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    Trump sets sights on liberal mega-donor George Soros: ‘A chilling message to other donors’

    Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, said “everything is on the table” and left it there. But Donald Trump threw discretion to the wind and was far more specific about his choice of enemy to go after.“If you look at Soros, he’s at the top of everything,” the US president said.The gathering with reporters took place in the Oval Office last month as Trump ordered a crackdown on “leftwing terrorism” and threatened to investigate and prosecute those who financially support it.There is no evidence linking George Soros, a 95-year-old billionaire who has supported democratic causes around the world, or Reid Hoffman, who helped start PayPal and the networking site LinkedIn, to terrorism. But both are top donors to the Democratic party. And both were named by Trump as potential participants in a vast conspiracy to finance violent protesters against the government.It is no coincidence, critics say, that the president is intensifying his attacks on Soros little more than a year before the midterm elections for Congress. The billionaire has reportedly contributed more than $170m to help Democrats during the 2022 midterm cycle. A justice department investigation could deter both Soros and other would-be donors in 2026.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Anyone who contributes to the Democrats can expect Soros treatment if they’re giving a large amount of money. We’ve seen Trump quite skillfully using intimidation and threats to bring prominent law firms, major universities and others to their knees. This is another effort to cower opposition. The point here is to make it harder for Democrats to raise money.”Soros has long been a go-to bogeyman for the right. He was born to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, in 1930 and emigrated to London after surviving the Nazi occupation of his home country. He moved to New York and, in 1970, founded Soros Fund Management, which grew into one of the most successful hedge funds in history. In 1992, he was dubbed the “man who broke the Bank of England” after short-selling $10bn worth of British pounds during the UK’s currency crisis.View image in fullscreenSoros began philanthropic work in the late 1970s, funding scholarships for Black South Africans under apartheid. In the 1980s, he provided support to dissidents and pro-democracy groups in communist eastern Europe. This work evolved into the Open Society Foundations (OSF), now one of the biggest funders of groups that support human rights, government transparency, public health and education in more than a hundred countries.Soros has donated more than $32bn to the OSF but in 2023 handed over its stewardship to his son Alex, who this summer married Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton and herself the target of rightwing conspiracy theories. Within the US, the OSF has supported groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Equal Justice Initiative, Indivisible, MoveOn, Planned Parenthood, the National Immigration Law Center and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.Patrick Gaspard, who was president of the OSF from 2017 to 2020, coinciding with Trump’s first term, said: “It’s hard to believe but at one point George’s work had bipartisan support. Republican senators and Congress members would meet with George Soros regularly, openly. They would tout his work in helping to bring down the iron curtain and help instill democracy in western Europe. They were proud to have the association.”That changed in 2004, when, disenchanted by the Iraq war, Soros emerged as a major backer of Democratic candidate John Kerry during his unsuccessful presidential campaign against George W Bush. He has since been a major donor to Democrats, giving $125m to one liberal Super Pac in 2021, according to the campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets.Republicans have megadonors of their own, including Miriam Adelson, Charles Koch, Timothy Mellon and Elon Musk, whose donation of more than $270m to Trump’s presidential campaign dwarfed Soros’s input. Even so, Soros’s influence has made him a frequent target of criticism and conspiracy theories, especially from rightwing groups and authoritarian governments.Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman from Georgia, posted on the X social media platform in 2023: “No other person has undermined our democracy more than George Soros. Why is [he] still allowed to maintain his citizenship?”The critiques often play on antisemitic tropes. Emily Tamkin, author of The Influence of Soros, said: “You couldn’t imagine a more perfect cartoon villain than Soros because he’s a foreigner, he works in finance, he lives in New York and, I would say most saliently, he’s Jewish, which means that you can have all sorts of stereotypes and conspiracies take hold without ever saying the word ‘Jewish’.”When Trump ally Viktor Orbán of Hungary was running for re-election in 2018, he targeted Soros with antisemitic dog whistles, saying: “We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world.”View image in fullscreenTamkin added: “This idea of the rootless cosmopolitan or the greedy New Yorker obsessed with money. ‘Globalist’ is one you’re hearing a lot. I don’t ever need to say the word ‘Jew’ for antisemitic synapses to light up, which helps these conspiracies travel extremely effectively. That’s exactly what we’re seeing now in the United States and we should be clear about that.”Soros has long been considered a villain by Trump and his conservative base. In August, the president said without evidence that Soros and his son should be charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or Rico, because of their alleged support for violent protests.Last month, the New York Times reported that the justice department has directed prosecutors to consider possible charges against the Open Society Foundations. Soros’s office sent a letter to “friends and colleagues” stating: “Allegations that George or OSF are in any way engaged in unlawful activity or in fomenting or promoting violence are 100% false.”Then, in the wake of charges against former FBI director James Comey, came Trump’s remarks in the Oval Office, suggesting that Soros and Hoffman could be prosecuted for sponsoring “professional anarchists and agitators”. There is no evidence to support these claims.Gaspard is not surprised that Trump is once again seeking to demonise George and Alex Soros. “Everyone knows – you can set your clock to it – that when the midterm elections come, when the presidential elections come, that family is going to be involved in some fashion in politics with capital ‘D’ Democrats,” he said.“Trump and those around him are interested in making the name toxic, the investments toxic, and to then find ways to destabilise what should be a source of strength for progressives and the centre left. Then this thing happens where the work of the philanthropy gets conflated with the rights of the individual to participate in American politics and to invest in national politics. That conflation is dangerous.”The move against Soros comes as Republicans face an uphill battle in next year’s midterms, when the party that holds the White House traditionally suffers losses. The jobs market is showing significant signs of weakening, consumer prices remain stubbornly high and this week the federal government shut down.But Trump has already intervened to protect his allies in Congress by pushing for the redrawing of congressional district maps, seeking to purge voter rolls, taking aim at mail-in voting and ordering the justice department to investigate ActBlue, the Democrats’ prime fundraising tool. The assault on Soros could be aimed at choking off money from bigger donors.Rick Wilson, a cofounder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Right now Trump’s in a lot of trouble across the board politically: the job situation is terrible, the economy is crashing out, the Epstein files are still dividing the party. All these things have led to a moment where they need some bait and they need some distraction out there.“Soros is a great target for that and I’m sure it’s also trying to send a chilling message to any other Democratic donor that they should watch out or he’ll go after them. If they don’t avoid transgressing against Trump, they’ll be in the same spot that Soros finds himself in.”Wilson, a former Republican strategist, added: “It’s absolutely about scaring people and freaking people out and causing fear and suppressing free speech. They do not want people to fund campaigns or Super Pacs or organisations that oppose Trump or Trumpism or their movement and so they’re going to seek to punish people and scare them off.” More

