Archive for the ‘Attorney General News’ Category

From WUWM:

Van Hollen says he’s charged with defending the state and federal constitutions.

Both he and Hassett agree the top priority of the state Attorney General is public safety. But the two differ on their areas of focus. Hassett says at the top of his agenda would be consumer protection.

“We’re in tough economic times. We’re all suffering from predatory practices by Lehman Brothers or AIG and this agency used to be one of the tops in the entire nation in terms of consumer protection. And we used to be aggressively involved in anti-trust and price-fixing and bid-rigging. And a lot of things you don’t see anymore that protect the public,” Hassett says.

In order to protect the public, Van Hollen says he’d keep the focus where he’s had it the last four years.

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From Midlandsconnect.com:

South Carolina Republicans have put $50,000 into attorney general hopeful Alan Wilson’s campaign.

The donation was reported in a state GOP campaign account filing on Monday. Joel Sawyer is the state Republican Party’s executive director and said Thursday the donation matches a $50,000 donation that Democrats made to their attorney general hopeful Matthew Richardson.

State political parties can give a maximum of $50,000 to statewide candidates while individuals are limited to $3,500 for each election.

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From SIlive.com:

Republican District Attorney Dan Donovan is struggling against his opponent in the race for state attorney general, a new poll finds.

Democratic Assemblyman Eric Schneiderman of Manhattan leads by a 43-32 percent margin over Donovan, the Quinnipiac University survey found.

But, pollster Maurice Carroll said, neither man has great name recognition, leading 24 percent of likely voters to be undecided and 39 percent of those asked said they might change their vote before Election Day.

Both Senate seats are both up for election and incumbents are in control.

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From the Los Angeles Times:

The choices presented to The Times’ editorial board at election time often are dispiriting: Candidate X mumbles bromides about being tough on crime and illegal immigration; Candidate Y naively imagines that the mere power of ideas will overcome the influence of special interests. Everyone claims to be an environmentalist, including those who would roll back environmental progress; everyone is skeptical of big government, even as they propose to make it bigger or tougher. Ultimately we must choose whom to endorse, but we often do so with reluctance.

This year’s race for the office of state attorney general poses the opposite difficulty. California’s two best-known public lawyers — the heads of the Los Angeles and San Francisco district attorney’s offices — are competing for the job. They are both worthy candidates, and closely matched. Either Steve Cooley, a Republican, or Kamala Harris, a Democrat, would do a fine job. After serious deliberation, The Times endorses Cooley.

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From the Columbus Dispatch:

Attorney General Richard Cordray has beefed up his office’s public-relations staff while neglecting the state’s delay-plagued crime lab, challenger Mike DeWine charged yesterday.

DeWine produced documents showing that Cordray’s 25-employee public-relations staff earns more than $1.5 million a year and that there are at least 11 vacancies among the fingerprint examiners, forensic scientists and others who evaluate crime evidence.

That amounts to misplaced priorities, the Republican challenger said during a news conference at Ohio Republican Party headquarters.

“It’s a wrong decision,” DeWine said. “It’s a wrong priority. My priority, as I have said time and time again, is to fix the state crime lab.”

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From the Arizona Republic:

The candidates for Arizona attorney general took shots at each others’ contributors Wednesday, each claiming the other is accepting money that reflects poorly on their integrity.

Felecia Rotellini, the Democratic candidate, said rival Tom Horne was wrong to accept money from charter-school operators and providers of educational services that he oversees as state schools superintendent.

Horne, the Republican nominee, pointed to money Rotellini has received from bankers and others in the financial industry that she used to regulate as superintendent of the Department of Financial Institutions. Rotellini left that post early last year, before she launched her bid for attorney general.

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From Projo.com:

A war of words has erupted between the chairman of the state Democratic Party and Chris Little, the Moderate Party candidate for attorney general, over Little’s environmental record as a lawyer.

Edwin R. Pacheco, the party chairman, accused Little, a lawyer in private practice, of having a long history of “defending corporate polluters that work against environmental protection.” Little, in a news release, rebutted Pacheco’s claims, saying the allegations are “completely untrue.”

Pacheco said that, in the mid-1980s, Little and his law firm defended the Massachusetts towns of Norfolk and Walpole against the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s charges that the towns violated water-pollution laws.

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From the Boston Herald:

Jim McKenna, Republican candidate for attorney general, on Wednesday blasted the news that incumbent Democrat Martha Coakley helped broker a deal to sell six Caritas Christi hospitals to a private equity firm for $495 million.

Citing political contributions she received from hospital executives, McKenna called Coakley the “Queen of Political Payback.”

“She has taken over 34,000 dollars from the executives of Caritas Christi and their family members. As the Commonwealth’s Chief Law Enforcement Officer, she should possess the highest ethics and maintain impartiality and objectivity,” McKenna said in an afternoon statement. “Just today, even the Boston Globe called on Martha Coakley to slow down this deal and demand more oversight. Instead of recusing herself from this matter, like I called on her to do, she has recommended the approval of the sale of Caritas not for the consumer, but with her political donors in mind.”

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