Q and A with Kevin Barton, Candidate for Washington County District Attorney

You are currently the chief deputy district attorney for Washington County. This spring you are running to replace District Attorney Bob Hermann. What is your record, what are your duties now, and how will they expand if you win the election?

As chief deputy DA, my responsibilities include co-managing the entire office (41attorneys and 75 staff), participating in the county's Major Crimes Team, directly supervising the Child Abuse Unit and Juvenile Unit, serving as chairperson of the countywide Child Abuse Multidisciplinary Team (MDT), and participating on multiple boards outside of the office (for example, CARES Northwest Governing Board, Attorney General's child abuse advisory council, etc.). In addition to these duties, I am also an active trial prosecutor and carry a caseload. In my 11 years in the DA's Office, I have prosecuted the most serious crimes in the county, including child physical and sexual abuse, trafficking, violent assaults, domestic violence and homicides. Before I started at the DA's Office, I was a trial attorney at Bullivant, Houser, Bailey, P.C.

If elected, I know my duties as chief deputy DA will expand to include an increased management role and greater responsibility. I intend to carry a caseload and to continue actively prosecuting cases.

On filing day, sole practitioner Max Wall filed to run against you for Washington County DA. Last month OPB reported that you told an audience, "I had no less than six defense attorneys come up to me and tell me they had been recruited by George Soros or Soros' agents. All of them turned it down because they respect me. Mr Wall was the last choice." What is Wall's record and experience? Why is George Soros interested in the District Attorney's race in Washington County?

Max Wall has a poor record and is relatively inexperienced. Although he worked for eight years as a prosecutor in the Polk County DA's Office, that office only has four attorneys and that county has fewer people than the City of Beaverton. While a prosecutor, Wall received poor performance reviews from two different elected DAs (failing to show up at crime scenes, chronic tardiness and absenteeism, being unprepared and unorganized, placed on a work plan with an extended probation). In fact, Wall applied twice for an entry-level position in the Washington County DA's Office and didn't make it past our screening interview. Wall's former boss, Polk County District Attorney Aaron Felton, does not endorse Wall. He endorses me.

Wall eventually quit as a prosecutor and for the past five years has been a criminal defense attorney specializing in drunk driving cases. He has never prosecuted a murder case, he has never managed a law office, he has very little experience working on serious felony cases, and he has only tried two cases in Washington County Circuit Court.

George Soros is interested in Washington County for the same reason he is interested in DA races around the nation -- he wants to impose his worldview and values on communities by purchasing the DA. The DA has the power to ignore the law by refusing to prosecute certain crimes or refusing to seek certain sentencing. The new Soros DA in Philadelphia provides a good example of what Soros likely intends for Washington County. In the first week in office, the Philadelphia Soros DA fired 31 career prosecutors. As DA he is ignoring crime victims and lowering sentences for violent criminals and murderers. We can't let that happen here in Washington County.

Since 2016, Soros has injected his personal agenda and millions of dollars into 12 district attorney races around the country in Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas, Colorado, Virginia, etc. Why would he choose Washington Country as a location to push his personal progressive criminal justice agenda? Especially since Washington County doesn't have an incarceration rate higher than the state as a whole?

Washington County is a target for Soros because it is the only major metropolitan county in Oregon with a DA election this year. Multnomah and Clackamas County DA elections are in 2020, and Soros will no doubt appear there next. This is the first step in a multi-step process, which is why it is important to stop it here. All Oregonians should be concerned about this race. If Soros is able to purchase the three metro-area county district attorneys, he will effectively control the majority of the criminal justice system in Oregon.

The Washington Free Beacon describes the Soros style in taking over local DA races: "Soros' game plan varies little state by state: The wealthy financier will set up a PAC, push funds into the PAC, then use the money to provide his candidate of choice with an enormous financial windfall ... the amount of money Soros pushes into district attorney races -- which typically do not feature enormous campaign expenditure -- makes it difficult for the opponents of his preferred candidate to counter."

On April 5, Whitney Tymas opened an Oregon PAC called the Law and Justice PAC. Are you expecting a flood of Soros money to come into Washington Country through this PAC for Max Wall in the last few weeks of the May primary? What plans to do you have to counter this outside interference?

