Minnesota hasn’t elected a Republican attorney general since 1970, but Ron Schutz could change that.
Polls put the race between Schutz and incumbent Attorney General Keith Ellison as too close to call. The Republican Attorneys General Association called Ellison “the most vulnerable incumbent AG in the country” and has helped bankroll Schutz’s campaign.
As elected offices go, it’s easy to learn about an attorney general’s performance (though the process for doing this is not exactly beach reading).
Ellison lists all the times he has sued the Trump White House and the times it has sued Minnesota. The attorney general’s office releases voluminous reports to the Minnesota Legislature describing its budget and legal actions.
Unlike many other states, Minnesota’s county district attorneys – and not the attorney general – take the lead on criminal prosecutions. But the attorney general has criminal jurisdiction over one very specific area – prosecuting Medicaid fraud. Here too, there are court records to comb through and news accounts to catch up on about Ellison’s Medicaid fraud record.
Also, the importance of state attorneys general is growing.
“State AG elections have become increasingly consequential, particularly as attorneys general have assumed a more prominent role in shaping enforcement priorities and influencing national regulatory policy,” emailed Martha Stolley, a partner in the New York office of the law firm Morgan Lewis, who has documented the history of state attorneys general.
But the heavily documented nature of the job plus its growing impact has apparently not prompted Schutz to say what he would do if elected.
Schutz did not return messages for this story.
One example is whether Schutz would withdraw from all, some or none of the dozens of lawsuits Ellison has filed against the Trump administration, the majority of which are efforts to claw back Congressionally appropriated money.
Schutz demurred when asked about the Trump lawsuits at an MPR News debate moderated by politics editor Brian Bakst.
“I haven’t had a chance to look at all these cases, Brian,” Schutz said. “I simply haven’t had the resources to dig into these cases.”
If other state attorneys general elections serve as a guide, Schutz would withdraw from most of the Trump cases.
Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law in Virginia, witnessed Republican Jason Miyares replace a Democrat as Virginia attorney general in 2022. Then, last year, Democrat Jay Jones defeated Miyares.
Miyares and Jones both withdrew from dozens of their predecessors’ cases and filed new ones on subjects that reflected the ideology of their respective political parties. “I’m pretty suspicious that Schutz isn’t going on the record about this,” Tobias said. “I imagine he would do something similar to what happened here.”
And Diana Cortes, a partner at Morgan Lewis’ Philadelphia office who has worked with Stolley on tracking state attorneys general, wrote in an email, “Ultimately, a change in an AG office’s partisan control could result in that state joining or withdrawing from a multistate litigation coalition, influence which investigations and lawsuits that state pursues, and significantly shift enforcement priorities.”
Schutz’s overhaul could also go beyond cases, and include replacing the offices’ 416 employees.
“Attorneys working in the Minnesota Attorney General’s office are not protected by civil service laws,” said Prentiss Cox, a law professor at the University of Minnesota. “Sometimes a new AG of a different party will do mass firings.”
Here is what else to know about what Ellison has done, what Schutz might do, and other critical parts of this race.
Schutz spent almost 39 years at the national law firm Robins Kaplan, where he worked as a litigator and managing partner before stepping down in January.
Schutz “wore the white hat” at Robins Kaplan, he said at the MPR debate, representing individuals and businesses who sued because someone stole their intellectual property. He captured several multimillion-dollar jury verdicts. In 1995, his client, The Fonar Corporation, won $110.5 million in a lawsuit that claimed General Electric infringed on two of the corporation’s MRI patents.
The wins Ellison’s office has extolled the most – capping the price of insulin, compelling John Deere to release information about how to repair the company’s tractors, stopping Agri Stats from sharing pricing information among ostensible meat processing competitors – arise from settlements.
And many of the office’s Medicaid fraud criminal convictions stem from plea agreements.
Schutz has broadly indicated that he wants to move away from settlements and plea deals.
“I will approach all these cases as an aggressive trial lawyer,” he said at the MPR debate.
State attorneys general must run Medicaid Fraud Control Units in order to be eligible for federal Medicaid funding. The state’s Medicaid fraud division started in 1983 – long before the current uproar over housing, autism and other providers allegedly scamming the program.
Ellison’s office touts that their Medicaid Fraud Control Unit secured convictions involving $92.9 million in Medicaid fraud since he took office, one of the highest dollar amounts over that time in the country.
At the MPR debate, Schutz did not quibble with Ellison’s conviction rate. Instead, citing reporting by KSTP, he voiced displeasure that the majority of convictions do not result in prison time.
Ellison retorted that judges, not prosecutors, sentence criminals. He also noted that a new law adding lawyers to the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit puts in stricter sentencing guidelines in some fraud cases.
Schutz responded that, if he becomes attorney general, he would “prosecute people by charging them at least three felony counts of fraud of over $35,000 and you refuse to enter into sweetheart plea agreements. There’s mandatory prison sentences.”
