Without mentioning former President Donald Trump by name, Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted George "Soros-backed" prosecutors forcing the law to be "weaponized for political purposes."
"These Soros-backed DAs, they are a menace to society; they are a menace to the rule of law," DeSantis told the annual Pennsylvania Leadership Conference (PLC) on Saturday in a speech that aired live and in its entirety on Newsmax.
DeSantis has teased he would not support extradition of Trump to New York City for surrender for a politically pushed indictment, pinning his criticism on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose campaign was funded in part by a group funded by Soros money.
Soros has attempted to distance himself from funding Bragg's campaign, but he has been forceful in backing prosecutors who are soft on crime in the name of progressive criminal-justice reform.
"And now you have this Manhattan district attorney whose whole platform when he got elected was that he was going to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanors," DeSantis told the Pennsylvania conservative conference. "He was going to keep as many people out of jail, even habitual criminals, as possible. And he was going to go light on all these things as part of quote, 'criminal justice reform.'
"So that's his posture. He doesn't want to charge people with felonies."
But the Democrat Bragg is eager to expand a misdemeanor to a felony in an attempt to indict the Democrats' political rival, Trump, DeSantis said.
"So now he turns around for purely for political purposes and indicts a former president on misdemeanor offenses that they're straining to try to convert into felonies," DeSantis said. "That is when you know that the law has been weaponized for political purposes.
"That is when you know that the left is using that to target their political opponents."
Soros-backed DAs' soft-on-crime reform agenda has made Democrat-run cities imperiled by crime, DeSantis said.
"There may be no issue that's caused crime to spiral more out of control in certain cities such as Philadelphia than the election of progressive prosecutors funded by people like George Soros," DeSantis said. "These prosecutors go in with an ideological agenda. They think it's their role as a prosecutor to manipulate, the law to ignore the law, to pick and choose which laws they will enforce — all in service of politics and pursuing ideology.
"So we've seen it in places like Philadelphia, where they don't prosecute people the way they should."
Pennsylvania is a key battleground state in politics, especially on the national level and once again for the 2024 presidential campaign.
DeSantis has not officially declared his intention to run for the GOP presidential primary, perhaps in part because current Florida law would force him to resign as governor if he were to official declare for higher office.
Still, DeSantis is promoting Florida as the blueprint for America with a recently released book, and he has been campaigning in key primary places like Iowa and Pennsylvania.
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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