CLEVELAND, OH – In their quest to advance diversity, equity and inclusion, the “woke” faction of Cuyahoga County’s Democratic Party is backing an inexperienced, leftwing Korean immigrant as a candidate for Cuyahoga County Prosecuting Attorney over legal veteran and incumbent Michael O’Malley. Attorney Matthew Junghwan Ahn’s candidacy reveals the Democratic Party’s growing willingness to lower the standards for holding elected office, just to have candidates they can promote as “different” to advance their “identity politics.”
Imagine a gay former Cleveland State University (CSU) “law professor,” who taught a junk elective class about law and critical race theory the American Bar Association’s been forcing into law school curriculums, who’s never practiced law in any local court, who thinks he’s qualified to prosecute criminal laws. Ahn was only recently licensed to practice law in Ohio on June 29, 2022, after he was hired in 2021 to teach law at CSU for $3300 a semester. He had just relocated from New York to Toledo in 2019, and from there to his CSU teaching job in Cleveland in 2021.
Ahn’s “career” as a federal public defender is non-existent. His “career” is more reflective of that of a job hopper. His faculty page at CSU has been removed. State university professors in federally funded institutions violate the federal Hatch Act when they campaign for partisan political offices. Ahn is characteristic of the kind of low-end Dean Lee Fisher hire that causes CSU’s law school to be ranked 111th out of 198. If Ahn knew the Hatch Act, and was operating within the law, he would have resigned, or Fisher would have sought his termination as soon as he announced his candidacy. It’s odd that Fisher thinks it makes sense to hire an unlicensed attorney who’s never practiced law in Ohio to teach law.

If the “activists” backing Ahn over O’Malley actually read his campaign promises, they might be alarmed if they want bad police identified and held accountable, and think their Asian “minority” candidate is a constitutional breath of fresh air. It’s O’Malley who teamed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to prosecute an unprecedented 19 East Cleveland police officers under Mayor Brandon King, who allowed them to operate like an organized crime gang. Reading between the lines of the sentence below, Ahn doesn’t want police “overburdened” when the crooked ones bypass their city prosecutors to file false criminal charges directly with the county prosecutor that can lead to wrongful convictions. It doesn’t appear from his own words as if “probable cause” will matter to Ahn.
“As your prosecutor, I will ensure that police experiences with my office are as smooth as possible, by understanding the many different things we already ask of them and the ways in which a prosecutor’s office can avoid overburdening them further,” Ahn states on his campaign website.
Ahn’s thoughts that police are “overburdened” contradict a cop hating June 17, 2020 letter he attached his name to with over 800 other New York State University alumni. Ahn and his fellow leftwing alumnus were criticizing the U.S. Department of Justice’s criminal charges against disbarred Brooklyn ex-attorneys and anarchists Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, a Pakistani alien. The two anarchists firebombed a New York police car during Antifa’s George Floyd protests in that city on May 30, 2020.

The more than 800 letter signers, Ahn included, thought federal prosecutors were too aggressive in wanting the anarchists locked up until trial. Rahman had written in a leftwing radical group chat that police stations and courts should be “incinerated.” Since “no one was hurt,” Ahn and the other anarchist-loving letter signers wanted Mattis and Rahman freed to continue working for Black, Brown and Latinx communities and illegal immigrants. The burnt $30,000 police vehicle was only property, and collateral damage in their pursuit of justice.
One of the revelations from the Antifa George Floyd protests was Ahn’s stunning claim, as an applicant for the Cleveland Community Police Commission on May 5, 2022, that he was shot by Toledo police. Ahn was researching and writing for the Federal Public Defender’s office in Lucas County at the time he claimed to be a police shooting victim.
What’s sketchy about Ahn’s claim is that Toledo’s mayor reported 10 arrests and three injuries in connection with the George Floyd protests. Ahn’s name wasn’t among the arrested or injured. Twenty plaintiffs filed federal claims against Toledo’s police for shooting them with rubber and wooden bullets, and dispensing tear gas into peaceful demonstrators. Ahn’s name was not among them, either.

