The former Chief Public Defender of Allegheny County, PA lost his bid to be elected District Attorney last week when he was defeated by longtime incumbent Stephen Zappala Jr. Steve Bohnel of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that Zappala’s opponent, Matt Dugan beat him by 10% in the primary last May after progressive billionaire George Soros contributed $700,000 to his campaign. While both candidates are democrats, republicans nominated Zappala as a write-in candidate, allowing him to face Dugan again in the November 7 election. Soros-funded groups contributed another $1.3 million to Dugan in an attempt to buy the election, but voters from both parties did not want Pittsburgh to go the way of Philadelphia, where Soros-bankrolled Larry Krasner as the District Attorney. Since Krasner assumed office, both violent crime and property crime have increased dramatically, while arrests and prosecutions have sharply declined.
Like Krasner, and other Soros funded DAs including New York’s Alvin Bragg and LA’s George Gascon, Dugan campaigned on reforming the District Attorney’s office to eliminate racial disparities by eliminating cash bail, declining to prosecute so-called low-level offenders (car thieves and drug dealers) and reducing the jail population, according to his campaign website. Another Soros-funded reformer Buta Biberaj, lost her reelection bid as Commonwealth Attorney last Tuesday as Loudoun County, Virginia voters elected tough-on-crime prosecutor Bob Anderson.
