The Colorado Attorney General is one of four independently elected statewide offices in Colorado. The Attorney General and the Department of Law, collectively referred to as the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, represents and defends the legal interests of the people of the State of Colorado. The Attorney General exercises the responsibilities given to the office by the Colorado Constitution, statutes enacted by the Colorado General Assembly, and the common law.

The Attorney General has primary authority for enforcement of consumer protection and antitrust laws, prosecution of criminal appeals and some complex white-collar crimes, the Statewide Grand Jury, training and certification of peace officers, and most natural resource and environmental matters. Additionally, the Attorney General’s Office works concurrently with Colorado’s 22 district attorneys and other local, state and federal law enforcement authorities to carry out the criminal justice responsibilities and activities of the office. The Attorney General is also the chief legal counsel and advisor to the executive branch of state government including the governor, all of the departments of state government, and to the many state agencies, boards, and commissions.

Attorneys General are elected to four-year terms, and are limited to two terms in office. They currently earn a salary of $107,676 per year. There are three candidates in this year’s race, and whoever earns the most votes win. There is no need for any candidate to get 50% of the vote or more.

Phil Weiser, Democratic

Phil Weiser

Phil Weiser is the incumbent Attorney General. He was elected for his first four-year term in 2018, defeating Republican George Brauchler by 51.6% to 45.1%, with Libertarian William Robinson at 3.3%.

According to Weiser’s official website, before running for office he served as the Hatfield Professor of Law and Dean of the University of Colorado Law School, where he founded the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship and co-chaired the Colorado Innovation Council.

Weiser served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice and as Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation in the Obama Administration’s National Economic Council. He served on President Obama’s Transition Team, overseeing the Federal Trade Commission and previously served in President Bill Clinton’s Department of Justice as senior counsel to the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division, advising on telecommunications matters.

Before his appointment to the Justice Department, Weiser served as a law clerk to Justices Byron R. White and Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the United States Supreme Court and to Judge David Ebel at the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, Colorado.

The Attorney General’s responsibilities are broad and varied, but for starters the AG oversees the Colorado Department of Law, which has a $70 million budget and about 480 employees. In general, the AG’s office can be involved in criminal prosecutions, legal actions pertaining to decisions made at the federal level, working with state legislators on bills, and collaborating with District Attorneys in any of Colorado’s 22 (soon to be 23) Judicial Districts or other local departments and officials.

Taking on the Feds

The Attorney General has the ability to decide whether or not the State of Colorado will play a role in legal cases involving the federal government. The following points are not included to suggest Weiser only took interest in environmental cases, but to provide an example of how which person or party holds the office can determine the state’s course of action. It’s important to remember that Weiser took office and served his first two years during the Trump administration, a period of time in which environmental regulations were at risk of being weakened or even gutted.

Prosecution

The AG’s office has prosecutorial power, but in practice many cases across the state are primarily handled at the local Judicial District level. The following paragraph is intended to give readers a taste of what types of prosecution the AG’s office might undertake.

The Criminal Justice Section investigates and prosecutes on a statewide basis a broad array of matters including but not limited to: securities fraud, insurance fraud, Medicaid fraud, environmental violations, human trafficking, drug trafficking homicides, and multi-jurisdictional organized crime. The Special Prosecutions Unit primarily investigates and prosecutes multi-jurisdictional, complex crimes.  The office works with the statewide grand jury to assist with complex investigations, and can work on wiretap investigations, state tax fraud, human trafficking, environmental crimes, and auto theft.

The AG’s office will work collaboratively with a wide range of authorities. For example, a team including the AG’s Special Prosecutions Unit, the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office, the Boulder Police Department, and the support of the Colorado Auto Theft Prevention Authority worked to convict and sentence a man for committing a series of bike thefts committed in Boulder County and nearby areas. The statewide grand jury indicted this man and seven others on charges that they were responsible for in the neighborhood of $1.5 million in theft and property damage.

Also on the local level, Governor Jared Polis appointed Weiser as the temporary District Attorney in Colorado’s 12th Judicial District (San Luis Valley) earlier this year. The sitting DA Alonzo Payne was under state investigation, including for alleged mistreatment of crime victims. Payne resigned in July, a new DA for the 12th District has since been appointed, and the Colorado Supreme Court announced that Payne will be disbarred, effective in late October.

Policy Snapshot

On the issue of abortion, Weiser interviewed with Colorado Public Radio in July 2022, and said he would defend Colorado’s new Reproductive Health Equity Act (HB 22-1279), and Gov. Polis’ then-recent executive order saying the state would not cooperate with civil or criminal investigations involving people who might come to Colorado for an abortion to escape restrictive laws in other states.

