A shadowy for-profit company and its nonprofit counterpart provide free services to at least 40 far-left prosecutors’ offices, raising questions about whether it’s working on behalf of taxpayers or of donors who have essentially bought government.
The Wren Collective is a shadowy group that emerged from a Cold War-era initiative aimed at promoting Soviet films in the United States. Its current iteration — funded by a former Enron executive and host of other eftist megadonors — claims that America’s “system of policing and mass incarceration is deeply flawed and intractably racist.”
The group has intervened on specific criminal cases, written policies that the district attorneys implement — such as eliminating cash bail — and strategized with at least one district attorney to mobilize activists to pressure judges who stood in the way.
That’s according to new research from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, which used public records laws to secure tens of thousands of communications between leftist prosecutors and Wren.
Emails suggest that the collective gets funding from donors contingent on government offices agreeing to do the group’s bidding, even demanding proof that an office is following Wren’s recommendations in order to satisfy donors. Those same donors often bankrolled the district attorney’s election campaign.
“Once in office, these donor-activist groups leverage their political relationships with prosecutors to embed The Wren Collective in their offices as the DAs’ lead policy and communications advisors,” the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund said.
“The Wren Collective, a single obscure consulting group, could only make policy for dozens of progressive prosecutors’ offices and nearly 50 million Americans if those district attorneys understood the group’s help was strongly suggested by their shared political donors and allies,” it added. “Wren’s fiduciary duty and client loyalty remained with their political and nonprofit donors — the same donors who got them ‘hired’ as unpaid policy and communications consultants to the elected prosecutors.”
One donor is David Menschel, a Portland activist who has funded the campaigns of radical DAs across the country. Menschel was a top donor to Portland DA Mike Schmidt in 2020. After he won the election, Menschel connected Schmidt with Jessica Brand, a former public defender who runs the Wren Collective.
Wren employee Amy Weber wrote to Schmidt: “We do this work without any billing or publicity. These policies will be yours.” It soon became apparent that Menschel would be funding Wren for its quasi-governmental work – with conditions. “I spoke to Dave, and all he needs is for us to give him a final scope of work,” Weber wrote.
Another donor is oil heiress Stacy Schusterman. Schusterman donated $1.8 million to PACs supporting the election of José Garza in Austin, Texas. Brand then had Garza’s office speak directly with their shared funder about the work that Brand’s group could do inside government.
Wren stands at the ready anytime soft-on-crime policies create a mess for prosecutors. When Loudoun County, Virginia’s prosecutor, Buta Biberaj, personally tried to jail the father of a girl who was raped by a “genderfluid” boy in the school bathroom — while the boy went on to sexually assault a second girl — Wren asked whether “you would like some communications support.” Wren went on to form a relationship with Biberaj’s office that included drafting “diversion” policies, which involved even lighter penalties for crime.
George Soros has reshaped law enforcement in the United States by injecting huge sums of money into previously sleepy elections, with far-left candidates sometimes outspending their rivals tenfold, and still squeaking out only the narrowest victories. The strategy involves the idea that influence groups don’t have to convince legislatures to change laws if they can place prosecutors who will simply decline to enforce them.
But this new breed of candidate has often never worked as a prosecutor, instead coming from activism circles that defend the rights of criminals. Once they’re in office, that support never goes away, the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund report found.
“The node of this donor-backed prosecutor influence operation is The Wren Collective LLC,” it wrote. “The substance of those policies – abolishing bail and releasing dangerous offenders, declining to prosecute narcotics, shoplifting, prostitution, and rioting while increasing prosecutions of law enforcement officers – have had serious consequences for public safety.”
In San Antonio, Texas, the Wren Collective “developed and implemented prosecutorial policies” for DA Joe Gonzales, all without a public contract. Brand was Gonzales’s “shadow communications director and senior advisor–despite other holding those roles on the public payroll,” the report said.