Yes, I expect a flood of Soros money to come through the PAC. FCC filings show the PAC purchased close to $100,000 in network and cable TV ads in the last several days. This is in addition to the over $20,000 of in-kind contributions from another Soros PAC in Washington, D.C. Given these purchases and what Soros has done in other counties (such as Jefferson County, Colorado) I expect he will spend several hundred thousand dollars on this race.

My plan to defeat this out-of-state influence is to inform the voters about the outside money, educate them about my experience, qualifications and widespread endorsements, and seek out local financial support to spread my message. I believe Washington County citizens generally have a positive view of local law enforcement and our local justice system.

Last year, Soros spent $1.7 million in Philadelphia to get civil rights attorney Larry Krasner elected as district attorney, beating Beth Grossman, a 21-year veteran of that office. On his first day in office, Krasner fired 31 veterans of the Philadelphia's District Attorney's Office in a mass firing. How unprecedented is that kind of heavy-handed judicial ouster? How disruptive would this be for Washington County's safety and security? Can we expect a similar pattern of behavior from Max Wall in Washington Country should he win the race?

Mass firings of career prosecutors are unprecedented, disturbing and a significant blow to community safety. I'm a prosecutor, but I'm also a Washington County resident who is raising a family here. I am worried about the safety of our community if Wall is elected DA. Like other Soros DAs, I anticipate he will fire several of our most experienced prosecutors. I know he will be completely unprepared for the task of managing an office of 115 people, handling a budget of $16 million, making decisions about cases and issues where he has no experience (for example, murder prosecutions, officer-involved shooting issues, complicated policy decisions, etc).

I especially worry about who Wall will turn to for answers that he undoubtedly will not have on his own. Wall's lack of transparency and honesty regarding his out-of-state funders is a character flaw that will be accentuated if he is DA when the questions are harder and the stakes are higher.

In March, the Hillsboro Tribune asked Max Wall about George Soros' backing of his candidacy. Wall said, "In terms of rumors about money and billionaires, I can tell you that I haven't been promised Dollar One by anyone ... the rumors are simply untrue."

But a little more than two weeks later, Wall reported in-kind contributions of roughly $22,000 from the Washington, D.C., branch of Whitney Tymas' PAC. Earlier Wall was unable to account for how his campaign manager Liz Kauffman was getting paid.

Why are his tactics and his political action committees so secretive? Does the Soros agenda for criminal justice reform have popular appeal?

The Soros agenda is to undo the work of the last 20 years of justice reforms in Oregon.

This includes crime victim rights, truth in sentencing, and mandatory minimum sentences for violent offenders.

I don't know why Wall has not been more transparent and honest about Soros' involvement. I suspect he was instructed by his handlers (the folks he called "the money people") to avoid mentioning Soros. Most Washington County voters believe that community safety issues should be decided by people who have a vested interest in the community, not east coast billionaires.

I think the Soros agenda may have popular appeal because there are places in the nation where the criminal justice system has not evolved as it has here in Oregon. Oregon is a leader. We incarcerate only repeat or violent offenders in our prisons. Drug users and non-repeat property crime defendants do not go to prison. In fact, about 75 percent of convicted felons do not even go to prison. In Washington County, our incarceration rate for drug and property defendants is below the state average because our treatment courts work. The concepts of providing treatment for drug addicts, increased services for those with mental health challenges, and rehabilitation for juvenile offenders are all good ideas. But, they are all things that we are already doing in Washington County.

It's not enough to simply have a DA who advocates for drug treatment. We need an experienced DA who understands that some criminals need treatment, but some need to go to prison. Washington County has a long history of many different treatment programs and courts. We have drug court, mental health court, family sentencing alternative program, intensive drug and property crime probation, early case resolution program, diversion programs, the second-look program for juveniles, and (starting this spring) veterans court.

Long time Clatsop County District Attorney Josh Marquis is supporting you in this race. He recently wrote on his blog, "Besides the backroom nature of a campaign funded by out-of-state interests, those interests are intent on reversing voter-passed reforms like Measure 11. If Soros and his handpicked candidate had their way, we'd empty Oregon's prisons of virtually all its inmates."

Is that true? Is that part of the real Soros agenda in Washington Country?

The Soros agenda is to undo all mandatory minimum sentencing laws, despite the will of both the voters and legislature to the contrary. This includes Measure 11 (which provides mandatory minimums for violent felonies like forcible rape, armed robbery, assaults with weapons that cause serious injuries, creation of child pornography, child trafficking) and Jessica's Law (mandatory sentence for raping or sodomizing a child under 12).

