On June 20, Democratic primary voters in affluent D.C.-adjacent Loudoun County, Virginia will decide on whether to renominate Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj, an Albanian Muslim immigrant elected in November 2019 in a campaign bankrolled by communist multibillionaire George Soros. If she prevails, she faces a recall campaign launched by Virginians for Safe Communities. For good reason: Biberaj is a case study of an alienated, unassimilable immigrant in power—facilitated by the continuing Great Replacement of Loudoun’s American population by yet more unassimilable immigrants.
VSC board member Sean Kennedy explained:
We are launching this campaign to hold accountable the prosecutors who have taken office under a writ of reform but have gone too far. They are continuing to flout the rule of law and are endangering our families and communities.
[Buta Biberaj recall, Loudoun County, Virginia, (2021-2023), Ballotpedia]
To succeed, supporters must collect signatures equal to at least 10 percent of the total vote in the previous Commonwealth’s Attorney election, roughly 11,500. A judge would then decide whether to remove Biberaj, after which the county would hold a special election.
One key issue: In Loudoun County, a motley collection of pro-homosexual activists called “Loudoun Love Warriors” are illegally harassing and threatening parents who oppose “LGBT” grooming in schools [Virginia parents harassed, threatened for speaking out, opposing LGBT teaching in schools: ‘I would shoot him,’ by Jeffrey Clark, Fox News, May 10, 2023]. Thus the Love Warriors threatened resident Mark Winn’s life and job, he said. “They went after my job,” another said. “That happened in early February. They referred me to the FBI, IRS, and DHS all because they don’t like my opinion.” In fact, he did lose his job. A few other messages from the Fox News story: “Lives needs (sic) to be ruined beyond repair.” “Lets (sic) actually destroy them. Grind them.” “If he had said that s--- about black kids or autistic kids I would shoot him.”
“They said that they wanted to curb stomp me,” said Alisha Brand, cofounder of the group Army of Parents [Virginia mom says activists threatened to ‘curb stomp’ her for speaking out against school curriculum, by Joshua Q. Nelson, Fox News, May 13, 2023].
But Biberaj has no sympathy for these victims. And little wonder—Fox reports, above, that she’s a Loudoun Love Warrior herself. So are various aides and associates of the Loudoun County School Board and Democratic candidates.
But the grounds for prosecution are clear. Observed legal scholar Jonathan Emord:
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has jurisdiction over each institution that makes use of state funds and has an obligation to investigate to determine if there are instances of law violation, public corruption and abuse of power [FBI Investigation Needed of Loudoun County School Board and Prosecutor, Not Parents, Town Hall, May 13, 2023]
In contrast, Biberaj recently asked the county sheriff to investigate Accuracy in Media for sending a mobile billboard to the homes of elected officials who are members of the Love Warriors.
New: Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj requested the Loudoun County Sheriff to investigate mobile billboards that are drawing attention to the Loudoun Love Warrior Facebook group. @7NewsDC latest story on the Loudoun Love Warriors Facebook group:… pic.twitter.com/WKQleZSrG7
— Nick Minock (@NickMinock) June 7, 2023
Welcome to immigration-impacted Loudoun County, where I have lived these past 30 years. A little history explains how Biberaj seized power.
If one thing has been constant in Loudoun County, it is rapid growth. In 1980, the county population stood at 57,427. That figure rose to 169,599 in 2000, 311,312 in 2010, and 420,959 in 2020. The Census estimate for July 1, 2022 was 432,085.
The housing stock likewise has expanded. In 1980 there were 19,742 dwelling units; in 2020 there were 142,074.
Growth itself, though, is less important than the county’s changed demographics. Census data for 2020 show that while the county’s black population has remained steady at 7 percent, Asian and Hispanic populations have exploded. Persons who identified as “Asians alone” increased from 5 percent to 21 percent from 2000 to 2020. The Hispanic share of the population rose from 6 percent to 14 percent.
