Schmidt: Guilty as charged
What will it take for Mike Schmidt to acknowledge his politics are wrong?
Juries aren’t the only ones who render verdicts. So do voters.
Multnomah County voters found that District Attorney Mike Schmidt was guilty as charged. He didn’t fight for public safety as he had promised. Now one of his career prosecutors — Nathan Vasquez — has defeated him at the polls.
The only thing that could have saved Schmidt was a progressive jury — like the one that acquitted six armed men and one woman who took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters for 41 days.
Those were the glory days of Portland progressive justice — 2016, when the city had grown smug from glowing restaurant reviews in the national media.
On Election Night at the Jupiter Next Hotel about 100 people gathered to wish Schmidt well.
After the early returns weren’t promising, he looked out at those invited to his party: “These are exactly the people I want to be in the room with… .”
He rambled on, thanking various groups including carpenters.
“Wage stealing makes us all less safe,” Schmidt said.
He leaned on safe, progressive mantras.
“Rehabilitation over mass incarceration” got a huge cheer.
The people who voted for him “want a DA that will fight for gun violence prevention. …They want a just system that … stands up for workers whose wages are stolen by bosses.”
Portland City Commissioner Carmen Rubio (now running for mayor) was among those who looked on saddened. She left early, as did others who seemed near tears.
I saw only a couple of black faces, but The Portland Mercury dutifully made sure one of them made it into the photo of its coverage. Three prominent black community leaders — Lakayana Drury of Word is Bond and city council candidates Candace Avalos and Terrence Hayes were among those on the invite list, but I didn’t see them at the party.
The ones who stayed after the initial vote count were indeed the people Schmidt has surrounded himself with since his days on the state Criminal Justice Commission, pushing for legislation and policies beneficial to criminal offenders.
It felt like a good-natured office party. The kind of send-off employees might give to a colleague who’s leaving for another job.
There was Kimberly McCullough, who has done her part to shred the public safety net. When she worked for the ACLU of Oregon, McCullough lobbied for Senate Bill 1008, which now makes it easier for violent juveniles to avoid incarceration or the public scrutiny of adult court. (See “Shredding the Public Safety Net”)
Where does McCullough work now? She’s the legislative director for Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum.
At Schmidt’s party, McCullough laughed it up with Lewis & Clark law professor Aliza Kaplan. Nobody has done more to get early release for convicted murderers than Kaplan. She’s the one who urged then-Gov. Kate Brown to use her clemency powers to not only free killers but cast them as victims of a “broken criminal justice system.” (See “The Ghosts of Crimes Past”)
Kaplan got the ball rolling on Brown’s record-setting commutations, and she also pushed for Senate Bill 819 that took effect in 2020, the year Schmidt became Multnomah County District Attorney. This piece of legislation was proposed by Lewis & Clark’s Criminal Justice Reform Clinic and establishes a procedure whereby a district attorney and an “incarcerated person” may jointly petition the sentencing court for reconsideration of conviction and sentence.
It allowed reform-minded DAs like Schmidt to overturn convictions under the voter-approved Measure 11, which called for minimum-mandatory sentences for certain violent crimes.
Also enjoying Schmidt’s party was another champion for progressive justice — but one whose illustrious political career didn’t go as planned.
Former state Rep. Jennifer Williamson (D-Portland), looking thinner and scragglier than her days as House Majority Leader, greeted old friends as Schmidt moved about the room accepting hugs. If you’re one of the thousands of people who have had your car stolen, you might thank Williamson.
In 2017 and 2018, police and prosecutors appealed to state politicians to fix a loophole that enabled car thieves to get off by saying they didn’t know the car they were driving belonged to someone else. A proposed law would have changed the standard of proof so that the presence of burglary tools or altered keys, for example, could be used as evidence to prosecute a car thief.
Williamson allowed that bill to die on her watch. A similar bill would have to come back in another session before it passed, and vehicle owners caught some relief.
Her big priority was always to gut the voter-approved Measure 11, and Williamson delivered when she gave McCullough and Kaplan Senate Bill 1008 — handing leniency to violent juveniles.
