A man who walked free after a Soros-backed Virginia prosecutor declined to press forward on six felony gun charges has now been arrested for second-degree murder in Washington, D.C. The soft-on-crime pipeline has another body, and the money trail leads straight back to billionaire George Soros.
Malachi Rawlings was charged in January 2025 with six felonies stemming from a shooting inside a Ballston apartment building — including "aggravated malicious wounding" and "use of a machine gun for an aggressive purpose," according to ARLNOW.com. Police found Rawlings in possession of an illegally modified pistol, the kind that carries a potential ten-year federal prison sentence and up to $250,000 in fines just for the machine-gun conversion device alone, per the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The state charges could have put him away for a minimum of 25 years, with a maximum of life without parole plus 49 years.
He didn't serve that time. Instead, Rawlings received what the Daily Caller described as "deferred adjudication" from Arlington County Commonwealth's Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti — a prosecutor who took nearly $1 million in donations from political action committees funded by George Soros, according to campaign finance records.
On August 2, the Metropolitan Police Department announced that Rawlings had been arrested on a D.C. Superior Court warrant and charged with second-degree murder while armed. A 30-year-old woman was found unconscious and suffering from gunshot wounds on May 12. The arrest came courtesy of the Capitol Area Regional Fugitive Task Force.
The Daily Caller reported the Soros money connection and the dropped charges clearly. The local Arlington outlet ARLnow confirmed the original felony counts and the deferred adjudication outcome. The mainstream outlets covering the D.C. murder charge made no mention of the Virginia prosecutor's role in letting Rawlings walk the first time.
Dehghani-Tafti has been candid about her priorities. "I have used my lobbying power as a prosecutor to push for gun safety laws," she told Jejune Magazine in 2023. She told ARLnow she plans to prosecute cases under Virginia's assault weapons ban — a law targeting law-abiding gun owners that's currently on hold pending the Supreme Court's decision in Viramontes v. Cook County.
So the arithmetic is plain: a prosecutor bankrolled by a left-wing billionaire declines to prosecute a man caught with an illegal machine gun after he shot someone, then that same prosecutor pledges to go after citizens who own standard semi-automatic firearms. The man she let walk went on to kill.
Dehghani-Tafti's office had the chance to put Rawlings away for decades on the machine-gun charge alone. She chose deferred adjudication instead. A 30-year-old woman is dead. The question isn't whether the system failed — it's who will be held accountable for building it this way, and how many more names get added to the list before voters demand an answer.