Vox reporter Li Zhou interviewed Ahn about his experiences at the May 30, 2020 Toledo protest. In the Chinese writer’s June 12, 2020 story, Zhou reported that her fellow Asian, Ahn, told her he saw police firing wooden bullets at two people. One, he said, appeared to be seriously injured. He said nothing of being shot to Zhou.
In a 15 thread tweet about the May 30, 2020 protest he attended, Ahn referenced in the 8th thread that he had been struck in the thigh by a wooden bullet. Later during the Antifa protest, Ahn wrote that a cop hit him with a nightstick in the same spot where he’d been shot. In the 15th thread, Ahn wrote how he hoped Toledo Police were satisfied with the violence their “wooden monstrosities” inflicted. In the same 15th thread Ahn reveals he was shot three other times with pellets during Antifa protests.
Antifa protests with its own medics. Ahn described an incident where a police fired wood bullet shattered a woman’s leg. He wrote how he told Toledo police to keep away from her while her leg wound was being treated by antifa medics.

Verifying the background stories of immigrant political candidates is a growing problem Americans are having with illegal aliens who’ve given birth to children living under the delusion their birth certificates, and the United States Constitution’s 14th Amendment, makes them American citizens. The 14th Amendment settled only the question of the citizenship of American Negroes freed after slavery. It ended the Supreme Court of the United State’s Dred Scott ruling of 1857 that enslaved Negroes were not U.S. citizens because they were property. Aliens and the children they gave birth to here were “temporary sojourners.”
Ahn doesn’t identify the names of his parents, or the country they arrived from, that he believes makes him now a “first generation American.” He shares a picture of his mother and an unidentified Caucasian man when he was a child. On his Cleveland Community Police Commission application, Ahn describes his race as Asian and ethnicity as Korean. It’s evidence the Caucasian man is not his biological father.
Ahn’s description of himself as a “first generation American” poses a conundrum because he’s gay. To extend his bloodline into the next generation would require Ahn to have sex with a woman willing to bear his children. Ahn has promised, as a Stonewall Democrat, that he will not enforce Ohio laws that protect the lives of unborn children. The Stonewall Democrats are the LGTBQ caucus of the Democratic Party.

Ahn has described his “parents” as retired Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) professors. American universities are being overrun with illegal aliens who arrive here on three-year student visas, who don’t leave and who graduate into a university job without a two-year H1B visa. At CSU, non-citizen aliens from China and India have had hiring control for the past nine years as provosts. CWRU’s 2023 graduating class was 53 percent foreign as its board and campus administrators educate more foreign students than Americans with federal and state tax dollars. The university’s faculty resembles the United Nations.
Ahn never explains how his mother, or both his biological Korean parents, arrived here as immigrants and legally remained. There’s no reference to his Korean father. He never identifies his mother’s visa or citizenship status, or explains how and if she applied for citizenship or to become a lawful permanent resident.
On his campaign website, Ahn stresses his roots to Cuyahoga County and claims he “grew up” in North Royalton. He admits to living in Berea, Cleveland Heights and now downtown Cleveland. He claims to have graduated from law school in 2014 and become a public defender because he had a “hunger for justice.” From his campaign website, readers are given the impression he’s completely home grown with his attendance at Case Western Reserve University and never left the area.
“Matthew’s hunger for justice led him to become a public defender after graduating from law school. He has spent his career as a sentencing, appeals, and post-conviction specialist, confronting the system’s negative impacts on clients, victims, families, and the entire community. As a federal public defender here in Northern Ohio, he won a number of rare victories, including a major change in compassionate release law in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, one level below the Supreme Court of the United States. He has spent the last two years teaching at Cleveland State University School of Law, where he was voted Faculty Member of the Year by the students in 2023.”
According to his Linked In page, Ahn studied chemisty and music theory at CWRU from 2004 until 2008. From 2008 until 2010 he left Ohio to study music composition at the University of Minnesota. He decided to study law and relocated from Wisconsin to New York where he was enrolled at New York University School of Law from 2011 until 2014. From 2015 until 2016, Ahn continued his New York residency the two years he won the city’s subway challenge. His Linked In page shows two fellowships at New York non-profits. On June 22, 2016, Ahn was admitted to practice law in New York state.

