# Larry Krasner **Larry Krasner** has been District Attorney of Philadelphia since January 2018 and is the longest-serving and most politically durable of the [[Progressive Prosecutor]] wave. A career civil-rights and criminal-defense lawyer who had sued the Philadelphia police department dozens of times before running for the office that defends it, he won in 2017 on ending cash-bail requests, declining to charge low-level offenses, and building a conviction-integrity unit to revisit old cases. He has since survived a state impeachment, a well-funded primary challenge, and a general election against the same challenger running under the other party's banner — and in 2026 he organized the first national attempt to use locally elected prosecutors as a check on federal law enforcement. He belongs in this vault as a **counterweight** figure, but an unusually complicated one: the same office that made him a target of a state legislature and a national conspiracy narrative has also been found by his own state's supreme court to have misled courts, and a federal judge has referred him to the Justice Department. Both halves are true and the page keeps both. ## The impeachment (2022–2024) In June 2022 Pennsylvania House Republicans formed a select committee on Krasner's handling of gun violence. He refused its subpoena as "wholly illegitimate," was held in contempt in September, and on **November 16, 2022** the House voted **107–85** to impeach him — the first impeachment by the Pennsylvania House since 1994, of a prosecutor twice elected by the voters of Philadelphia. It collapsed on the law: a Commonwealth Court judge ruled on December 30, 2022 that the conduct alleged did not meet the constitutional standard of "misbehavior in office," the state Senate postponed the trial indefinitely in January 2023, and the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held in September 2024 that the articles had expired with the legislative session. The episode is the reason he is filed alongside the [[Chesa Boudin Recall]] rather than merely in the criminal-justice material. Both are attempts to reverse a local election from outside the electorate — one through a recall funded by donors who did not live under the policy, one through a legislature of the opposite party seated elsewhere in the state. See [[Krasner Impeachment]]. ## Re-election (2025) The attacks did not work at the ballot box. In the **May 20, 2025** Democratic primary Krasner defeated former judge Patrick Dugan **64–35** while being outspent by roughly $400,000 and without the endorsement of his own city party. Dugan then switched to the Republican ticket for the general, and on **November 5, 2025** Krasner won a third term with about **76 percent** of the vote. The result is the empirical counterweight to the Boudin story. The national narrative holds that voters turned decisively against reform prosecutors after 2022; Philadelphia, a big city with real violent-crime problems, re-elected the movement's most prominent figure by three to one in the same cycle. Neither result generalizes on its own, which is the point — the "voters rejected this" claim and the "voters embraced this" claim are both retail, not wholesale. ## The Musk sweepstakes suit (2024) In October 2024 Krasner sued [[Elon Musk]] and [[America PAC]] to stop their $1 million-a-day swing-state voter sweepstakes, calling it an illegal lottery run on Pennsylvania voters. At the November 4 hearing, America PAC's lawyers told the court the $1 million winners were chosen in advance as paid "spokespeople," not at random. Judge Angelo Foglietta allowed the giveaway to continue through Election Day, finding no element of chance, and Krasner withdrew the suit on November 26, 2024. The PAC's admission became the basis of the federal fraud suit [[McAferty v. Musk]]. See [[America PAC $1 Million Petition Sweepstakes]] and [[Elon Musk - 2024-10-19 - one million dollar giveaway]]. ## FAFO and the federal confrontation (2026) On **January 28, 2026**, after two fatal shootings by federal agents during immigration operations in Minneapolis, Krasner convened eight other elected prosecutors to launch the **[[Fight Against Federal Overreach]]** coalition — an infrastructure for bringing state criminal charges against federal officers who break state law. He framed it in terms well beyond ordinary prosecution, calling locally elected prosecutors "one of the most effective tools to try to preserve democracy in the United States" and rejecting the claim that federal agents carry absolute immunity from state law as "completely false." The argument's constitutional weight is genuine and its outcome unsettled; the [[Supremacy Clause]] question of what falls "within the scope" of federal duty has not been resolved on facts like these. What made the coalition consequential within months was that it identified the one category of official the federal executive cannot remove: a county prosecutor is not appointed, funded, or fireable by Washington. The first test ran through [[Mary Moriarty]]'s prosecution of the ICE officer [[Christian Castro]] and the extradition standoff with Governor [[Greg Abbott]] that followed. ## The candor findings and the DOJ referral (2026) This is the part that complicates the counterweight framing, and it should not be flattened into persecution. In **June 2026** the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania rebuked Krasner's office, finding that its prosecutors had "repeatedly lacked candor to the court" and misrepresented facts while seeking to vacate murder convictions, and ordering that the Pennsylvania Attorney General review future conviction annulments — a supervisory remedy imposed on a district attorney by his own state's highest court, not by a political opponent. On **September 16, 2026**, U.S. District Judge **[[Paul Diamond]]**, a George W. Bush appointee, referred Krasner and a senior assistant to the Justice Department for potential obstruction of justice, perjury and false statements, writing that Philadelphia's highest law-enforcement official "may have violated the law." The referral arose from Diamond's review of Dennis Johnson's 2009 second-degree murder conviction and the handling of a withdrawn concession motion in that case. **Framing note for anyone building on this page.** It would be easy, and wrong, to file the referral as a Trump administration attack on a resistance figure. It is not one. It came from a federal judge in a conviction-review matter, it follows a same-year finding by a Republican-appointed-and-Democratic-elected mix of state justices on the same underlying problem, and its subject is how Krasner's office has handled old convictions — the signature reform program, not the federal confrontation. The honest reading is that the conviction-integrity project that defines progressive prosecution is also where this office's documented failures are, and that a referral landing on the desk of a Justice Department Krasner has spent a year organizing prosecutors against creates a conflict-of-interest problem regardless of the referral's merits. A referral is not a charge, and as of this page's date no charges have been filed. ## See Also - [[America PAC $1 Million Petition Sweepstakes]] · [[America PAC Timeline]] - [[Progressive Prosecutor]] — the movement and its backlash - [[Fight Against Federal Overreach]] — the coalition he founded - [[Krasner Impeachment]] — the 2022 removal attempt - [[Chesa Boudin]] · [[Chesa Boudin Recall]] · [[George Gascón]] · [[Mary Moriarty]] · [[Sean Teare]] - [[George Soros Conspiracy Timeline]] — the funding narrative aimed at prosecutors like him - [[Anti-Trump Resistance Timeline]] · [[Resistance Hub]]