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    Trump’s attack on George Soros is the next step in the autocrat’s handbook | Kenneth Roth

    As a former federal prosecutor, I know that prosecutors should be guided by the facts. But in his determination to hound George Soros, Donald Trump wants prosecutors to become agents of his personal vendetta, facts be damned. That is the conclusion to be drawn from the instructions issued by one of Trump’s senior justice department officials to a group of US attorney’s offices across the country, telling them to investigate Soros’s foundation.This is the latest step in Trump’s implementation of the autocrat’s handbook, with the aim of chipping away at the checks and balances on presidential authority. Having already attacked judges, lawyers, media companies and universities, Trump now sets his sights on civil society. Soros, a longtime and extraordinarily generous funder of progressive causes around the world including in the United States, is Target Number 1. Trump shares this fixation with the likes of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most prominent autocrat, who for years has used Soros as a scapegoat for widespread and growing dislike of his corrupt, self-serving rule.As the name of Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) suggests, he promotes the free and public exchange of ideas. Soros made his billions by recognizing that markets are fallible. He gave away billions based on the insight that human governance is imperfect, too, and that the best way to compensate is with independent voices engaged in free debate. Having survived as a Jewish boy in Hungary under Nazi rule, Soros understands that we are safer when people can contest government dogma.Soros has funded not only human rights activists who defend open societies but also intellectuals and journalists who have pushed the limits of public debate, as well as organizations devoted to redressing a range of injustices. My former organization, Human Rights Watch, was and remains a major beneficiary.Despite his brilliance, Soros is too modest to believe he has the ultimate answers to society’s most vexing problems. He is always self-critical, deeply aware of his inability to see the full truth, skeptical of any moment’s conventional wisdom.At age 95, he has stepped back from an active role in his foundation, which is now chaired by his son Alex. But his vision still guides the foundation and is antithetical to Trump’s delusional belief that he alone is the guardian of all wisdom while critics are to be demonized and persecuted. Soros has the self-confidence to eschew the kinds of sycophantic lackeys whom Trump prefers.The debate that Soros has long promoted is peaceful. That is the essence of the open society that he champions. OSF recently reiterated that they “unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism. Our activities are peaceful and lawful, and our grantees are expected to abide by human rights principles and comply with the law.”But that has not stopped Trump from insinuating without evidence that Soros and OSF are somehow supporters of people who engage in political violence. I have known Soros for more than three decades and have never seen a hint of that. It is the opposite of who he is. But stubborn reality has never impeded Trump and his acolytes in their universe of “alternative facts”.Straining to justify the vendetta, Trump’s justice department points to a report issued by a group that calls itself the Capital Research Center. It is filled with tendentious, McCarthyite allusions about OSF grantees having alleged sympathy for Hamas or tolerance of “direct action”, a supposed reference to violence.One of the prominent examples it cites is OSF’s funding of the highly respected Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, one of six Palestinian organizations that the Israeli government in 2021 designated as supposed terrorists. But the Israeli government bandies about accusations of terrorism the same way it tries to silence critics with false allegations of antisemitism. I have worked with Al-Haq throughout my career and have always known it to be a fact-based, principled, and peaceful organization that fairly and objectively investigates and reports on Israeli abuses in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.Another OSF grantee targeted is the human rights group Dawn, which was founded by Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was murdered by the Saudi government. One of its stated offenses is that while it condemned Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack, it focused on the civilian, not the military, victims.That such “evidence” might tempt Trump to order criminal charges against Soros under his newly announced effort to counter “domestic terrorism and organized political violence” means that almost anyone could be targeted.In persecuting Soros, Trump has taken on a tough target. Like Harvard, which successfully sued rather than capitulate, Soros has the means to fight back. Moreover, unlike some law firms that cut deals with Trump to escape his wrath, 100 progressive foundations have announced that they will mount a common defense if any of them faces Trump’s vengeance. That mutual support is the right response to Trump’s divide-and-conquer strategy.I would expect that the courts will promptly dismiss any action that Trump takes against Soros. Despite Trump’s efforts to bully them, federal judges have maintained their independence, and many continue to apply the law rather than Trump’s dictates. A fact-free prosecution of a well-known critic is a recipe for judicial rejection.But that doesn’t relieve Soros and his foundation from the burden of defending themselves from fabricated charges, which can be substantial. Trump’s abuse of his power to persecute an independent voice – his posturing to his base in utter contempt of the first amendment – should be widely and firmly denounced. Unless the pushback is intense enough, Soros may be Trump’s first civil society target but not the last.

    Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments is published by Knopf and Allen Lane More

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    George Soros foundation hits back at Trump after report that DoJ plans to target group

    The Open Society Foundations (OSF), the major philanthropic group funded by George Soros, has criticized the Trump administration for “politically motivated attacks on civil society” after a report that the justice department had instructed federal prosecutors to come up with plans to investigate the charity.The New York Times reported on Thursday that a lawyer in the office of Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, sent a memo to several federal prosecutors in attorney’s offices in California, New York, Washington DC, Chicago and Detroit, offering a range of charges to consider against the group. Those charges included racketeering, arson, wire fraud and material support for terrorism, the newspaper reported.The push comes as Trump has ramped up efforts to deploy the justice department to target his enemies. He has pledged to crack down on leftwing groups in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing and has repeatedly singled out Soros, a major funder of liberal groups, as a target. “We’re going to look into Soros, because I think it’s a Rico case against him and other people,” Trump said on 12 September, using an acronym to refer to racketeering charges. “Because this is more than like protests. This is real agitation.”In a statement, the OSF described the effort as “meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the first amendment right to free speech”.“The Open Society Foundations unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism. Our activities are peaceful and lawful, and our grantees are expected to abide by human rights principles and comply with the law,” it said in a statement.“When power is abused to take away the rights of some people, it puts the rights of all people at risk. Our work in the United States is solely dedicated to strengthening democracy and upholding constitutional freedoms. We stand by the work we do to improve lives in the United States and across the world.”Trump has pledged to prosecute Soros and has increased pressure on the justice department to prosecute his political rivals. Last week, Trump forced out a top federal prosecutor in Virginia after it was determined there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James.Trump installed a White House aide, Lindsey Halligan, in the role, and prosecutors are said to be nearing filing charges against Comey. More

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    George Soros hands control of multi-billion foundation to son

    The financier George Soros, the billionaire investor and liberal donor, has handed control of his multi-billion-dollar foundation to his son, Alexander.The 92-year-old, who memorably made $1bn betting against the British pound and “breaking the Bank of England” in a catastrophic financial event in 1992 that became known as Black Wednesday, had said previously that he did not want his Open Society Foundations (OSF) to be taken over by any of his five children.However, Soros has now named his son Alexander as chairman of one of the wealthiest global philanthropic foundations. “He’s earned it,” said Soros, whose personal fortune is valued at $6.7bn.The 37-year-old, who was quietly appointed in December, said he was “more political” than his father and that he planned to continue donating family money to left-leaning US political candidates, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Sunday.His father has been one of the biggest donors to Democratic candidates in US politics.“We are going to double down on defending voting rights and personal freedom at home and supporting the cause of democracy abroad,” said Alexander. “As much as I would love to get money out of politics, as long as the other side is doing it, we will have to do it too.”Alexander, who earlier this week tweeted a picture of himself posing with the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, now directs political activity as president of his father’s political action committee.The foundation, of which Alexander has been deputy chair since 2017, directs about $1.5bn a year to groups such as those backing human rights and helping to build democracies.Alexander, who studied history at New York University and earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, has pursued his own initiatives including backing progressive Jewish organisations, environmental causes and workers’ rights in the US.He also sits on the investment committee of the foundation that oversees Soros Fund Management (OSF), with the vast majority of the $25bn in assets under management belonging to the OSF. The OSF received $18bn from his father in 2018.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“With my background, there are a lot of ways I could have gone astray,” said Alexander. “Instead I became a workaholic, and my life is my work.”George Soros has married three times and has five children: Alexander, Andrea, Gregory, Robert and Jonathan. More