In this conversation, Doylestown’s Joe Khan discusses his candidacy for Bucks County district attorney. He talks about his extensive experiences as a federal prosecutor and county solicitor. Khan also highlights the importance of addressing hate crimes and extremism, the need for proactive community engagement, and the philosophical differences between himself and his Republican opponent.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Why are you running for district attorney?
I want my kids to have a DA who’s going to keep them and their classmates and their neighbors and everyone in Bucks County safe. And we don’t have that right now. There’s a lot that’s happening in world that’s really bad. We need people, especially in positions like DA, who are going to stand up and fight for everyone, who are going to do something where we need to to protect us from the bad things that are happening and also to provide some hope, to write a blueprint of the good that we can do together. I spent my career over the course of 25 years doing exactly that as a federal prosecutor, as a county solicitor, keeping us safe, bringing people together, not dividing us. And I think that’s what we need in our DA right now. And that’s why I’m running.
Let’s talk about your career a little bit. Can you explain your experiences as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania? What kind of cases you prosecuted, etc.?
Yeah, I mean, it was really a bridge between the beginning of my career when I started out as a young assistant district attorney, prosecuting strictly violent crime and the worst kinds of crimes you can imagine, sexual assault, child abuse, domestic violence, and a lot of hate crimes. And the work I went on to do taking on corporations and people whose greed and corruption harms communities and doing that on a large scale, often with the powers of civil justice. And in between those two kind of bookends of my career was 10 years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office where I really did everything. I did very significant violent crime prosecutions and that work really covered the entire Eastern District of Pennsylvania. So that includes Philadelphia, Bucks County, Montgomery County, all the way up to the Lehigh Valley and as far west as Lancaster. So we were trying to use the incredible power of the United States government to not just lock up people here and there and rack up the statistics, but to thoughtfully take on problems, systemic problems, big problems facing communities, and to try and do something good.
So one big example a lot of folks know about was the work that I did going after the corruption in the city halls of the cities of Allentown and Reading. You had a couple of mayors who were looking out for themselves instead of their communities, the people who needed government to show up for them. And we had to hold them accountable. A lot of people were convicted, a lot of people went to jail, and it just so happens that nearly all those people, including all the elected officials, were members of my party, the Democratic Party.
It didn’t matter to me.
It shouldn’t matter to you as a prosecutor.
And I served in a Department of Justice, I served with members of the FBI and other law enforcement, federal, state, and local, with people from all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of political parties who had exactly that same mindset – that we’re not here to pursue a political agenda, we’re here to keep people safe. I was proud to do that over the course of 10 years as a federal prosecutor working with those stakeholders.
But Cyril, we’re in a very different time right now. And the Department of Justice that I knew, the FBI that I work so closely with, we are losing those institutions to people who have a completely different idea about what those positions are all about. And we need right now, because no one else is coming to save us, we need people in places like the DA’s office to stand up for us and to start to address some of these threats that the federal government is not taking on and in some cases is part of the problem.
In 2020, you were appointed Bucks County Solicitor. Can you talk about how that helped prepare you for potentially taking on the role of Bucks County DA?
Among other things, it was an opportunity to really learn all of the incredible components that make Bucks County such a special place, to see where all the places were that people needed government to stand up for them. You know, we talk a lot about the work that we did reaching out to our marginalized communities, communities where people don’t really speak English very well or not at all, who weren’t really hearing from their government. And when we were doing that work, we started to understand that a lot of those folks felt victimized by used car dealers. And when we showed up and listened to those folks and realized there might be something we could do at the local level, that led us to create a bill of rights for everyone in Bucks County, no matter who they were. The first ever used car lemon law was created here in Bucks County.
It’s an example of the work that we did standing up to protect our environment, standing up to go after corporate greed, whether it was Norfolk Southern after that train derailment that we all know about, whether it was polluters who harmed our environment, whether it was social media companies that went after our kids.