Ellison’s campaign pointed out that Minnesota has presumptive and not mandatory sentences for fraud. They noted that the $35,000 rule only applies if that level of fraud happens within a six month period.
Put another way, if someone commits $1,000 worth of fraud each week, they would have committed $26,000 over six months – not enough to meet the threshold.
Schutz has said little else about how he would do a better job than Ellison in prosecuting Medicaid fraud.
The candidate told the Minnesota Star Tribune that he would use artificial intelligence to better reallocate resources, but did not elaborate.
He did mention in the MPR and WTIF PBS debate that he might move more of the office’s lawyers to the Medicaid fraud section, though the division is already set to jump from 32 to 50 employees.
Under the byzantine rules of Medicaid, the federal government pays for the majority of these employees’ salaries. So, the 18-person staff ramp-up cost Minnesota taxpayers just $1.2 million. If Schutz moved lawyers from other divisions into the Medicaid unit, the state would bear the full cost of their salaries and benefits.
Schutz’s campaign website provides no plan on fraud besides the statement: “I will make fighting fraud and protecting taxpayer dollars a top priority and take aggressive steps to stop the fraud before it starts.”
Ellison called the 72 and counting lawsuits he has filed against the Trump administration in the last 21 months “federal accountability work.”
“In the area of federal accountability work, if we do not sue it’s possible that the federal government will deprive the state of Minnesota of some much needed resources,” he said in a phone interview.
Indeed, while some of these cases are purely about Trump allegedly taking away a constitutional right – like challenging the end of birthright citizenship – most of the litigation centers around a judge enjoining the Trump administration from stripping previously scheduled payments to Minnesota.
To give just a few examples, Ellison has clawed back over $1 billion in federal transportation funding, $467 million in child care assistance, National Institutes of Health grants and money for Americorps.
Many of these lawsuits – stopping tariffs and preserving benefits for the 440,000 Minnesotans on SNAP benefits (food stamps), to name two – have an episodic quality. Ellison snares a temporary court win but Trump either appeals or issues a new executive action that begets new litigation.
At the MPR debate, Schutz derided the fact that almost all of these lawsuits are filed in concert with other Democratic state attorneys general and in federal courts with reliably liberal judges in states like Maryland and Rhode Island.
“We will sue the Trump administration,” Schutz said, but then added, “We will sue them in Minnesota” in order for Minnesotans to be able to visit a courthouse and view the proceedings in-person.
Ellison responded that Minnesotans care more about winning the case than watching it, and pointed out that records of each case are publicly available.
As to what lawsuits Schutz would not withdraw from, he would probably keep litigating a complaint seeking evidence from the U.S. Department of Justice into the killings of Operation Metro Surge protestors Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Schutz has consistently said he supports the ability for the state and Hennepin County to conduct criminal inquiries into both shootings.
Otherwise, we can only speculate.
Asked at the MPR debate whether he would continue to defend Minnesota’s immigration laws in a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department, Schutz changed the subject to note that, by many legal definitions, Minnesota is not a so-called sanctuary state.
According to Tobias, the Richmond law professor, when the Republican, Miyares, won election in 2021, “He joined all the Republican AG national litigation, sight unseen” including lawsuits against the Biden administration.
Jones, the Democrat, did the same when he was elected, quickly adding Virginia to cases against Trump.
Tobias described both Democratic and Republican state attorneys general as “tightly knit groups” that work together in selecting cases and splitting up workloads.
Schutz lists five priorities on his website – “fighting fraud,” “consumer protection,” “tackling crime,” “supporting our law enforcement” and “protecting girls sports” – and writes a few sentences on each.
Again, the Minnesota attorney general has no jurisdiction on crime besides Medicaid and cases referred to the office by county prosecutors – or, in very rare examples, cases the governor directs the attorney general to take on. So, crime and law enforcement matters are almost entirely reduced to fighting Medicaid fraud.
Consumer protection could suggest that Schutz will follow Ellison’s path on some cases, including a swath that Republican and Democratic attorneys general have teamed up on. In Virginia, Tobias noted, there was a seamless transition between attorneys general in pursuing litigation against opioid manufacturers.
Protecting girls sports is one way of phrasing banning trans girls from girls sports, a consistent area of focus for the Republican Attorneys General Association.
When the Republican Miyares became Virginia Attorney General, he made a bee line to investigate institutions lending support to trans students.
Miyares referred the Loudoun County Public Schools to federal authorities, stating that the school had unfairly accused three high school boys of sex discrimination for telling a trans boy to leave their locker room. Miyares said that these boys were actually the victims, for having to share – even for a few moments – private space with the trans student.
“The culture war issues – arguing over trans people’s rights – are top of mind for Republican AGs,” Tobias said.
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