A coalition of progressive prosecutors promising to target federal immigration agents has amassed a war chest funded by secret donors with the help of left-wing networks. Legal experts said the arrangement is "terribly corrupt" and blurs the lines between legitimate law enforcement and politically motivated prosecutions.
The Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach—or FAFO, an acronym that also stands for "fuck around and find out" in internet lingo—was formed by two George Soros-funded prosecutors, Philadelphia's Larry Krasner and Mary Moriarty of Hennepin County, Minn., after federal officials shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti as they interfered with immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis. Several elected district attorneys have said Krasner, who pledged to target ICE agents "the way they hunted down Nazis for decades," personally recruited them.
The group has said it aims to "hold federal officials accountable when they exceed their lawful authority" and regularly meets to strategize. But rather than using taxpayer dollars to carry out its mission, FAFO members say operations are fully funded by outside donors.
One member, Norfolk, Va., commonwealth's attorney Ramin Fatehi, said during a Feb. 19 interview that the group has "money in a lock box that has been pledged for us … so that we can bring in the top lawyers in the country," which will be available to "anybody who has a federal official that they're prosecuting."
But the donors behind that funding are kept secret, and the dark money groups handling the cash flow are openly left-wing, leading legal experts to sound the alarm. Rachel Paulose, managing attorney at the Upper Midwest Law Center, said it raises "stunning concerns about impartiality."
"The notion that an arm of the government would accept outside money to prosecute or target a political opponent or an ideological foe seems vindictive and contrary to basic notions of fairness," Paulose, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota, said. "I think it could raise constitutional issues of equal protection and due process under the federal constitution, and certainly under state constitutions, depending on which jurisdiction you're litigating in."
It also suggests that the outside funders have "an interest in impacting the evidence and the manner in which the evidence is presented," she added. "There's a reason that taxpayers fund government offices."
John Hinderaker, president of the Minnesota-based think tank Center of the American Experiment, called it "a terribly corrupt arrangement."
"That is not a situation that you want, where law enforcement is available to the highest bidder in any direction," he said. "It's something that should be exposed and should be fought."
Neither FAFO nor its founders responded to requests for comment.
Soros-funded prosecutors have long made efforts to disrupt the Trump administration, particularly on immigration. Moriarty, for instance, told the Sahan Journal her office does not "work with ICE or cooperate with them." Fairfax County prosecutor Steve Descano, another founding FAFO member, is under investigation by the Department of Justice for allegedly giving illegal immigrants "preferential treatment" through a policy requiring his staff to consider immigration consequences when making charging decisions and plea deals.
FAFO has already begun to make good on its promises. In April, Moriarty charged an ICE agent with second-degree assault for allegedly pointing his gun at two motorists. The next month, she charged a second, accusing him of fabricating an attack against him that he used to justify shooting through the front door of a Minneapolis home, striking an alleged assailant in the leg. Moriarty also sued the Trump administration in March over access to evidence in two additional cases involving the killings of Good and Pretti as part of an ongoing investigation.
Moriarty's legal standing in those cases is in question since federal agents have a degree of immunity from state prosecution for conduct within the scope of their official duties. She hasn't disclosed whether she's using FAFO funding to help bankroll her efforts—but it isn't clear that she'd have to at this point, if at all. The law doesn't explicitly require prosecutors to reveal that information, but it could be considered exculpatory evidence that must be provided to defendants, according to Paulose.
While the sources behind the funding are unknown, the figures managing it are overtly left-wing. The anti-Trump group Defiance.org said it "incubated" FAFO when it launched in January, and a Defiance spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon that it provided seed funding and a website. The group was cofounded by Miles Taylor, a former official with the Trump Department of Homeland Security who declared himself "part of the Resistance" inside the administration in the infamous "Anonymous" op-ed he penned in the New York Times.
"We'd say it's pretty much a directly aligned interest for the Americans who contribute to us to want the prosecutors — in the communities where they live — to be educated on how to take on complex cases, especially when the federal government swoops in and violates their constitutional rights," the Defiance spokesman told the Free Beacon.
When FAFO spun off as its own nonprofit in March, it filed a business registration in Virginia listing its principal office at a Washington, D.C., address belonging to the law firm Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock, whose partners include former top attorneys for the Democratic National Committee.
The filing also lists three directors, all of whom have liberal backgrounds. Delvone Michael, a former organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders's (I., Vt.) presidential campaign, has served as the director of criminal justice initiatives for the Working Families Party since July 2016 and has called to "divest from policing."
James W. Conrad, as a volunteer for the left-wing Lawyers Defending American Democracy, has written legal complaints against former attorney general Pam Bondi, accusing her of a "longstanding pattern of misconduct" by permitting and incentivizing "violations of court orders in dozens of cases."
Ellen Yaroshefsky, a Hofstra University professor of legal ethics who serves on the New York State Committee on Standards of Attorney Conduct, is a member of Lawyers and Democratic Decline. The international "research project" is based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and studies "the role of lawyers in countries experiencing democratic decline or already in the throes of authoritarianism." It most frequently targets the Trump administration across its webpages.
None of the directors responded to requests for comment.