And so often, I did that work not only with the support of all of the county commissioners, the Democratic and Republican commissioners, but often I did that in partnership, teaming up and going to court with our district attorney. He was a Republican, I was a Democrat.
It didn’t matter that we are from different parties. We understood the need to stand up and keep our community safe.
We don’t have a district attorney right now who is proactively looking for the opportunities to enforce our constitutional rights to a clean environment, to a fair education, to protect a woman’s right to in Bucks County.
“I’m particularly concerned about the threat that we are seeing right now with the rise of hate and extremism all across this country and the failure of the current DA to stand up and assure everyone in Bucks County that the DA’s office is going to keep them safe.”
These are rights that when you take an oath to the Constitution as district attorney, it’s something that you need to take seriously, not just a ceremony that you do on the first day. So I’ve spent 16 years as a prosecutor, I’ve served Bucks County as its solicitor, and it’s time that we have a district attorney who understands the full power of that office. Because on a good day, the current DA is doing maybe half the job. We’re seeing prosecutions of crimes that the DA has been prosecuting for years, but what we’re not seeing is proactive support to address the crimes that we’re facing right now and the utilization of that office to do so much more to stand up for everyone. I’m particularly concerned about the threat that we are seeing right now with the rise of hate and extremism all across this country and the failure of the current DA to stand up and assure everyone in Bucks County that the DA’s office is going to keep them safe.
Let’s talk about that a little more. You had also mentioned your previous work as a federal prosecutor on hate crimes. And this is an issue that you want to put front and center in the Bucks County DA’s office should you be elected. We’ve seen locally an uptick of both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, though sadly that’s something that’s kind of always been bubbling under the surface in Bucks County and other places across the country. That being said, how would you as district attorney combat hate crimes in Bucks County?
The first thing I want to talk about, Cyril, is the work that we’ve done before because we’ve been here before. I remember the election of Barack Hussein Obama when in that exact moment we did see a rise in hate and extremism. Again, we saw a rise in anti-Semitism. We saw a rise in white supremacy. We saw a rise in Islamophobia. We saw all of these folks looking for opportunities for scapegoats, for people to blame and people to hurt.
And I was in the U.S. Attorney’s Office at that time and we saw the opportunity and the need for our office to not just work with law enforcement, but to proactively work with the community – to reach out and to find out what is happening so we can make sure that we have the intelligence and we have the information to use the power of our offices to protect people. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for prosecutors not just to sit there and wait for the cops to put a file on their desk and tell them that they caught someone and it’s time to take them to court. If you want to run a prosecutor’s office that’s really going to keep people safe, you need to be proactive and you need to be out there in the community.
The thing that makes me so really chilled is seeing in all these other areas that I’ve talked about a lot, protecting consumers, protecting the environment, where we’ve seen the federal government, in some cases, the Pennsylvania attorney general retreat from their obligations.
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In this moment, right, at a moment when our Jewish constituents and friends and neighbors and loved ones are celebrating high holidays, we saw the FBI announce that they have ended their relationships with the very groups that for many years we relied on to track hate groups and domestic extremism. I’m talking about the Anti-Defamation League. I’m talking about the Southern Poverty Law Center. This ought to be a wake-up call to everyone in Pennsylvania and everyone across this country and certainly here in Bucks County.
What was the response from our district attorney when [FBI Director] Kash Patel went on TV and bragged about how they were going to cut ties with all these groups that were tracking hate in this country. It was the same response we’ve heard to all the other bad things that are coming out of Washington. This district attorney will not stand up to her political base. She will not call out corruption and she will not assure people in Bucks County that we are gonna have a district attorney who’s gonna do more to keep them safe.
And the alarming reports of racist, antisemitic, and violent hate shared among aspiring Republican leaders is the latest reminder of the growing threats to religious and ethnic minorities at our colleges, workplaces, and public spaces. We need to be clear-eyed, proactive and ready to do the hard work of building a District Attorney’s Office that will keep all of us safe from hate crimes.
We are long past the time where action is needed. And I think the only thing we can do now is make sure that people get out there and vote for a new DA, and we implement a new vision for addressing hate crimes and extremism here in Bucks County.
