Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner spent years telling the city that his progressive experiment would deliver justice while locking up fewer people. Now a federal grand jury is looking at whether the man who calls himself the city’s highest law enforcement official may have tried to obstruct justice in a federal courtroom.
Fox News reports that the Justice Department sent grand jury subpoenas to Krasner’s office in recent days. Two sources briefed on the matter say the subpoenas concern potential obstruction of justice tied to the handling of cases before federal judges. The move follows a referral from U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond, who pointed federal prosecutors toward Krasner and his deputy Matthew Stiegler for possible criminal investigation over false statements, perjury, obstruction, and conspiracy.
Neither man has been charged. Krasner’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and the DOJ declined to comment. That silence is louder than usual for a prosecutor who rarely misses a chance to lecture the rest of the country.
The underlying case involves Dennis Johnson, convicted in 2009 of second-degree murder in the killing of Kenyatta Smith. In 2022 Krasner’s office filed papers saying Johnson was entitled to habeas relief because of ineffective assistance of counsel. Later, prosecutors inside the office raised potential conflicts involving Stiegler and urged that the matter go to the Pennsylvania Attorney General. Krasner opposed that and insisted someone from his own office needed to stay involved to “protect the office.”
Judge Diamond, after evidentiary hearings, concluded that Krasner and Stiegler sought to pressure prosecutors into presenting a false narrative to the court. He wrote that Krasner warned of “consequences” if staff alerted the court to an internal conflict.
“I have thus reluctantly concluded that Philadelphia’s highest law enforcement official and one of his top assistants may have violated the law,” Diamond stated. He disqualified Krasner and Stiegler from the case but left the rest of the office in place.
Krasner pushed back in a statement at the time. “I respectfully and vigorously disagree with the court’s findings of fact and conclusions of law,” he said. “I look forward to appealing to the higher court as soon as the law allows.” He has since tried to get Diamond to recuse himself. The judge refused, calling the latest filings something that generates “more heat than light.”
This is the same Larry Krasner whose campaigns received roughly $1.7 million from George Soros-backed efforts in 2017. He entered office promising to empty jails, end cash bail for many offenses, and treat the criminal justice system as the real problem.
Homicides in Philadelphia hit a record 562 in 2021. Dismissal and withdrawal rates for cases brought by police climbed sharply during his early years. Critics argued the policies created a revolving door. Supporters later pointed to subsequent declines in killings, which fell to 222 in 2025, and argued national trends and policing explained the drop. The argument over numbers never settled the deeper question of whether a prosecutor’s first duty is to victims or to the ideology that got him elected.
Krasner has also drawn congressional scrutiny. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan subpoenaed him in July 2026 over the office’s handling of illegal aliens and sanctuary policies, seeking records on whether the DA’s office gave preferential treatment that shielded noncitizens from immigration consequences. Krasner’s office produced nothing for months.
That subpoena sits in a separate lane from the current grand jury matter, but both point to the same pattern. When outside authorities ask hard questions, the office protects itself first.
Isaiah 5:20 warns, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”
A prosecutor who allegedly pressures staff to hide conflicts and present a false story to a federal judge is not pursuing justice. He is protecting a political project. Progressive district attorneys across the country have treated the courtroom as a venue for social engineering rather than the place where the guilty are held to account and the innocent are cleared. When the engineering requires bending the truth before a federal judge, the project collides with the law.
Krasner still holds office. No charges have been filed. Appeals remain possible. Yet a federal judge concluded the evidence amounted to a prima facie showing of possible criminal conduct, disqualified the city’s top prosecutor from a murder case, and referred the matter for investigation. A grand jury has now issued subpoenas.
Philadelphians who lived through the years of record bloodshed already knew the experiment carried costs. Those costs may now include a federal probe into whether the man elected to enforce the law decided the law did not apply when it threatened his office. Fox News first reported the subpoenas. Just the News covered the original referral. Townhall noted the broader context of Krasner’s clashes with federal authorities.
The subpoenas do not prove guilt. They do prove that a federal court no longer trusts the story the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office tried to tell.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.