(New York) A website that functions as the public web portal for Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate for December’s Senate special election in Alabama, advocates for supporters to “get involved” in “matters of justice and equality” through four organizations that are far-left activist groups financed by billionaire George Soros.
Jones himself is closely associated with at least three of those Soros-financed groups, Breitbart News has found.
The website SeekingJusticeToday.com gets its namesake from the following statement by Jones, brandished on the main page of the site: “It is never too late to just do the right thing, to seek the truth, to seek justice.”
The entire website is about Jones. The “about” section is a page with Jones’s bio. The “media” section links to Jones’s media appearances. The “gallery” section is a collection of photos of Jones with various newsmakers. The “blog” section contains Jones’s personal blog. The site links to Jones’s social media accounts.
The “resources” page of the Jones website urges supporters to “get involved in matters of justice and equality” by taking a “look at the following list of recommended organizations.”
The webpage then recommends six groups, four of which are far-left activist organizations funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
Efforts to trace the actual owner of the website were unsuccessful since the registration information is private, although the page clearly functioned as the main Internet portal for Jones until he opened a website for his 2017 senatorial race.
Jones’s campaign did not return a Breitbart News request seeking comment on the politician’s exact relationship with the SeekingJusticeToday.com website.
A test subscription resulted in an email from “G. Douglas Jones” welcoming the new subscriber and providing a link to confirm the user’s email address.
The four Soros-financed groups recommended on the Jones website are:
1. The Constitution Project, which describes itself as seeking to “foster consensus-based solutions to the most difficult constitutional challenges of our time.” Its list of “generous supporters” includes Soros’s Open Society Foundations as well as the Open Society Policy Center.
The Project filed a “friend of the court” legal brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni national who admitted to serving as the driver for Osama bin Laden and was declared an illegal enemy combatant by the U.S. government. The Project argued against the process of a military tribunal for Hamdan, who was jailed at Guantanamo Bay from 2002 to November 2008.
2. The Equal Justice Initiative, which says it is “committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.”
Besides direct funding from Soros’s foundation, Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, serves on the board of the U.S. Programs division of the Open Society Foundations.
The Initiative argues that lynchings carried out in America between 1877 and 1950 helped create the climate today in which, the organization charges, the U.S. criminal justice system is biased against African Americans.
“Lynching reinforced a narrative of racial difference and a legacy of racial inequality that is readily apparent in our criminal justice system today,” the group claims. “Mass incarceration, racially biased capital punishment, excessive sentencing, disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities and police abuse of people of color reveal problems in American society that were shaped by the terror era.”
3. The Marshal Project, which says that it “seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system.”
Soros’s Open Society Foundations is listed as a founding donor.
4. The Brennan Center for Justice, which is a far-left policy institute that says it “focuses on the fundamental issues of democracy and justice.”
Brennan has been the recipient of numerous grants from Soros’s Open Society Foundations totaling over $7,466,000 from 2000 to 2010 alone.
Besides those four Soros-financed groups, the Jones website also directed supporters to two other organizations, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the National Association of Former United States Attorneys.
Jones ties to ‘recommended’ Soros groups
Jones has a long history of association with the Soros-financed Brennan Center and is tied to the Marshall Project and the Equal Justice Initiative.
As Breitbart News first reported, Jones took a leading role in an effort by the Brennan Center to grant full voting rights nationwide to felons released from prison, including those convicted of murder, rape and other violent crimes.
In December 2011, Jones was one of 15 signatories to a letter sent to Congress from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School calling for the restoration of “federal voting rights to the nearly four million Americans living, working and paying taxes in our communities who have been disenfranchised because of a criminal conviction in their past.”
Besides his direct role advocating for the votes-for-criminals scheme, Jones is also listed by the Soros-funded organization as a “supporter” of the voting drive for felons alongside a group of radical Soros-financed organizations. Jones is himself tied to some of those other Soros-funded groups.
Additionally, as Breitbart News reported, Jones spearheaded a Brennan project that 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. Jones’s project resulted in the release a 69-page Brennan document titled, “Federal Prosecution for the 21st Century.”
Among other things, Jones’s project called on 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.”
One section of the report seeks to put U.S. Attorneys in the role of social justice warriors who go to schools to preach against “bullying,” coach Little League teams and mentor at risk youths. All this while working to “develop solutions to problems that do not involve prosecutions, such as mediating disputes and participating in school intervention programs.”
Jones also participated in a Brennan conference titled, “Shifting law enforcement goals to reduce mass incarceration.”
On his 2017 senatorial campaign website, Jones pushes a living wage plan for the state and country that, as Breitbart News reported last week, has a history of hurting small businesses, negatively impacting local economies and decreasing employment opportunities for low income workers. The brief economic policy listing on Jones’ campaign website calls for the enactment of a “living wage,” which would hike the minimum wage above the federal minimum.
The Brennan Center played a leading role in helping to craft living wage ordinances and ballot measures for numerous cities and states.
The living wage was originally a project of the controversial former group known as ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which played a central role in enacting the scheme in several cities.
Regarding the Soros-funded Equal Justice Initiative recommended on the Jones website, Jones worked alongside the group in a case to overturn the death sentence of an inmate in Alabama. Jones in 2015 represented former convict Ray Hinton in a successful bid that saw him freed after nearly 30 years on death row when new ballistics tests raised questions about the evidence used to convict him. Also defending Hinton was the Equal Justice Initiative.
Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative (who is listed above as a board member of Soros’s domestic foundation) commented after working on Hinton’s case: “Don’t be confused: Had we not gotten the United States Supreme Court to turn this case around … he would have been executed.”
Jones, meanwhile, was featured in a lengthy interview with the Soros-financed Marshall Project in June 2015. “What I’ve seen in the last decade is a combination of political rollback of civil rights in legislation and in court cases, coupled with a rise of social media hate groups,” Jones told the Marshall interviewer.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
Written with additional research by Joshua Klein.