Colorado and much of the nation has recently experienced serious problems with fentanyl abuse, including no small number of overdoses and fatalities. The Colorado General Assembly passed HB 22-1326 this year, a lengthy bill establishing penalties for trafficking and possession of more than one gram of fentanyl, with more severe penalties for crimes resulting in death, and the bill also included some funding for harm reduction strategies like increased availability of Narcan in case of overdose and test strips to hopefully reduce accidental overdoses.

The bill was controversial from viewpoints of both the political left and political right, in very short because progressives were concerned about criminalizing possession of small amounts while conservatives felt the bill should have included tougher penalties. Weiser supported the bill and delivered testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, but released the following statement after it passed: “I pushed for several notable improvements to this bill, including ramping up the resources needed to disrupt fentanyl trafficking rings. This bill does not contain everything I would have liked to see, but it makes significant improvements on the harm reduction, public awareness, addiction treatment, and criminal justice fronts.”

Campaign Website: https://www.philforcolorado.com/

John Kellner, Republican

John Kellner

John Kellner is currently the District Attorney for Colorado’s 18th Judicial District, spanning Arapahoe, Douglas, Elbert, and Lincoln Counties and including more than a million people. Kellner was sworn in as District Attorney for the 18th Judicial District on Jan. 12, 2021, after defeating Democratic candidate Amy Padden in 2020 by 50.1% to 49.9% and prevailing in a mandatory recount. Since Kellner is in the middle of his first term as DA, he could continue in that role if he is unsuccessful in the AG’s race.

According to his campaign website, Kellner grew up in a military family, moving frequently. After earning his undergraduate degree from the University of Florida, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps. He came to Colorado for law school at the University of Colorado-Boulder. After earning his law degree, he served on active duty with the Marines for five years, including a deployment to Afghanistan as a deputy judge advocate.

He resigned from active duty in 2011 and accepted a commission in the Marine Corps Reserves, where he still serves. He then took a job as a prosecutor in the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office. He came to the 18th in 2013 to head up the office’s Cold Case Unit. In 2016 he was recognized by the Colorado District Attorney’s Council as “Prosecutor of the Year.”

A District Attorney’s office has some similarity to the Attorney General’s office, especially in that the DA oversees a large department with professional staff. The JD 18 budget document for 2021 said it had about 240 employees and interns, and a 2020 budget of about $25.5 million. A 2022 ballot measure (Amendment D) would actually create a new JD 23 out of Douglas, Elbert, and Lincoln counties from JD 18, beginning in 2023, but the amendment hasn’t passed yet.

Kellner has made crime a central focus of his campaign, and even though he’s only been in office since the start of 2021, he and his office have secured a number of convictions since then. A list of news releases about some of the convictions can be found at this link, but following is a very abbreviated list describing some of them:

  • A man who killed a couple after the couple responded to an online ad to purchase a car.
  • A man who attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon, after he intentionally accelerated toward the victim, striking him with the hood of the vehicle. The defendant also attacked the victim in court while he was testifying.
  • A woman who committed second-degree kidnapping and child abuse.
  • A man was sentenced to life in prison for killing a woman in her home back in 1981. The sentence came 41 years after her murder.
  • A man was sentenced to 64 years to life in prison for his role in distributing fentanyl to a 16-year-old victim who ultimately died from an overdose at a party.
  • A man was convicted for killing his ex-girlfriend and dumping her body at an abandoned truck stop along I-25.
  • A gang member was sentenced to 38 years in prison for a 2018 shooting spree in Aurora

Readers might find this August 2022 Kellner interview with Colorado Public Radio interesting for perspective. In it, he talked about fentanyl enforcement and said “Last December, we indicted over 20 individuals. We seized some 24 firearms, 110,000 fentanyl pills, and [we were] trying to dismantle an organization that was pushing poison on young people and causing untold death. That’s the local grand jury that I’m using; The statewide grand jury has the ability to look at this holistically across the entire state.” He also said the new statewide fentanyl bill (HB 22-1326) “didn’t go far enough,” which is consistent with opinions expressed by some Republican legislators during debate on the bill.

Kellner has frequently criticized Weiser for not using the statewide grand jury enough, and told CPR he would use it more frequently than Weiser if elected AG.

On the issue of abortion, Kellner said during a campaign debate in Aurora that he supported the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and supports abortion being an issue left up to the states. Colorado passed the Reproductive Health Equity Act (HB 22-1279) in 2022, as the name suggests to protect reproductive rights in Colorado, and Kellner told CPR he would defend the Colorado bill in court if he becomes AG.

