When George Soros spends millions of dollars to elect soft-on-crime prosecutors in many of the United States’ biggest cities, much of that money ends up in the hands of a single Manhattan-based communications firm that’s boosted prosecutors’ campaigns.
Campaign finance records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show that the PACs Soros uses to fund left-wing DA campaigns have steered millions of dollars to BerlinRosen, a PR firm that “happens to be the largest expenditure item for nearly all Soros DA campaign spending,” according to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.
Led by former New York Senate Democratic campaign operatives Valerie Berlin and Jonathan Rosen, the firm’s clients have included former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and former speaker of the New York State Assembly Sheldon Silver, who was convicted of corruption, as well as a host of progressive advocacy organizations.
BerlinRosen has also helped Soros elect progressive prosecutors across the country, including Fairfax County, Va., prosecutor Steve Descano and Arlington County, Va., prosecutor Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, both of whom received support from the Soros-funded Justice & Public Safety PAC. The PAC’s chair, liberal attorney Whitney Tymas, described the firm as the PAC’s “chief strategists and creative leads” in a testimonial on BerlinRosen’s website.
“BerlinRosen has been the perfect partner as chief strategists and creative leads for our work in almost 40 district attorney races since 2015,” she said. “Working with BerlinRosen has been central to our success.”
BerlinRosen has expanded well beyond promoting progressive causes, though its more lucrative corporate clients may not be aware of its activist roots and advocacy for lax crime enforcement. Via a communications and PR network called Orchestra, which it established to acquire other PR firms, the company boasts a long list of current and former blue-chip clients ranging from Google, Novo Nordisk, and Major League Baseball to Vanderbilt University and Hailey Bieber’s best-selling skincare line, Rhode. In 2023, the firm managed PR for the sale of the Washington Commanders NFL franchise to an ownership group led by the private equity billionaire Josh Harris.
In 2025, PRWeek estimated that Orchestra—which is backed by a Midwestern private equity firm called O2 Investment Partners—was bringing in about $159 million a year in revenue. Its influence is far greater than its revenue figures suggest. Observer’s PR Power List—a closely watched measure in the industry—ranks Orchestra as 13 on the list of the 25 most influential PR firms.
BerlinRosen broke through in 2013 as a key partner to de Blasio during his successful mayoral campaign. Rosen was considered one of de Blasio’s most powerful outside advisers, and the firm has stayed true to his progressive vision ever since.
A 2019 video BerlinRosen produced for the PAC and posted to its Facebook highlights former Cook County, Ill., prosecutor Kim Foxx and Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, among other Justice & Public Safety-backed prosecutors. The video laments that of the “2,300 prosecutors with unrivaled power, almost all are white—most are men.” “We’re proud of the game-changing work our BerlinRosen Campaigns team is doing with Justice & Public Safety PAC to elect progressive prosecutors across America,” BerlinRosen wrote in a caption accompanying the video.
Since 2016, the firm has received more than $3.1 million from Justice & Public Safety PAC and two other Soros-funded entities: Safety & Justice PAC and Law & Justice PAC.
Soros has given nearly $3 million to Justice & Public Safety PAC to support progressive prosecutors like Descano and Dehghani-Tafti, money that came from Soros himself and from a political entity he founded, Democracy PAC. Justice & Public Safety PAC in turn has sent more than $2.2 million to BerlinRosen for communications work since 2017, federal campaign finance disclosures show.
The now-defunct Safety & Justice PAC, which funneled nearly $215,000 to BerlinRosen in the 2016 election cycle, was used mostly to finance the campaign of former St. Louis circuit attorney Kimberly Gardner, who resigned in disgrace in 2023 after she failed to revoke the bond of a serial criminal, Daniel Riley, who repeatedly broke the terms of his house arrest. While out on bond, Riley was speeding and driving without a license when he struck a 17-year-old girl in downtown St. Louis, causing her to lose both of her legs.
Foxx stepped down in 2024 after eight tumultuous years as Chicago’s top prosecutor. While most notorious for dropping charges in 2019 against the Mighty Ducks star Jussie Smollett, who’d been accused of faking a hate crime, she also controversially raised the threshold for felony retail theft prosecutions from $300 to $1,000 and dropped felony charges on a mass scale, leading to the resignations of hundreds of prosecutors.
The third Soros-funded PAC, Law & Justice PAC, supported progressive darling Max Wall’s 2018 DA campaign in Washington County, Ore. Wall’s campaign—which advocated for lenient alternatives to courts and incarceration—gained unwelcome attention for the large amount of “dark money” that flowed into its coffers from outside the state, despite Washington County being an obscure, off-the-radar Portland exurb. Wall lost to incumbent DA Kevin Barton.
Overall, Law & Justice PAC paid BerlinRosen nearly $700,000 in 2020 for “nonfederal” advertising, spending disclosures show.
With the help of BerlinRosen, the Soros effort was successful in electing a wave of progressive prosecutors across the country—though many were subsequently ousted by voters after lax prosecution and cashless bail led to sharp increases in crime, disorder, and urban squalor.
George Gascón, the former Los Angeles DA, slashed police budgets and eliminated cash bail. He faced two recall attempts before losing his reelection campaign in 2024. Two years prior, San Francisco voters ousted far-left DA Chesa Boudin, the son of Weather Underground terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, in a recall election after he eliminated cash bail. He prosecuted just three drug cases in 2021 as overdose deaths in the city surged.
In total, 21 Soros-backed DAs have been replaced by prosecutors seen as tougher on crime since 2022.
BerlinRosen has also tapped into the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” gravy train now facing pushback from the Trump administration. One Orchestra company, Onward, “empowers partners to create inclusive organizations through organizational strategy, executive coaching programs, learning opportunities, assessments and tools to support partners in promoting equity, diversity and inclusion,” according to a 2024 press release.
BerlinRosen did not respond to a request for comment.
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