Even as the group secretly worked for the DA, Brand presented herself to the media as an independent expert who sought to deflect blame from Gonzales when crime rose. When the police chief complained of an increase in homicides because criminals saw few consequences, Brand orchestrated a seemingly organic “op-ed from a community advocate” in response.
Text messages show that in March 2020, Brand told the San Antonio DA’s office to drop a death penalty case, and offered to use a political action committee to pressure judges. “You could settle that death penalty case right now and no one would bat an eye,” she wrote. “Are the judges being any better? Or would it be helpful if some real justice pac volunteers started calling?”
In 2022, when a police officer non-fatally shot a suspect who hit him with a car, Wren pushed to drop charges against the suspect and indict the officer instead. “We got an indictment on the officer,” Gonzales’ deputy texted Brand. “Thanks for the help.” Brand’s group even told Gonzales what to say about it, with the deputy reassuring her that he “stuck to the talking points.”
When Gonzales faced a recall, Brand connected him with lawyers to fight it. Gonzales replied, “This was sent to my work email, and I do not always check my work emails as often as I do my personal.” He told her to communicate with him on his personal email “because my secretarial staff can see my emails.”
The group wrote policies eliminating cash bail that were adopted by prosecutors in Virginia, Texas, and Florida; a policy that resulted in Portland not charging left-wing rioters; and a “Sex Work Policy” to “mitigate the many harms and abuses plaguing sex workers, who often also struggle with poverty, discrimination, and marginalization, by declining to prosecute.” It held weekly calls with since-recalled San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin.
Yet the Wren Collective is shrouded in secrecy. The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund said many prosecutors refused to turn over communications with the group under public records laws, with some demanding up to $14,000 and others producing responses that omitted communications that the law enforcement group knew existed.
Wren’s nonprofit arm is structured as a “fiscally sponsored project” of a larger nonprofit: the shell of a group dedicated to pushing Soviet films in the United States before the fall of the Communist bloc. That intermediary serves as a black box, preventing its donors and its staff salaries from being directly disclosed. But the larger group, once known as the American-Soviet Film Initiative, has reported millions in funding from the foundations of Schusterman, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla, and Cari Tuna, the wife of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.
Another major funder is Arnold Ventures, the charity of former Enron executive John Arnold. Arnold Ventures’ former COO now works for Wren.
Yet records show that even as billionaires wrote checks so the nonprofit could provide shadow government workers free of charge, which the Wren Collective used to gain easy access to offices, Brand would sometimes later ask DAs to pay an identically-named for-profit firm. One contract obtained by the law enforcement group showed that the money — $15,000 a month from the office of Los Angeles DA George Gascon — went to Wren Collective, LLC. The contract was awarded without competition.
Wren may have pulled the same bait-and-switch on Minneapolis prosecutor Mary Moriarty. In May, the Department of Justice said it was investigating Moriarty for civil rights violations after saying that charging decisions would take into account a suspect’s “racial identity”. The following month, Moriarty asked the Board of Supervisors for approval to pay Wren $150,000 to counteract “misinformation.”
Brand did not respond to The Daily Wire’s questions about the difference between the nonprofit and for-profit groups, how much she was paid, which prosecutors she had worked for, who funded the nonprofit, and whether providing donor-funded services to government offices posed ethical concerns.
The group works hand-in-hand with a second group that steers Soros prosecutors after their election, Fair and Just Prosecution. FJP’s founding executive director, Miriam Krinsky, resigned last year, the day that The Daily Wire published documents showing her staff accused her of racism and said she hypocritically called the police on them. She was replaced by Aramis Ayala, a black former Orlando prosecutor who is married to a member of the Wren Collective’s board.
Ayala was replaced as Orlando prosecutor by Monique Worrell, who gave confidential files to Wren so that the group could write a memo justifying not charging a teen with murder. The suspect was found in possession of a machine gun months later and sent to prison by federal prosecutors.