What are a few of the other top criminal justice issues Bucks County residents face right now?
There’s a lot of issues that we think about as traditional crime issues. We wanna make sure that we’re doing the right things, not just to catch drunk drivers, but by putting things in place that lower the incidence of drug driving in the first place. We wanna make sure not only that we’re arresting people who are using guns to commit violence, but that we’re doing more to stop the flow of illegal guns on our streets in the first place.
There’s so many of these areas where frankly, the district attorney hasn’t done enough to do more than just prosecute crime, but to stop crime before we have more victims in Bucks County. And that’s a critical part of the work I did as a federal prosecutor. It wasn’t good enough for us to lock up a couple of guys that we caught with guns. We wanted to make sure that we use the levers of the power that we had to encourage them to help us solve unsolved murders. To go up the chain and to catch the people who were calling the shots in these criminal organizations. We don’t really have a system like that in place in Bucks County. And so much of this requires closer cooperation across groups. I’m talking about local law enforcement. I’m talking about federal and state law enforcement.
And back to this issue of talking about hate crimes. I’m talking about working with community groups, whether it’s the Human Relations Commission, whether it’s the NAACP, to say, listen, we don’t want to wait for something bad to happen and then have a press conference bragging about the fact that we can get a conviction. That’s not what the job of a district attorney is. And for too long, we’ve had a district attorney who thinks that’s good enough. We need to have a system in place where the district attorney is in the community, and is working with people, and looking at the stories that if you just show up, you’re going to hear from people. You know, I spent the weekend with some friends who no longer live in Bucks County. They now live in Montgomery County. And they had shared with me the fact that they just didn’t feel as Jewish Americans that Bucks County was really a place that was safe for them.
And that really stung.
And I asked them, well, you know, did you ever have a conversation with the district attorney or someone in that office about how you were feeling? And they looked at me like, well, why would I ever do that? Because they had no idea who the district attorney in Bucks County was. And that’s unfortunately too often the kind of reaction I hear from people when we talk about these problems that face our community. Well, what’s the district attorney doing about it? And they say, well, I didn’t think that’s something that the DA did.
If we get through this election and I’m feeling pretty confident that we can do this and people get out to vote, I’m going to wake up every single day making up my business to figure out what is it that the DA can do to make people’s lives better. And most importantly, what is it that we need to do to make sure that we keep Bucks County safe?
Joe, can you discuss a little more about the main philosophical differences between you and your Republican opponent, Jennifer Shorn, and where would your practical approaches to criminal justice diverge?
I think the most fundamental philosophical difference is the idea of a district attorney that is basically going to do things the way that the job has been done since it became full-time in the 1970s and doing things the same way over and over, waiting for the police to lock someone up, get a confession, and then just allow you to have a press conference and take credit for the win. Or if we’re going to have a district attorney’s office that we expect more from, that is going to be more proactive.
I’ll give you one example. Up in Upper Makefield, there is a pipeline maintained by Sunoco that runs underneath those homes as well as homes all across Bucks County. Neighbors started smelling a leak. Sunoco told them that there was nothing to worry about. Well, it turns out that wasn’t true. And it turns out the jet fuel was leaking into their water supply. And now it turns out that those families that live in Upper Makefield are trapped in their homes.
It turns out that they can’t sell those homes because the property value has dropped down to zero and because the drinking water is not safe they can’t mix the water coming out of their taps with baby formula to feed their little ones. And these folks went to the district attorney and said, what are you going to do about this? You’re the top law enforcement official in Bucks County, right? We deserve justice. We need someone to help us with this catastrophe. And we want to make sure this doesn’t happen in any neighborhood anywhere else in Bucks County. The district attorney said, well, that just isn’t my job.
