Go-along-to-get-along will not be the strategy of Arlington’s top prosecutor as the nation heads into the second Donald Trump era.
Instead, she is asking those on her side of the political aisle to embrace new ways of fighting back.
“At this point, the right wing just feels more empowered,” Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti said during a monthly gathering of Arlington Senior Democrats, held Nov. 12.
“We need to be clear-eyed about what is happening, start to figure out what the resistance looks like,” she said at the luncheon meeting which later was posted online by organizers.
“The resistance doesn’t look like marches any more — a march can be weaponized against us, and it doesn’t do very much,” she said. “You need three-and-a-half percent of the population constantly, consistently disrupting things.”
“I don’t think you have to play dirty,” Dehghani-Tafti said. “You just can’t rely on norms.”
On the other side of the aisle, Arlington GOP Chair Matt Hurtt took aim at statements of this nature, arguing that they amount to Dehghani-Tafti using “her position and authority to reject the results of a landslide election.”
“Arlington residents want safe communities — free from crime,” he told ARLnow. “The focus of the Commonwealth’s Attorney should be prosecuting lawbreakers, not whipping fellow leftists into a frenzy. Stop the activist act, and please just do your job.”
Election security efforts
While Dehghani-Tafti’s office has a limited role in national politics, it recently waded into election security efforts with the announcement of a nonpartisan task force for possible trouble at the polls.
Dehghani-Tafti promised that prosecutors would “rapidly respond to and investigate any reports of voter intimidation, interference, or fraud,” should they occur.
The task force actually launched in 2020, Dehghani-Tafti clarified to ARLnow, but it has been “getting better at coordinating and anticipating issues each year.”
“We were more front-facing about the work this year because we wanted to assure the community that we are committed to protect their right to vote and to let anyone who might be thinking about disrupting the election know that we won’t hesitate to prosecute,” she said.
The commonwealth’s attorney spent much of Election Day visiting voting precincts, but found little to report, she said.
“Thankfully, we did not see widespread or extreme issues before and during the day of the election and will be following up on additional areas of investigation as they are referred by the Registrar,” she said.
This election cycle, Arlington was also home to a GOP-led training on spotting potential voter fraud. Organizers hoped to rustle up 5,000 volunteers to “be in the room whenever a vote is cast” and preserve election integrity.
Frank Lusby, who manages the Arlington GOP’s election integrity efforts, told ARLnow that Republicans did not detect any instances of fraud during early voting, in mail-in-ballots or on Election Day.
However, he criticized the additional resources needed to process same-day voter registrations this year. He said these created a need for additional paid registration clerks, and contributed to “several days” of extra work for both the Election Office and the Electoral Board.
Lusby also expressed suspicion concerning Dehghani-Tafti’s task force.
“That seemed to arise more from a national narrative on the left to promote the idea of unruly conservative voters — which we have never had in Arlington,” he said.
Nationwide challenges for ‘reform prosecutors’
Dehghani-Tafti was one of a trio of progressive-leaning candidates elected commonwealth’s attorneys in Northern Virginia in 2019. She and Fairfax prosecutor Steve Descano won re-election in 2023, but the third — Buta Biberaj — was ousted by Loudoun County voters.
Nov. 5 proved a tough night for Democrats nationally, and was particularly challenging for some of the nation’s more progressive prosecutors:
- In California, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón — who had survived multiple recall efforts — was trounced in a re-election bid by Nathan Hochman, a former Republican running as an independent, while Oakland voters by a large margin recalled progressive Alameda County prosecutor Pamela Price. In 2022, voters in San Francisco had recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin, another high-profile progressive prosecutor.
- In Florida, voters’ verdicts were mixed in two cases of county prosecutors suspended by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). While Monique Worrell was re-elected Orange-Osceola state’s attorney in Florida after being removed by DeSantis in August 2023, Andrew Warren lost his bid to return to office in Hillsborough County after being suspended in August 2022.
Another high-profile prosecutor — Fani Willis in Fulton County, Ga. — won re-election. Though a Democrat, Willis is not typically considered on the party’s progressive wing.
Dehghani-Tafti had little trouble defeating centrist Josh Katcher in the pricey 2023 Democratic primary, but expects to continue to be targeted by those who disagree with her agenda.
“Even on the best of days, they were coming after reform prosecutors like me,” she said.
At the Busboys & Poets luncheon, organizer Bob Platt was among those wondering aloud what the response to the Republican victory at the national level would look like.
“Civil resistance didn’t work that well in the first Trump administration,” he said.
Dehghani-Tafti said those on the left needed to prepare “a resistance in a way that doesn’t look like traditional political organizing” if they aimed to stymie Republicans eager to “impose the national agenda on areas like Arlington.”
