She dropped
the gun charges.
He cut off
his ankle monitor.
He shot two more.

Two million dollars from Soros. Cook County paid in blood.

Kim Foxx was first elected Cook County State’s Attorney in 2016, defeating incumbent Anita Alvarez. Her 2020 re-election campaign received more than $2 million from the Illinois Justice and Public Safety PAC — a political action committee funded by George Soros. Soros’s investment in county prosecutor races is a documented national strategy: fund progressive DA and State’s Attorney candidates in major metropolitan jurisdictions, reshape charging policy from within, and reduce the prison population. In Cook County, the strategy succeeded.

Foxx ran on reducing prosecutorial overreach, ending cash bail, and narrowing the scope of felony prosecution. She delivered. CWB Chicago — a Chicago-area investigative outlet that pulls Cook County court data and tracks individual cases — documented that her office dismissed more than 25,000 felony cases since she took office in 2017. The dismissed cases included murders. They included serious violent felonies. They included defendants with documented criminal histories who went on to commit additional crimes.

16 felony counts. No plea. No sentence. No explanation.

In January 2019, actor Jussie Smollett reported to Chicago police that he had been attacked by two men who shouted racist and homophobic slurs, tied a rope around his neck, and poured bleach on him. Chicago Police Department investigators subsequently determined that Smollett had orchestrated the attack himself, paying two Nigerian brothers — Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo — to stage it. Smollett was charged with 16 counts of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report.

In March 2019, Kim Foxx’s office dropped all 16 charges. There was no plea agreement. There was no conviction. Smollett forfeited $10,000 in bond and performed community service — but he was not required to admit to any wrongdoing, and the charges were dropped with what the special prosecutor later called no clear legal basis. Text messages subsequently released showed that before formally recusing herself, Foxx had communicated with Tina Tchen — a friend of Smollett’s family and former chief of staff to Michelle Obama — who had asked Foxx to refer the case to the FBI.

“The manner in which this case was handled was not appropriate. It was an abuse of discretion.”

Cook County special prosecutor Dan Webb · report on Foxx's handling of Smollett case · August 2020

A Cook County judge appointed Dan Webb as special prosecutor to investigate the dismissal. Webb’s August 2020 report found that Foxx’s office had misled the public “time and again” and that the handling of the case represented a “major failure of operations.” Webb could not criminally charge Foxx himself, but the report was damning. Smollett was subsequently charged again by the special prosecutor, convicted of five felony counts of disorderly conduct in December 2021, and sentenced to 150 days in jail — a sentence he partially served before being released pending appeal. The Illinois Supreme Court ultimately threw out the conviction on double-jeopardy grounds in November 2024.

Charged with murder. Released. Cut the monitor. Shot again.

Demarcus Johnson’s case is documented in detail by CWB Chicago, which tracks Cook County court records and has covered his criminal history across multiple filings. Before his 2021 murder charge, Johnson had accumulated prior gun-related charges that Foxx’s office repeatedly declined to prosecute. The pattern of declining prior gun charges — which CWB Chicago documented across multiple defendants — is a direct consequence of Foxx’s charging policies, which directed prosecutors away from certain categories of firearm offenses.

In 2021, Johnson was charged with murder. Cook County courts set electronic monitoring as the condition of his pretrial release — a practice that became increasingly common under the Illinois bail reform framework. Electronic monitoring requires a defendant to wear a GPS ankle bracelet and remain within court-approved boundaries. Johnson cut off the ankle monitor. According to CWB Chicago’s reporting, weeks passed before any bond revocation action was initiated. He remained at large.

In 2022, Demarcus Johnson shot two more people. He was a man who had been charged with murder, whose prior gun charges had been declined, who cut off his monitoring device, and who was not brought back into custody in time to prevent the next shooting. The system, as implemented by Foxx’s office and the broader Cook County court framework, had failed — specifically, preventably, and with consequences that can be named.

2016 to 2023. Seven years of choices.

One county. Every office. One party.

Cook County. San Francisco. Alameda. The money. The dismissals. The bodies.

George Soros and affiliated political action committees have invested in progressive prosecutor campaigns in dozens of American jurisdictions since 2015 — including Cook County (Kim Foxx), San Francisco (Chesa Boudin), Alameda County (Pamela Price), Los Angeles (George Gascón), Philadelphia (Larry Krasner), and others. The pattern is consistent: large outside investment, election of a candidate committed to declining prosecutions, documented downstream harm, community backlash.

The theory behind the investment is coherent: if mass incarceration is the problem, prosecuting less will reduce it. The question the theory does not answer is what happens to the specific individuals — and the specific communities — who encounter defendants whose charges were declined. Demarcus Johnson is not a data point. He is a documented case. The two people he shot in 2022 are not statistics. They are people in Cook County who were shot by a man who should not have been free.

“The question is not whether the theory is progressive. The question is what happened to the people on the receiving end of the choices that theory produced.”

Civic Intelligence Editorial Desk · Cook County, Illinois