Now that may be the response that district attorneys may have given to people in the past, but this is 2025 and that’s not good enough anymore. And when you take an oath to the Constitution, you got to take an oath to the entire Constitution, not just the parts that you like the most. Article One, Section 27 of [Pennsylvania’s] Constitution guarantees every man, woman, child, and unborn person in Bucks County the right to clean air, pure water, and the enjoyment of our amazing environment across Pennsylvania. And that includes Bucks County.
So it is not acceptable to have a district attorney that basically views the job as an opportunity just to continue doing the same thing over and over again, making sure that they have their statistics the way that they want them to look and claiming credit when they win cases in court that aren’t necessarily difficult to prove. So I think fundamentally it’s a different vision.
Cyril, you know when I had the honor of serving as county solicitor here in Bucks County, I had the opportunity not only to do things that no county solicitor in Bucks County had ever done. But we did things that no county solicitor anywhere had done. That case that we brought against the social media companies, that was the first county lawsuit of its kind. And we can go through all of the other areas where we took an office that wasn’t necessarily envisioned as a place that was gonna be innovative, that was gonna be forward thinking, that was gonna be seen as a source of how you make life better in Bucks County. And fundamentally, Cyril, this election is a choice between a DA who looks at problems that are facing everyday people and says to those folks, well, that just is not my job, and a public school parent who wakes up every day wanting to build a better world for his children and making sure that when I go to sleep at night, I can tell my kids, I can tell every family in Bucks County that I did everything in my power with the time that I’ve been given by the voters to make things better and to keep them safe.
We’re also recently critical of Shorn’s handling of a Republican election fraud case involving a Bucks County Republican committee person. Can you unpack for us some of your concerns with how her office is handling this?
Well, I think the most important thing I need to begin with is by saying that we have a pending criminal case and so I think everyone deserves the presumption of innocence. And I’m going to just tell you what’s been reported and what the allegations are.
According to the allegations, despite the fact that the supporters of my opponent have been spreading false accusations for years that there is rampant voter fraud and somehow that the Board of Elections in Bucks County isn’t taking voter fraud seriously. They made those claims when we went to court back in 2020, when Donald Trump and his friends were trying to steal the election and we protected the rights of every voter in Bucks County and made sure that we protected the integrity of the election and that we rooted out any attempts to commit fraud. And so it turns out in 2025, the board of elections did catch an instance of voter fraud and they found someone who was alleged to have tried to vote for a dead person.
And they sent that referral over to the district attorney’s office for possible prosecution. Well, guess what? It turns out that the person who was caught, it doesn’t really matter what anyone’s political party is when you look at these facts, but this person happened to be an elected member, an elected Republican committee member, which is the very organization that my opponent went to for support and continues to rely on for support in this particular election.
But there’s more.
The alleged crime was trying to commit voter fraud in the 2025 election in which my opponent and I are both on the ballot. Now, if I was a district attorney and someone who was part of, one of my top supporters, was accused of trying to rig the election in an election in which I was on the ballot, this would have been an obvious call for me and frankly any second year legal ethics student, which is why so many people have expressed outrage at the district attorney’s office refusal to send this case to another prosecutor. It’s what she’s done when we’ve faced serious threats in Bucks County, whether it was the Sunoco Pipeline leak or the Central Bucks School District issues that we’ve had here in our county. But instead the district attorney insisted on handling this one herself, said, nope, this one is a job for me. And at the same time that the district attorney falsely accuses Democrats of not being serious about holding dangerous offenders and people charged with crimes accountable through the appropriate use of bail, the district attorney’s office allowed this person to go home without having to post any bail whatsoever.
So obviously this is hypocritical. Obviously this is outrageous. And obviously this is a case where the district attorney ought to have allowed somebody who was not gonna be vulnerable to these accusations of bias to handle the case. And it’s just, it’s sad and it’s unfortunate, but it’s just long past time that we have a district attorney who is going to be independent, who is going to give everyone confidence, who has a record of not just working for Republican elected officials or Democratic elected officials.
