Longtime federal prosecutor builds case to replace Roger Marshall in U.S. Senate
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- Jason Hart cites 21 years prosecuting child abuse as central to his Senate bid.
- Hart envisions televised hearings to gather evidence if Democrats regain Senate control.
- Hart switched party registration twice before entering the Democratic Senate primary.
Jason Hart, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Kansas, believes his 21 years prosecuting child abusers to be “peculiarly relevant” experience in a moment when voters are clamoring for Congress to expose convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s collaborators.
He also wants to see the Senate use its oversight authority to investigate alleged corruption within the Trump administration, including whether a broker for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attempted to invest in major defense companies on the eve of the war in Iran. The Pentagon has dismissed that reporting by The Financial Times as “entirely false and fabricated.”
“Rather than simply pound on a table and grandstand, I’m going to ask questions that have an intended purpose, that are focused on elements of criminality,” said Hart, a University of Kansas law grad who served in the Shawnee County District Attorney’s office and the Kansas Attorney General’s office before becoming an assistant U.S. attorney in 2010.
Hart said that if Democrats regain control of the Senate in November, he envisions televised hearings exposing abuses and collecting evidence to be used in criminal prosecutions under an eventual Democratic administration.
“People want to talk about the economy, and I’m like, yes, affordability happens only if you have accountability,” said Hart, 51, who lives in Wichita and quit his job prosecuting child exploitation and cybercrime cases in March to pursue elected office.
He changed his voter registration from independent to Republican as he explored a primary challenge to U.S. Rep. Ron Estes. Then, he switched his registration to Democratic and waded into a formidable field of candidates vying to take on GOP Sen. Roger Marshall in his first reelection bid.
“I don’t want to give the Republicans my credentials on their side,” Hart said. “I made the joke in the (Kansas) Reflector article that my wife wouldn’t want to sleep with a Republican. Which is true. She did say that.
“I didn’t want to give the Republicans my credentials because I think they have abandoned law and order and I think they have abandoned their moral authority,” Hart added. “And they don’t deserve a candidate like me.”
Hart said he is pro-abortion rights and vehemently opposed to the Trump administration’s “cruel and incoherent” immigration policy. He described himself as a gun owner who supports “rational policies related to gun ownership.”
“If (voters) want to know my politics, they can think about what I’ve been prosecuting,” Hart said. “What I’ve been prosecuting is domestic violence crimes and child abuse, which I tend to think is a more left-leaning, pro-feminist type of prosecution.”
Why run for U.S. Senate?
Hart was born in Russell, Bob Dole’s hometown, and grew up in western Kansas. He said that from a young age, he knew what he wanted to do with his life.
As a sophomore at Dodge City High School, the career tract he chose in the Game of Life exercise was that of a district attorney prosecuting child abuse crimes.
“I wanted to create safe spaces for kids,” Hart said, a conviction he developed after his family took foster children into their home and he witnessed the physical and emotional scars they carried with them.
“This administration was taking away my ability to prosecute those crimes,” Hart said, pointing to the reassignment of thousands of federal investigators working high-priority cases, including child abuse, drug trafficking, terrorism and fraud, to carry out President Trump’s immigration agenda.
“They took the agents who had been working my cases, either at FBI or (Homeland Security Investigations) that had been assigned down to the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force — they took them to work immigration, their surge operations,” Hart said.
He said those surge operations have been disastrous and that the “scapegoating” of immigrants makes everyone less safe.
“(Immigrants) are the way that many of our communities survive. They create businesses. They pay into our system. They’re not a drag on our services,” Hart said.
“The whole business of, ‘Oh, they’re rapists and blah blah blah,’ — as a prosecutor of sex crimes, I can tell you, it’s U.S. citizens who are the most dangerous people in our communities. Just empirically, statistically,” he said.
Hart is one of nine candidates seeking the Democratic nomination in August. Other candidates include the Rev. Adam Hamilton, retired corporate executive Sandy Spidel Neumann, real estate developer Erik Murray, state Sen. Patrick Schmidt, former Biden USDA official Christy Davis, Army veteran Noah Taylor, attorney Anne Parelkar and Michael Soetaert of Wellington.
