‘Rotting fruit’: Ashley Moody likens soft-on-crime prosecutors to ‘Manchurian candidates’

Image via AG Gancarski

Attorney General Ashley Moody continued her assault on “liberal” crime policies Monday morning, suggesting that certain prosecutors were “Manchurian candidates.”

“You get these radical liberal prosecutors elected; I think they’re Manchurian candidates. They get in. Many of them used to have ties or were criminal defense attorneys, and they start undermining the system. They start dismissing cases. They stop taking and successfully prosecuting cases brought to them,” Moody said. “They start letting people out on ridiculous bails, even those who are violent.”

Moody referred to the incident in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where a man out on bail drove a car into a parade route, killing multiple people; it was an example of the wrong way to do things.

The AG commented on Fox Business Channel’s “Mornings with Maria Bartiromo,” just one of several quotable comments made in the cable news hit.

Asked about crime in California, where the Governor proposes $300 million on a statewide response to “smash and grab” thefts at stores, Moody called it an example of “rot from the inside.”

“It’s really like rotting fruit. You can’t tell right away as it’s starting to rot from the inside,” Moody said. “But when you see it from the outside, you start seeing murder rates skyrocket.”

Noting that murder rates in Los Angeles and Chicago are up, Moody added, “you have to do something about it.”

“At least making a statement that you’re going to step up and recognize there’s a crisis. They really have no choice now,” Moody added. “And the only way they’re going to do this is (getting) leaders and prosecutors that will start saying we support the police. That you get prosecutors who actually prosecute the cases that police are bringing to them. And they’ll cut off this nonsense of dumping the jails of even those that are going to be a harm to society.”

Moody called such policies a “systematic dismantling of the criminal justice system from the inside out.”

The AG is ramping up her commentary on the news from around the nation as she prepares her re-election campaign next year. Last week, she bashed President Joe Biden as “tone deaf” for appointing defense attorneys to the bench.

Moody herself was once a Circuit Court Judge in Hillsborough County, but she didn’t draw on that experience when arguing against public defenders advancing to the judiciary.