Maryland held its primary elections this week and one of the contests that was being watched closely was the race for the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s office currently held by Marilyn Mosby. Because of state election laws, the mail-in ballots couldn’t be counted until Thursday and the race was close enough that a winner wasn’t declared until last night. Those results, while close, appeared to suggest one surprising message from the voters. There is apparently a limit to the amount of corruption that Democrats will tolerate from one of their own even in a city as bright blue as Baltimore. The embattled Mosby lost to Ivan Bates, a defense attorney and form prosecutor. And since the Democratic Primary is effectively the same thing as the general election in this Democrat-run city, Bates should replace her next year. Of course, this won’t be the last we hear from Mosby since she has a slew of appointments with various judges coming up because of all of the corruption accusations against her. That was likely a large factor in the decision delivered by the voters. (Fox News)
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby lost her reelection bid to defense attorney Ivan Bates in the Democratic primary after she was indicted by a grand jury on federal charges alleging that she used coronavirus hardship as a reason to take money out of her city retirement account.
The Associated Press called the race in favor of Ivan Bates, a defense attorney, on Friday night. Bates is a former prosecutor in Baltimore who served from 1996 to 2002 before becoming a defense attorney.
Mosby, a Democrat, directed her office to stop prosecuting offenses such as drug possession, prostitution, urinating in public, and more during the coronavirus pandemic in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading in jails and prisons.
There seems to be little reason that Mosby lost the election other than the multiple ongoing corruption investigations into the affairs of her and her husband, City Council President Nick Mosby. Voters didn’t seem to be all that upset about her terrible job performance when she stopped prosecuting almost all nonviolent crimes, despite the fact that prosecuting crimes is pretty much the definition of her job. They didn’t seem particularly incensed over the way she spent eight years at war with the city’s police, hounding them more fiercely than the gangbangers who control the streets most evenings.
But over the past two years, the endless headlines seemed to have become too much for the voters. It was all too embarrassing. She’s been charged with fraud, perjury, and corruption. She and her husband didn’t bother paying their utility bills for years at a time despite making enviable salaries on the taxpayers’ dime. They both allegedly played fast and loose with the campaign funds they raised. Marilyn Mosby was getting dragged into court more often than some of the criminals she was elected to prosecute.
Why would they supposedly do all of that? Because this is Baltimore that we’re talking about. Democrats own and operate the city and many of them have treated the municipal coffers like their personal piggy banks. It’s simply part of the culture and many of them have gotten away with so much of this activity for a long time until it became too obvious to ignore anymore and they finally faced prosecution. (Two of the city’s last five mayors wound up going to prison and another messed up her job so badly she didn’t even bother attempting to run for a second term.)
Perhaps that will all be coming to an end now. Will Ivan Bates be any better? He knows the system from the inside, having worked as a prosecutor in the past. But maybe that’s part of the problem. Bates already knows where all of the levers of power are and how they operate. Hopefully, he at least won’t be as obvious about it as Mosby.
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