The campaign to recall Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón will review the signatures that were rejected by county officials, a spokesperson told Breitbart News, one day after enough signatures were rejected to defeat the recall effort.
Gascón, who took office in December 2020 after being elected with the help of millions of dollars in spending by left-wing billionaire George Soros, has pursued radical “reform” policies that many voters blame for a surge of violent crime in L.A. He is one of 75 “progressive” prosecutors Soros has installed across the country.
In July, the recall campaign handed in 26% more than the required target of 566,857 signatures. But on Monday, county officials claimed that 27% of the signatures had been invalid for a variety of reasons, causing the recall effort to fail.
Gascón claimed that he had overcome a “power grab.”
In a statement Monday evening, the recall campaign stated:
While the initial results are very surprising and disappointing, the Recall Committee intends to exercise its full statutory and legal authority to review the rejected signatures and verification process that took place, and will ultimately seek to ensure no voter was disenfranchised.
…
The removal of George Gascon from office has never been a matter of if, but when. The citizens of Los Angeles cannot afford another two years of Gascon unleashing havoc on their streets – people’s lives are at stake.
Tim Lineberger, speaking to Breitbart News on behalf of the recall effort on Tuesday, said that the campaign would utilize the 21-day interval allowed by the county to review signatures, and challenge those it believed to have been excluded unfairly.
County spokesperson Mike Sanchez, however, told Breitbart News earlier Tuesday that there is no mechanism for challenging rejected signatures, even after review.
Lineberger said that it was “problematic” that the county had not allowed observers to watch the signature verification process, and said that there were questions about the standard used to reject signatures. He suggested that some voters might have been unfairly disenfranchised by the county.
He said that Gascón’s claims about a “power grab” by the recall campaign were false: “He’s living on another planet. It think it’s complete tin-foil hat stuff … Gascon himself is part of a giant power grab.
“He ruined the City of San Francso to take out a sitting district attorney [Jackie Lacey] who was the first African American female in the job.
“If anything is a power grab, it’s what Gascon and his cohort of soft-on-crime prosecutors have done. I’m shocked when I see those statements, I think it’s disgusting.”
Lineberger said it was unclear whether there would be another recall effort, or whether Gascón’s opponents would focus on defeating him if he ran for re-election in 2024.
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 recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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