Williamson appeared headed for higher office, maybe even Governor one day. She was briefly the front-runner for the Democratic primary as Secretary of State in 2020. Then Willamette Week delved into her questionable use of campaign funds for eight years. Williamson immediately dropped out of the race.
What is Williamson, an attorney who used to represent criminal offenders and once worked for the Western Prison Project (now renamed Partnership for Safety and Justice) doing these days?
For awhile she was senior vice president of Strategies 360, a lobbying and consulting firm that filed for bankruptcy protection last year. She now works for Swift Public Affairs.
So what’s next for Mike Schmidt?
As he worked his way through the party, I asked him if he would consider criminal defense work. There has been much publicity about the shortage of criminal defense attorneys.
“You know, I’ve never done criminal defense work,” Schmidt said.
Given the proclivities of the people he likes to surround himself with, it would appear that criminal defense work is what he’s been doing all along.
Schmidt was gracious when I told him he probably wouldn’t like the story I was working on. He seemed surprised when I mentioned I had been following his career since his Criminal Justice Commission days. I even attended some of its meetings (courtesy of my employment by then-state Sen. Betsy Johnson, D-Scappoose). How many state legislators staffed those meetings? Not many.
Vasquez will inherit more than a decade’s worth of bad legislation, which has been nurtured by the media and ignored by apathetic voters.
Aside from the Multnomah County DA’s race, there are other signs of movement away from progressive excess.
One was this story in Politico, headlined “Democrats Beware: A Progressive DA Fights for His Job — in Hipster Portland.”
“Should Vasquez prevail, it would represent more than the rejection of a progressive prosecutor,” writes Jonathan Martin. “It would be the culmination of simmering local frustration with crime, homelessness and drug abuse and a resounding correction to the shift left on criminal justice that took place here and in so many cities in 2020.
“It should also get the attention of Democratic lawmakers everywhere. They’ve mostly found success by elevating abortion and MAGA, the party’s best one-two since Dobbs, but their vulnerabilities on quality-of-life issues remain and could prove particularly acute with the broader presidential electorate this fall.”
All candidates in the General Election — Republicans and Democrats alike — should read Martin’s story. (Johnson’s Darth Vader quote is a special treat. You won’t find anything like that on opb.org.)
Schmidt’s supporters might consider how they helped contribute to his failures.
“I voted for you Mike,” tweeted Portland architect Mark VanderZanden on X (Twitter).
In almost the same space, VanderZanden joked about a recent story in The Oregonian reporting that someone has been dropping cans from the top floors of the 23-story Ladd Tower near Southwest Jefferson Street between Park Avenue and Broadway.
So far, the cans have struck the ground and a parked vehicle, but the threat has frightened employees in the neighborhood. VanderZanden dismissed the story as “fear porn” and joked on X (Twitter) “Don’t get canned!”
There was a strange helplessness to The Oregonian’s story, as if there was nothing that could be done.
Portland, Oregon — where the progressive living used to be easy. It isn’t anymore.
The kind of insight about a defeated officeholder that is insightful, yet compassionate, and a depth we haven’t seen in Portland legacy journalism for a long time.
Fitzsimmons draws the connections between the power players, real and imagined, in the immediate aftermath of an election for a post almost nobody pays attention to.
I’m still curious how what was originally a 15% lead was reduced (to a still healthy 54/46 split) by what the O called a”massive last minute turnout” of voters.
A fleeting lede at OregonLive/The Oregonian reported last night that Schmidt plans to serve out the rest of his term, which expires at the end of December 2024.
Bizarrely, Schmidt's Wikipedia entry states that he "will concede to Nathan Vasquez on January 1, 2025 at the end of his term." Let's hope this is a muddled Wikipedia contributor's muddled work product. Electoral etiquette (an oxymoron) requires that Schmidt concede when the official results are final at the latest.
Be that as it may, having been sworn in to office several months prematurely in 2020 and resoundingly fired by the voters on Tuesday, Schmidt should do the correct thing and resign right away. Otherwise, in a perfect world, Vasquez would be within his rights to serve Schmidt with a preservation of records letter.
I submit Schmidt's extreme zeal for criminal justice reform must be driven by feelings of animosity of some kind. I do not want to believe that the wreckage he caused resulted entirely from good but misguided intentions.