In other words, more than a third of Loudoun County’s population now consists of two meta-groups whose politics are palpably Leftist. That’s how Leftists such as Biberaj win elections.
As for whites, they composed 90.2 percent of Loudoun County’s population in 1980, yet only 65.3 percent in 2020. More telling, the 2020 figure for the “white only” category was only 54 percent, down from 83 percent in 2000. Significantly, 25.2 percent of all residents in 2020 were born in another country, far higher than the 13.7 percent for the United States. The Great Replacement is here!
The real threat: Biberaj’s reconfiguration of criminal justice into an instrument of Leftist activism. And the electorate, apparently, favors this. In the 2020 presidential election, Loudoun County voters preferred Joe Biden to Donald Trump by a resounding 61.5 percent to 36.5 percent.
Virginia’s 10th congressional district, which encompasses the outer portion of neighboring Fairfax County as well as all of Loudoun and points west, is now in the hands of the Left. This happened only recently. Until his retirement at the end of 2014, longtime Republican Rep. Frank Wolf led efforts on Capitol Hill to combat violent Hispanic gangs such as MS-13, a very real problem in Northern Virginia. Unfortunately, his GOP successor, Barbara Comstock, a functionary of Conservatism Inc., lasted only two terms, losing reelection in 2018 largely due to her avoidance of immigration issues. The winner, former Loudoun County prosecutor Jennifer Wexton, indeed is a radical. She conspicuously began her tenure by hanging a rainbow flag outside her office. (She’s also a supporter of boosting annual ceilings for H-1B employment visas, according to her campaign website).
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Biberaj’s close election victory in 2019 over Republican opponent Nicole Wittmann owed not only to the county’s ethnic transformation but also to $922,000 from the George Soros–funded Justice and Public Safety PAC [Virginia Democrats Turn on Soros-Funded Prosecutor, by Kevin Daley, Washington Free Beacon, June 14, 2022]. Her benefactors have certainly gotten their money’s worth.
Born in 1964 in Montenegro to Albanian Muslim parents, Biberaj was raised in the Bronx, N.Y. She’s a graduate of George Mason University and its law school. She worked her way up via a series of legal advocacy projects, with an emphasis on rights for minors. In Loudoun County, she served as a public defender and a substitute judge, where she claims to have been radicalized by various “microaggressions” [Buta Biberaj (JD ’93) Becomes First Elected Female Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney, GMU/Antonin Scalia Law School, December 7, 2020].
Here’s how radical she was before voters put in her charge of prosecuting criminals:
Biberaj defended a man who tried to rape his female co-worker late at night. He masked his face and attacked her. With one hand clutching her throat, he forced his other hand down her shirt. She fought back and bit him savagely. He was convicted using DNA evidence from the blood-soaked crime scene.
After trial, Biberaj was angry because the victim watched the defendant being handcuffed and led off to prison. She demanded of the prosecutor, “Are you going to stand and watch this?” When the prosecutor replied “yes,” Biberaj sneered back “F—ck you!”
[Buta Biberaj—Defending rapists and child molesters, by Dick Black, The Bull Elephant, October 23, 2019]
Biberaj campaigned for Commonwealth’s Attorney on a Soros-certified platform of ending cash bail, “mass incarceration,” and mandatory minimum sentencing. Yet as an elected official, she knows she can’t afford to alienate people too much. Thus, she periodically asserts that she’s tough on crime. “[W]e have built a safer community with less violent crime and more support for victims, and have saved millions in taxpayer dollars,” she wrote for the Washington Post [The endless recalls in Virginia are pointless and must stop, June 10, 2022].
But actions speak louder than words. For her, political affinities come first and integrity comes second. People notice this.
In June 2022, a Loudoun County judge removed her from a case because her office willfully omitted details about a defendant’s criminal past to win a lenient plea deal. Kevin Enrique Valle had participated in a dozen burglaries in four Virginia counties. Biberaj’s prosecutors worked out a six-month jail term, a punishment the judge deemed inconsistent with state sentencing guidelines and the facts of the case [Liberal Virginia DA hit with bar complaint following judge booting her office from criminal case, by Emma Colton, Fox News, June 16, 2022]. VSC filed a bar complaint.