The majority of inmates in Oregon's prison are there for committing violent crimes or for committing repeat property crimes (such as identity thefts, home burglaries, etc). I believe the people in Oregon's prisons deserve to be there because of the crimes they committed.

Our communities in Washington County and beyond will be less safe if these people are not incarcerated. People like Soros, who have never set foot in Washington County and will not be here to deal with the consequences of this election, have no business trying to influence this race.

One of the rare Soros defeats happened last year in Denver when his PAC put almost $200,000 into deceptive advertising about the record of Jefferson County incumbent District Attorney Peter Weir. In defense of Weir's record, two neighboring Colorado DAs, Jeff Chostner and Stan Garnett, wrote an op-ed in The Denver Post clarifying the situation:

The ads ... are not even remotely accurate. They portray Weir as a careless prosecutor, soft on [sexual assault] offenses and repeat DUIs, whereas Weir and his office have a well deserved reputation among the law enforcement community for toughness and professionalism.

The job of district attorney is to do justice with every case, answering only to ethical standards and to the people of Colorado. Last-minute infusions of large amounts of out of state money in these races pollute the local debate and distract from the DA's ability to understand and serve the priorities of the community.

On Election Day, incumbent Peter Weir was reelected by seven points, handing Soros a rare defeat.

Because you are supported by the vast majority of Washington County mayors and prosecutors, and all the Washington County commissioners, do you expect that voters in Washington Country will react as Denver voters did to outside money and interference?

I believe the Washington County voters will reject outside money and interference if they are made aware of its presence. Soros has won in many different DA races nationwide by hiding his involvement until it was too late for the voters to realize. Thankfully we learned early on here that Soros was involved and we are educating people.

My opponent's endorsements are political, but mine are personal. Each of my endorsers either knows me directly or knows me by reputation. The collaborative nature of Washington County is what led to me being endorsed by the retiring DA, the sheriff, all police chiefs, all police officer associations, all county commissioners, virtually all mayors and multiple state representatives.

Killing the Silicon Goose

By Allen Alley

April 11, 2018, will be remembered as the day the American Technology Industry died. It will mark the zenith of unfettered technology growth and the greatest wealth creation the world has ever seen. It will mark the day government began to strangle the goose that laid the silicon egg.

Technology companies, such as Facebook, have been allowed to flourish with little regulation. Manufacturing, agriculture, banking, finance, telecommunications and even hospitality are regulated and taxed from inception to death. Technology companies have been able to innovate and flourish in basically a free-range market. Companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and Facebook have literally created a new economy. Meanwhile, traditional manufacturing and even large amounts of agriculture have either downsized, focused on higher margin niche products, or migrated to more friendly (less regulated) shores.

Think about it; when a technology company starts up, all they really need are some computers, software and good internet access. They don't pay a tax based on how powerful their computers are or how much memory they have. There isn't even an internet access tax or a bandwidth tax ... yet. They can hire people, and given the nature of the business, employees don't have to be located in the same city, state or country. In fact, geopolitical borders just slow technology companies down.

One could argue that the explosive growth of technology has been created by this lack of regulation. In my 30-plus years helping to build technology companies, I would have to say that America is the least regulated, first world, technology market. Is it possible that this lack of regulation is history repeating itself? It seems to mirror the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the American economy in the 18th and 19th centuries, when largely unregulated expansion created the greatest economic, political and military power in the world.

For all of the billions of dollars of net worth that has been created through technology entrepreneurship, technology executives have largely been absent from the politics of America. The April 11, 2018, Congressional hearings of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg are the first shots across the bow of the largely unregulated technology industry. The statement by Congressman Billy Long (R-MO) was chilling and true, "Congress is good at two things: doing nothing and overreacting. So far, we've done nothing on Facebook ... We're getting ready to overreact."

Don't think for an instant that Republicans or Democrats are going to stand up and say, "That Zuckerberg is a fine fellow; Facebook is a great American company. We don't need to regulate them. You constituents just need to learn how to deal with technology."

As Glass-Steagall reformed Wall Street after the crash of 1929, the Facebook hearings are the first step to regulating the last great American industry -- spurred on by public outcries of "Facebook is selling my data!" and "Facebook is weaponizing the Russians!" and "Facebook suppresses conservative messages!"