I served under five different U.S. attorney generals, three Republicans and two Democrats. I was hired by a Republican U.S. attorney. I was appointed by a bipartisan, unanimous board of commissioners here in Bucks County, two Democrats and one Republican. My career has been about public service, not about politics. And we will get through this election. We will each make our case to the voters. That’s what you do in an election. And if I am rewarded with the opportunity to serve as district attorney, I’m gonna make sure that people in Bucks County have a DA who’s gonna stand up for them no matter who they are.
Let’s pivot a little bit. You had been talking about innovation and forward thinking. So how would you apply that to community-based crime prevention and diversion programs, as well as alternatives to incarceration? What would you introduce, or continue, or bolster should you be elected?
Well, I think when we’re talking about a community-based approach, I think the thing I really want to stress in our interview today, because it really has been on my mind, is this issue of people feeling safe from hate crimes and extremism. And for me, this comes back to how I was raised. And you mentioned immigration. The issue of immigration is a very personal one to me. My dad, was allowed to come to this country because there was not a president who was calling to ban all Muslim immigrants, or to only let immigrants from certain countries come into the United States back then. My dad came here and was welcomed because the president was John F. Kennedy. And my dad got to build a life here in this country. He got to build bridges, literally, as a city engineer in Philadelphia. And he met and fell in love with my mother.
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My dad was Muslim. My mom was Catholic. They raised my brother and me in a Jewish neighborhood. It was a place, Cyril, where I learned to listen and to stand up for everyone.
I’m having the same conversations with my Jewish friends, with my Muslim friends, with my friends who are African American. People are feeling really nervous and they’re feeling really, really unsafe right now. And so I think we need to be very clear-eyed about the threats that we have right now. I think we need to connect the dots when we see our defense secretary, our FBI director, going out and claiming to attack what they call DEI. But I think a lot of people hear is code for having a less inclusive government. So I think the most important thing we need to do right now is make sure that we have leaders who have the right values and who will truly stand up for everyone. And that’s part of the work that I’m going to make sure that we do on day one as the district attorney.
Is there anything else you’d like to leave voters with?
Well, I just want to come back to this issue that we’ve been talking about when it comes to going after hate crimes in Bucks County because I think it’s so critical at this moment in time with the announcement from the FBI that they were severing their ties, that they are obviously taking a retreat from doing this work. And I really call upon your [readers], anyone who wants to get involved to reach out to us, because I can’t emphasize this enough. This is not going to be a DA’s office that is going alone on addressing hate crimes.
I am going to convene a hate crimes task force here in Bucks County and I’ll play whatever role I need to play as part of that task force, but I don’t want this to be a one-person show. We need to make sure that we have buy-in from our local police. We have amazing organizations as we mentioned the NAACP, the Human Relations Commission, others who are actively involved in this work.
We need everyone together.
And so I really want your [readers] to take from this that if they’ve been seeing these dots out there and they’ve been connecting them, that if we are able to win these elections and I’m able to serve as DA, that we’re going to have a district attorney who’s going to be ready on Day One to not just connect these dots – but to lift us up together – because we have to stand strong. We cannot get defeated by all the bad things that are happening right now. We cannot get distracted from all the nonsense that Donald Trump puts out on social media every day.
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If I can amplify one thing from all these national news stories, it’s look at what is happening to our FBI? Look at who they are recruiting, look at who they are trying to kick out, and look at the work that they have walked away from. And let’s ask ourselves this question: We have the power of a vote in [18] days. What are we going to do with it? And right now in Bucks County, we have an opportunity to elect a new DA, elect a new sheriff, elect a new controller, recorder of deeds, prothonotary, and four new members of our bench in an election where the rule of law is literally on the ballot. At the same time, we can vote Yes to retain our Supreme Court justices and our statewide judges to protect our rights.
It is more vital than ever because of all of the outcomes that happened in November of 2024, that we have to hold the line right now in 2025. We have to stand up, we have to fight. There’s a reason they’re pouring millions of dollars into Bucks County and even more than that into Pennsylvania to try and throw out our Supreme Court and to try and hold these offices.
We need to stick together. But if we come together and we get out the vote, we’re gonna win.
