such replacements since 2022, according to one report.
Soros was said to have backed 75 prosecutors, many of them defeating incumbent Democrats, over the past decade in an effort to back the Black Lives Matter movement and change criminal justice, leading to a nationwide crime wave.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.