# Progressive Prosecutor A **progressive prosecutor** is an elected district attorney who treats [[Prosecutorial Discretion]] as a tool for shrinking the criminal legal system rather than feeding it — declining to charge low-level offenses, ending cash-bail requests, opening conviction-integrity units to revisit old convictions, and charging police officers. The wave began around 2014 and crested in the 2018–2020 elections, when reform candidates won in Philadelphia ([[Larry Krasner]]), San Francisco ([[Chesa Boudin]]), Los Angeles ([[George Gascón]]), Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and a dozen smaller jurisdictions. The strategic insight behind the movement is structural, and it is the reason this page sits in a knowledge base about power. American criminal law is enforced almost entirely at the discretion of roughly 2,300 locally elected prosecutors, most of whom run unopposed in low-turnout races that almost nobody watches. Prosecutors decide what to charge, and the charge — not the trial, which almost never happens — determines the outcome in a system where the overwhelming majority of cases end in plea bargains. [[Mass Incarceration]] was built one charging decision at a time by officials nobody could name. The reform movement's bet was that the same lever, pulled the other way by the same officials, could unbuild it faster than any legislature. ## The counterattack The backlash arrived faster than the movement did, and it came through three distinct channels that are often conflated. **Electoral and recall.** The [[Chesa Boudin Recall]] in June 2022 removed San Francisco's DA 55–45 on a campaign about street conditions, drug deaths and retail theft. Gascón lost re-election in Los Angeles in 2024. These were real defeats in real elections, and the movement's own supporters concede that reform DAs frequently failed to build the coalitions needed to defend their policies when crime rose. **State preemption.** Where voters would not remove a reform prosecutor, state officials tried to. Florida's governor suspended elected state attorneys in Tampa and Orlando in 2022 and 2023; Georgia created a commission empowered to discipline and remove DAs; Texas and Missouri passed removal mechanisms; Pennsylvania's House impeached Krasner in 2022 (see [[Krasner Impeachment]]). The common structure is the nullification of a local election by a state government of the opposite party, which places this material alongside the vault's other preemption fights rather than in a purely criminal-justice frame. **The Soros narrative.** The most durable attack has been the claim that these prosecutors are not locally elected officials at all but purchases — "Soros-funded DAs" installed to engineer disorder. [[George Soros]] and the [[Open Society Foundations]] did fund prosecutor races, substantially and openly, and that is a legitimate subject for the vault's money-tracking. What converts it into a conspiracy theory is the leap from *donated to campaigns* to *controls the officials*, and the consistent omission of the other side of the ledger: [[William Oberndorf]] and allied donors funded the Boudin recall and the opposing campaigns at comparable scale. Both networks are spending on the same low-salience races for the same reason — they are cheap and they decide who goes to prison. Only one network's spending is described as sinister. The arc is tracked in the [[George Soros Conspiracy Timeline]]. ## The 2026 turn: prosecutors as a federal check The movement's second act is not about local charging policy at all. In January 2026, nine reform prosecutors launched the [[Fight Against Federal Overreach]] coalition to bring **state** criminal charges against **federal** agents who break state law during immigration enforcement — a use of the prosecutor's office that nobody in the 2018 wave campaigned on. [[Mary Moriarty]] charged the ICE officer [[Christian Castro]] in Hennepin County; [[Sean Teare]] took a Houston ICE killing toward a grand jury in Harris County. This is a genuine constitutional frontier rather than a rhetorical one. Federal officers acting within the scope of their duties have long been understood to enjoy substantial protection from state prosecution under the [[Supremacy Clause]], and the doctrine's boundary — what counts as "within the scope" when an agent shoots the wrong man — has rarely been tested by a state prosecutor with the resources to litigate it to conclusion. Whether the FAFO theory survives contact with the federal courts is unresolved. What is already clear is that the locally elected prosecutor, an office the right spent a decade trying to neutralize, has become one of the few remaining points of institutional resistance that the federal executive cannot fire, defund, or reorganize away. ## See Also - [[Larry Krasner]] · [[Chesa Boudin]] · [[Mary Moriarty]] · [[George Gascón]] · [[Sean Teare]] · [[Steve Descano]] - [[Fight Against Federal Overreach]] — the 2026 prosecutor coalition - [[Krasner Impeachment]] · [[Chesa Boudin Recall]] — the two removal attempts - [[George Soros Conspiracy Timeline]] — the funding narrative - [[Prosecutorial Discretion]] · [[Mass Incarceration]] · [[Supremacy Clause]]