Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison was back Tuesday at the Legislature — for a fourth year — to ask for more money to hire criminal prosecutors that help county attorneys in rural areas handle complex cases like murder.
But a lot has changed since the DFLer last pleaded, unsuccessfully, with lawmakers for a small slice of what is now a rather humongous budget surplus.
Gone is the Republican majority in the state Senate, which repeatedly stalled Ellison’s plan as the GOP fumed over other issues like enforcement of executive orders restricting restaurants during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the November election, Ellison also narrowly defeated his Republican opponent Jim Schultz, who made a bigger expansion of the AG’s criminal division a central promise on the campaign trail. Schultz had pledged to transfer attorneys from a large consumer protection unit if he couldn’t get money from lawmakers.
Now Democrats control the Legislature, clearing the way for Ellison to keep his consumer division intact and hire seven full-time prosecutors and two support staff. At two hearings on Tuesday, Republicans had some objections to the $4.3 million bill and questioned if the AG needed more money for the attorneys, or if Ellison’s work should have more oversight from lawmakers.
But Ellison’s proposal has nevertheless been fast-tracked as the DFL seeks to show it is addressing violent crime, a top issue for many voters in the 2022 election.
“We’re back at it,” Ellison said in an interview. “Back at it again, back at it again. Because we think this is an important value-add for the people of the state of Minnesota and will enhance public safety.”
Why Ellison wants more criminal prosecutors
Adding criminal prosecutors has been a priority for Ellison since he first took office in 2018. At the time, there was just one full-time prosecutor, though he shifted resources within the office to add another two.
Still, Ellison asked the Legislature in three separate years for extra cash to hire more prosecutors and expand the division’s footprint.
Those lawyers help county attorneys prosecute complicated violent crimes. The AG has taken over cases, when asked, in the Twin Cities metro — notably by prosecuting former officers Derek Chauvin and Kim Potter in the killings of George Floyd and Daunte Wright. But the vast majority of requests come from county attorneys in Greater Minnesota, where two dozen offices have only two or fewer prosecutors.
Lorsbach recounted, as she did last year, that the AG’s office stepped in to help when her office dealt with a pair of homicides, a case involving allegations of sexual abuse against a school resource officer, and litigation tied to protests over Enbridge’s Line 3 oil pipeline. All happened within the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“To say that we were overwhelmed would have been an understatement,” Lorsbach said.
Freeborn County Attorney David Walker was one of several rural prosecutors to write the Legislature in favor of the bill. He told House lawmakers that the AG’s office is helping Freeborn County with two cases that “would be straining us beyond the breaking point without their help.”
And Robert Small, executive director of the Minnesota County Attorneys Association, said in a letter that while the AG has helped county attorneys who seek help in homicide cases, the lack of resources means Ellison has “not been able to accept requests for assistance in other cases involving violent crime, white collar crime, financial exploitation, federal habeas corpus petitions, and multi-county prosecutions of drug or human trafficking.”
Facing accusations of being soft on crime on the campaign trail, Ellison repeatedly asserted the AG’s office took every “serious” criminal case county attorneys asked for.
But Deputy AG David Voigt told the Senate panel on Tuesday that they did turn away a case in which an officer shot someone in Mower County, though AG spokesman John Stiles said the neighboring Olmsted County prosecutor who took the case later declined to charge the cop with a crime. The office has also not been able to do certain appellate work. Voigt also said for the most part, county attorneys don’t ask for help on cases besides homicides because they know the AG’s office lacks resources.
“Given our limited resources we just haven’t been able to historically over the last dozen or almost 20 years take cases other than homicide cases,” Voigt said.
Stiles said he wasn’t aware of a case Ellison had declined to take, or a request for his office to handle the types of crime listed by Small and the county attorneys.
Small said in a follow-up interview that Ellison has “bent over backwards to be able to try to take every significant case that we’ve asked him to take,” but that they would like “the ability for more assistance from his office.”
“Probably we didn’t ask because we knew they didn’t have the resources to do it,” Small said.
A request stymied in the past
DFLers, who have a majority in the state House, have supported Ellison’s request in the past.
But Republicans who had controlled the state Senate from 2017 until 2022 had rejected the proposal. Last year, then-Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake, said Ellison had time and resources to shut down businesses and should be able to prosecute crime with the money and staff he already has. And she pushed for a new $100,000 training program for county attorneys that would have been cheaper than Ellison’s request.
Schultz, the GOP candidate for attorney general, by contrast wanted as many as 36 criminal prosecutors to make addressing a wave of violent crime the office’s top priority. And he said if the Legislature couldn’t fund some or all of that request, he’d shift resources and prosecutors from elsewhere in the office to make crime a higher priority.
For his part, Ellison argued the office is obligated to handle some legal work, making it difficult to shift resources. And he also worried draining a consumer protection division would leave people vulnerable to exploitation.
The AG says his budget hasn’t kept up with inflation, though lawmakers have approved some extra money for the office as a whole in recent years. And Ellison maintains 36 prosecutors would be far too many and was a campaign talking point more than a realistic need.
On Tuesday, Ellison told MinnPost the request for seven prosecutors was based on conversations with the county attorneys association. “We’re part of the group and we asked them what do you think the needs are? And they gave us answers, and that’s what we put in our budget.”
DFL fast tracks the AG proposal
In a pair of committee hearings at the Legislature, Democrats advanced the $4.3 million bill and said it was a priority to address early in session. The bill will make other committee stops before a floor vote.
“It is long overdue funding necessary to look out for and support our 87 county attorneys,” said Sen. Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, who sponsored the measure in the Senate.
Rep. Jim Nash, R-Waconia, asked for a report on how the new money was spent after it was allocated. (The AG does release a broader report on its criminal work.)
“I’m not denying that there are needs from a prosecutorial perspective, I do recognize that there are a fair amount of bad actors out there, both the murder and the waste fraud and abuse,” Nash said.
But Nash said he believed the AG didn’t have a good track record in some circumstances. He raised an instance where the Minnesota Department of Education wanted, but failed to get more than $580,000 in legal fees after the scandal-plagued Feeding Our Future filed what the state said was a frivolous lawsuit. The AG represents state agencies in court. Federal prosecutors have brought dozens of indictments against people tied to the nonprofit for allegations of fraud. “I hope that you can provide better value than you did with that,” Nash said.
Ellison said after the House hearing that he wasn’t surprised the GOP opposed his bill after Schultz and the GOP pushed for more criminal prosecutors to address violent crime.
“I think that we’re still mired in partisanship and polarization,” he said. “Hopefully on the floor they’ll vote for it.”