Ahn remained in the New York area between 2011 and 2019 before returning to Ohio to Toledo. He worked far less than two years in the Toledo office of the Federal Public Defender between 2019 and 2021 before he job hopped to Cleveland State University. In August 2021 he registered to vote in Cleveland. Ahn’s first local vote was cast in the September 14, 2021 Cleveland mayoral primary election. Lucas County records show Ahn was registered to vote in that county on January 10, 2020. His background seems more like that of an Antifa plant who targeted the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office from New York. In a Tweet Ahn described O’Malley as the county’s “district attorney.”
On June 29, 2022 Ahn was admitted to practice law in Ohio, about one year after he left the Federal Public Defender’s office for his $3300 per semester teaching job at CSU. His “career” as a non-attorney “public defender” had been less than two years. It began five years after he graduated from law school in New York. Ahn became a federal public defender’s office employee, and not an attorney, in a state, Ohio, here he was not licensed to practice law. O’Malley has been quick to point out that Ahn has not tried a misdemeanor or felony case in any of Cuyahoga county’s municipal, common pleas or appeals courts.
The June 29, 2022 date Ahn was given permission to hold himself out as an attorney in Ohio is compelling because he’s claimed to have represented “clients” as a career federal public defender. Ahn was admitted to practice law in the state of New York on June 22, 2016, but he wasn’t allowed to hold himself out as an attorney in Ohio pursuant to Section 4705.07 of the Ohio Revised Code, “Unauthorized practice.” His New York license is current and expires in May 2024. Since Ahn wasn’t licensed to practice law in Ohio when he worked for the Federal Public Defender in Toledo, his actual job classification was that of a “research and writing specialist as he wrote on his resume. He described the job on Linked In as a “research and writing attorney.” His edits are imperceptible plays on words intended to reinforce his career public defender attorney lie.
In between his graduating law school in New York in 2014, and returning to Ohio in 2019, Ahn worked as a fellow for two non-profits. He also worked as a law clerk for two U.S. District Court judges, Lawrence E. Kahn in Albany, New York and Jane R. Roth in Philadelphia, Pennylvania. They are additional facts that makes his campaign website claim of graduating from law school and becoming a career public defender a lie. Roth was his last employer before joining the Toledo Federal Public Defender’s office in 2019. Ahn appears to have not resided in Ohio since he left CWRU for the University of Minnesota and a music composition degree in 2008.

Pursuant to section 1901.06 of the Ohio Revised Code, it takes six years of being “admitted” to practice law in Ohio before an attorney is qualified to campaign for a judgeship. Under section 309.02 of the Ohio Revised Code, there is no requirement that a prosecutor build law practice experience before seeking the job. Ahn was teaching a critical race class at CSU instead of practicing law when he was licensed in Ohio. He’s now unemployed.
There’s no requirement that an attorney seeking the county prosecutor’s job know the civil and criminal laws they will appoint and assign assistant prosecutors to advise the county’s officers and employees to obey. Even by his own admission, Ahn’s work with the Federal Public Defender’s office, and work in academia, did not create a familiarity with state and municipal laws.
“My academic expertise, which includes 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the statute that allows police departments to be sued for constitutional deprivations, arises out of my experience working with my public defense clients but also my two federal clerkships, including one in the Northern District of New York, which has one of the highest proportions of § 1983 cases in their docket across the country. I also teach a class that covers police history and considers how the police have responded to reform requests over the last 150 years.”

The inconsistencies and holes in Ahn’s stories about his background and events in his life, are reflective of a growing problem with immigrants seeking access to the privileges of U.S. citizenship that include holding elected offices. The problem with immigrant candidates is local voters can’t confirm their immigration stories, and if they or their parents entered our nation legally. It creates a “George Santos-ish” aura around Ahn because of the sketchy background information he shares with Cuyahoga County Democratic voters and omits on his campaign website. It wasn’t until after Santos was elected that some of the Brazilian native’s lies were uncovered by New York and Congressional Republicans.
Since his background includes lies and half-truths he knowingly shared with the public, Cuyahoga County voters should trust what they know about Ahn and expect him to be the slippery sketch artist he’s presented himself to be as a candidate for elected office. Ahn identifies himself as a “visiting professor” of law at CSU. Visiting professors are temporary teachers on short term contracts. No tenure. Ahn’s campaign shows he’s unemployed and needs a job, and his job-hopping resume doesn’t show him as the type of employee who’s committed to anything but a government paycheck.
The job of Cuyahoga County’s prosecuting attorney is too important to be occupied by a liar who impersonated a federal public defender and lied about being shot by Toledo police.