Both Republicans and Democrats have the air cover to put the noose on the goose. I expect that the legislation will be less like the CliffsNotes-length Glass-Steagall legislation of 1929 and more like the "Atlas Shrugged"-length Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act of 2010. And because technology executives and companies have been largely apolitical, politicians won't be cutting a major source of their campaign funds. Kill the goose!

The question then for the last great American industry, led by titans like Zuckerberg, is this - will they fight or will they simply put on their hoodies, hop in their Gulfstreams, and fly away in a flock?

Blowback Against the Protected Class

By Philip J. Romero

Although recent news stories have been dominated by two figures accused of influencing the 2016 presidential election -- Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and former FBI director James Comey -- as Yoda would say, "There is another." The Federal Reserve may be most responsible for Donald Trump's election, quite unintentionally.

Some readers may be secretly pleased by this, and others horrified. The Fed is supposed to stand outside of politics, although that commitment has been ignored in the past, most egregiously when Arthur Burns engineered a boom (which later led to double digit inflation) to keep Richard Nixon in office in 1972.

Few observers believe that the 2016 Fed was wittingly partisan. Its Uber-Establishment officials certainly weren't secret Trump supporters. But its actions have profound side effects. Over the past several decades, under several Fed chairmen, they have shored up the protected class at the expense of everyone else. Our instruments of government have protected Wall Street, not Main Street. The year 2016 was the first serious blowback, as working class voters rose up in a primal-scream protest.

These developments have been a long time brewing. Capitalism delivers aggregate economic growth, but with no guarantees about how that growth is distributed. In the generation after World War II -- when most Oregon Transformation Newsletter readers came of age -- the American middle class grew alongside the broad economy. But since about 1980, median incomes have stagnated, and those with less than a college education have fallen significantly backward. Celebrity economist Thomas Piketty argues that the benign postwar period was simply a blip in a secular trend of rising inequality: the late 20th century, not mid-century is the new normal.

An individual's rational response to a sinking ship is to find a life preserver and join the protected class. This class has mushroomed in the past few decades, to include:

Tenured professors and teachers (present company included), who receive lifetime employment largely unconditioned on performance;
Civil servants, whose generous pensions often pay more than their working salary, even though they too had guaranteed employment and took no real risk for such high rewards;
Large company CEOs who stack their boards with comrades who convince themselves that giant options grants are well-earned rewards for stock performance driven more by a bull market than wise corporate decisions;
Tech company employees who monetize customer data they vacuum up for free, reaping fortunes through vast scale (Facebook has over 2 billion users);
Wall Street banks that rode the bubble up in the early 2000s -- often leveraging by 40 to 1 or more -- then received bailouts when the bubble inevitably burst in 2008.

The greatest protections were delivered by the Federal Reserve. The Fed and the U.S. Treasury have been cognitively captured by the financial sector. In the run-up to 2008 they saw rising bank profits as a sign of general prosperity. In 2008 they saw the imminent collapse of banking as a death knell for the overall economy. This overgeneralization wasn't surprising given that the Fed had allowed financial sector profits to exceed those of the rest of the Fortune 500. In the face of a recession caused by bank-engineered toxic financial waste (derivatives of mortgage bonds), the Fed bought trillions of that very paper, expanding its balance sheet fivefold and rewarding banks for imploding the economy. These asset purchases and the TARP bailouts were like a judge who showed mercy to a defendant who murdered his parents because he was now an orphan.

Capitalism without failure is like religion without hell. Capitalism only delivers prosperity if losers suffer for their mistakes, so that they, or someone else, can learn from them. Protections lead to what economists call "moral hazard": they encourage risky or undesirable behavior. They avoid short-term pain at the expense of long-term pathology. Ask any parent who has bailed their kid out of jail.

After TARP the Fed may have meant to say "no more" to the banks, but instead expanded its protections, with unavoidable side effects. Zero percent interest rates, criticized in these pages several times since 2015, were intended to ease bank lending to small and midsized firms -- Main Street -- to encourage them to invest and hire. Instead banks avoided any risk by depositing their free capital in Treasury bonds, and at the Fed itself. Much corporate borrowing went not for new investment, but for stock buybacks. This boosted executive bonuses and the stock market, but did little for large swathes of households who own few stocks. Not surprisingly, the birth rate of new firms -- the core engine of economic growth, responsible for all new jobs for decades -- has collapsed to barely one-third its former rate.