Campaign Website: https://www.johnkellner.com/

William Robinson, Libertarian

William F. ‘Bill’ Robinson III is an attorney from Denver, Colorado. In 2018, Robinson was nominated by the Libertarian Party of Colorado to run for Colorado Attorney General. He finished third in the race with about 3.3% of the vote.

He wants to end the war on drugs, which he believed could lead to emptying out the jails. He said in a 2018 video clip that his law office Robinson and Robinson “housed” TABOR architect Douglas Bruce when TABOR passed, and Robinson said he will defend TABOR if elected AG. He would repeal the Blaine Amendment in Colorado’s Constitution, which prohibits public funding for schools or educational institutions run by religious organizations, since he wants parents to have a choice regarding what their children need educationally.

Richard’s Take

Vote Weiser. This is an incredibly important race. I’ve worked at the Capitol during times of both Democratic and Republican Attorneys General, and I will tell you the difference is profound.

This is probably very debatable, but for the sake of framing I would say there are two major dimensions to serving in a role like AG or DA and running those offices. One is to defend laws or prosecute cases to the letter of the law, and while laws and constitutional provisions may be open to interpretation, an honest court or judge should be open to solid and straightforward legal presentations. The other dimension is to me more open to the influence of personal or political philosophies – in how an AG or DA will either work with legislators on new laws or set priorities on enforcement – in essence potentially influencing the future direction of our legal systems.

I very intentionally included information about the Obama-era Clean Power Plan in the section above about Weiser to help illustrate this second dimension. Weiser’s predecessor as AG, Republican Cynthia Coffman (who by the way has endorsed Weiser in this year’s AG race), entered Colorado into a multi-state lawsuit against this plan, and Weiser pulled the state out shortly after he took office.

At the bare minimum, voters should understand that the AG’s office would almost certainly move in a conservative direction should Kellner take over. So, ask yourself, if the federal government passes national legislation limiting abortion rights, but Colorado has a law in state statutes like the Reproductive Health Equity Act, would you rather have Weiser and his AG’s office defending the state law or Kellner and his team? State firearms laws? Environmental policy? Voting rights? And of course, individual voters might have individual preferences, but I’ll take Weiser in all four rhetorical categories.

Kellner’s campaign is emphasizing crime and blaming Weiser for Colorado’s recent crime statistics, and for that matter many Republicans running for office this year are doing some semblance of the same. There are a few reasons I would suggest voters ought to at least be skeptical of what Kellner in particular is trying to do:

  • If statewide crime is Weiser’s fault, then perhaps it’s fair to say crime in the 18th JD is Kellner’s fault, and statistics in the 18th JD are generally no better than much of the state – and in some cases worse. See the paragraph following these bullet points for more.
  • Some of the crime increases in 2020 can be pretty directly attributed to the pandemic and its associated economic factors (business disruptions, job losses, people losing housing because they lost employment, etc.)
  • The AG can work with state legislators on state bills, but state legislators or caucuses might have ideas of their own regarding criminal justice reform.
  • This year’s Colorado General Assembly did pass bills in the interest of reducing crime, and Weiser was active in the legislative process.
  • Crime rates can depend on the vigilance of local police/sheriff’s departments and even ordinary citizens, and crime can occur despite anti-crime policy being in place.

Readers might find this Colorado Public Radio story on crime rates interesting. It includes maps where you can click on given counties and check crime rate increases or decreases between 2019 and 2021. In “violent crime,” Kellner’s Arapahoe County increased 37%. In “property theft,” Kellner’s Elbert County increased 117%. In “motor vehicle theft,” Kellner’s Douglas County was up 114%. In fairness, Kellner was only the DA in 2021, not 2019 and 2020, but nonetheless the chart shows crime statistics increased on his watch.

To be fair, statewide numbers are also up. Again according to CPR, “Violent crime, which counts homicides, aggravated assaults, sex assaults and robberies, is up 17 percent between 2019 and 2021. Murder is up 47 percent in those two years. Property crime is up 20 percent and auto theft is up 86 percent between 2019 and 2021, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

Personally, I don’t believe blaming Kellner for the JD 18 numbers or Weiser for statewide statistics would be completely fair. The topic of “crime” is extremely multidimensional, and one officeholder typically can’t overpower what’s happening as part of national, regional, or economic trends.

Otherwise, and again debatably, I would say Weiser has far deeper experience in the legal world, literally going back to his time in the Bill Clinton administration. One knock on him during his 2018 campaign was that he didn’t have sufficient prosecutorial experience, but with four years as AG he has certainly gained experience in how the AG’s office prosecutes specialized cases. Kellner has admirable prosecutorial experience at the DA/Assistant DA level, but I would weigh four years actually running the AG’s office above two years in an admittedly large DA’s position.

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