In a recent notorious case clearly aimed at crushing political dissent, Biberaj sought jail time for parent Scott Smith for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest at a school board meeting on June 22, 2021. A 15-year-old “gender-fluid” boy had assaulted his daughter in a bathroom. The boy was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, arrested, fitted with an ankle bracelet and transferred to another school. Months later, he assaulted another girl. Scott Smith, who shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place of course, received a suspended 10-day jail sentence on the resisting arrest charge, and now goes to trial on September 25 for disorderly conduct [Smith Appeal of Disorderly Conduct Conviction Heads to Jury Trial, by Renss Greene, Loudoun Now, June 1, 2023].
Significantly, Biberaj appeared personally in court to prosecute Smith. At least she can’t do that anymore. In September 2022, a Virginia judge booted her from the case, citing impartiality concerns [Loudoun County judge boots liberal DA from case of dad whose daughter was sexually assaulted in school, by Emma Colton, Fox News, September 13, 2022].
Domestic abusers don’t have to worry about Biberaj as much. In October 2021, after a wife-beating suspect who has been released on bond allegedly murdered his wife with a hammer, revelations surfaced that Biberaj had dismissed hundreds of domestic violence cases [Loudoun County prosecutor who sought to jail father of girl allegedly raped at school tied to Soros, McAuliffe, by Jessica Chasmar, Fox News, October 17, 2021; Brutal Domestic Homicide Sparks Backlash Against Soros Prosecutor, by Kevin Daley, Washington Free Beacon, October 4, 2021].
Here’s another one: Biberaj refused to prosecute a black thug charged with assaulting a cop [Commonwealth’s Attorney Declines to Prosecute Man Charged with Assaulting Leesburg Officer, by Patrick Szabo and Kara C. Rodriguez, Loudoun Now, October 22, 2020].
Biberaj’s management style might be her biggest handicap. Voluntary employee turnover is unusually high [Loudoun County CA Buta Biberaj responds to criticism that she’s an ‘HR nightmare,’ by Nick Minock, WJLA, February 5, 2023]. And she habitually avoids interviews. If she’s friendly with anyone, it’s with defendants and their attorneys, as the Free Beacon’s Daley reported [Soros Prosecutor Under Fire for Mishandling Child Endangerment, Domestic Abuse Cases, by Kevin Daley, February 2, 2022].
“The prosecutors in that office are so scared that if they don’t give the defense everything they ask for there is the fear that the defense attorney will go to Buta and complain that the [assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney] is being too hard,” former county prosecutor Jason Faw wrote in an email to the Democrat chairman of the board of supervisors.
But Biberaj’s Democratic challenger, Elizabeth Lancaster, is no game changer. She’s a former Loudoun County public defender, and still thinks like one. Lancaster, asserts her campaign website, wants “to seek justice by zealously protecting the rights of the accused and the dignity of victims with equity, transparency, and purpose.”
Down page, we read this:
Competence in the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office is fundamental to the safety of our community, the dignity of victims, the rights of those accused, and justice for all.
That is the deceptively soft language of today’s Leftist authoritarian women steeped in a morally self-righteous nurturing. Her sympathies appear to lie more with ostensibly misunderstood criminals than with their prey.
By contrast, the Republican candidate, former Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney Bob Anderson, seems to understand the job. “It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s Republican or Democrat,” he remarked. “The operation of this office is not political” [Bob Anderson slams Loudoun County CA Buta Biberaj for hostility towards judges and press, by Nick Minock, WJLA, May 26, 2023].
Loudoun County is a national bellwether. Communist activists will interpret a victory as an inspiration for further radicalization of America.
If the cliché “all politics is local” means anything, then patriots need to watch Loudoun County, Virginia.
Carl Horowitz [Email him] is a veteran Washington, D.C.-area writer on immigration and other issues