In the meantime, the Fed leadership seemed to suffer from mission creep. Ben Bernanke crowed about the Fed's success in re-inflating the stock market, and his predecessor Alan Greenspan seemed to agree. Janet Yellen made a few grudging comments about income inequality, but there was no evidence the Fed undertook any meaningful initiatives aimed this way.

In fairness, the Fed can argue that it has very few weapons available. Most options for remedying inequality (either by shoring up the losers or weakening the winners' protections) are in the hands of the president and Congress. But the first rule of holes is to stop digging. The Fed failed that test for more than two decades, from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s. At long last it began slowly withdrawing its stimulus in 2016, as this column urged.

It is remarkable, and tragic, that for so many years the working class directed its anger over this economic abuse inward. Millions have dropped out of the work force, collect disability as the new long-term dole, and even abuse (and die from) opioids. It wasn't until 2016 that they began to look outward and find their voice at the ballot box. This is not a uniquely American phenomenon: the Brexit vote in June 2016 and Hungary's ratification of right wing populism in April 2018 are other examples.

Since the 1980s the general drift of public policy has been to shore up competition, which is to the good. But for the next generation policymakers must fully embrace the costs as well as the benefits of capitalism. A rising tide has not lifted all boats, just those with protected keels.

National Waves and Oregon Ripples

By Jacob Vandever

Many in the media are predicting a Democrat "Blue Wave" in the 2018 midterm elections. With a few rare exceptions, the party of a sitting president almost always loses legislative seats in midterm elections. Right now Real Clear Politics polling average for the generic congressional ballot gives a 5.5 percent edge to Democrats. Given the enthusiasm we have seen from Democratic voters in the special elections that have occurred since 2016, it is not a big stretch to assume that 2018 will be a good year for Democrats at the national level.

What would that mean for us here in Oregon? Let's take a look.

Because Oregon and U.S. Senate seats are on four-year and six-year cycles respectively, comparisons can be difficult because seats are up at different times. So let's just look at the U.S. House of Representatives and the Oregon House as each of those holds elections every two years.

In 1994, the Gingrich Revolution swept Republicans into control of the U.S. House, picking up 54 seats in that midterm election, taking Republicans from 176 seats to 230 seats. While this massive "Red Wave" was sweeping the country, here in Oregon Republicans were able to pick up only one seat in the House, building their majority with 33 of 60 seats.

America did not see another wave election until 2006, yet another midterm election, when Democrats picked up 32 seats and installed Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the U.S. House. Oregon House Republicans lost six seats and turned control over to the Democrats. Similarly in 2008, the year that swept Barack Obama into the presidency, both national and state Democrats added to their new majorities. Nationally, Democrats picked up an additional 21 seats and Oregon Democrats picked up five seats, taking them to a 36-seat supermajority.

America's last wave election occurred in 2010. This was the Tea Party wave where Republicans picked up a whopping 64 seats in the U.S. House and took control of that chamber. In line with that national trend, Oregon Republicans picked up six House seats, taking the lower chamber to a 30-30 tie between Republicans and Democrats.

So, Oregon elections seem to track with waves at the national level. What could make Oregon different is considering who controls the chamber going into the election. The 1994 Gingrich election was monumental for national Republicans, but only translated into a one-seat pick up for House Republicans in Oregon, because Oregon Republicans already controlled the House. Sweeping Gingrich and the 1994 Republican class into office was a referendum on President Clinton and the Democrats in congress. Oregon didn't see massive gains in that red wave because they were already in charge; it was not a "change" election for them. They simply bolstered their majority.

National Republicans have a target on their backs, but that is an expected consequence of holding so many offices. When a party holds the House, Senate, presidency and more than three-fifths of the nation's governors, it is going to have a difficult time defending all of those seats.

While Republicans have been dominant across the nation, Oregon Republicans teeter on the edge of becoming super-minorities in both legislative chambers. There is no referendum on Republicans in Oregon as there may be at that national level.

There is a referendum on Governor Kate Brown. While national trends may keep Oregon from having anything close to a "Red Wave" in 2018, massive wins for Democrats at the national levels will not necessarily translate into massive wins for Democrats at the state level, just like 1994 did not translate into massive wins for Republicans here in Oregon.

The right candidate in the right place may even push back against national trends, if they play their cards right.

?Back to Top