This week, the Minnesota Senate’s State Government Finance and Policy and Elections Committee advanced legislation that would prevent privately paid outside lawyers from working in the state attorney general’s office.

Legal Newsline reported:

“The Minnesota State Senate on Wednesday advanced a bill designed to limit the hiring by the Attorney General’s office of outside attorneys who could be politically motivated by the nonprofits and agencies that provide them.

“In another example, billionaire Michael Bloomberg and his Family Foundation donated $5.6 million to develop a New York University School of Law, State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, which placed 11 special assistants in state attorneys general offices, including Minnesota.”

As EID Climate has noted before, Attorney General Keith Ellison currently employees two Special Assistant Attorneys General (SAAGs) who are not Minnesota state government employees, but rather have been placed in the Ellison’s office by the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at the NYU Law School, which also pays their salaries. The center was started in 2017 thanks to a $5.6 million grant from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the arrangement has drawn intense criticism for allowing privately-funded organizations to gain a foothold in taxpayer-funded state government offices to carry out particular agenda.

The bill in Minnesota seeks to block such arrangements. First, the bill stipulates that all work done in the attorney general’s office must be performed by Minnesota state government employees or officials from the federal government under certain agreements.

Second, the bill would require that all compensation for officials in the attorney general’s office come from Minnesota taxpayers and not outside organizations:

“Except as otherwise provided under this section, the sole source of compensation paid to employees of the Office of the Attorney General for performing legal services on behalf of the state shall be from the appropriations provided under this chapter. In any case in which the Office of the Attorney General is authorized under law to contract with, hire, or engage a person other than a person described in clauses (1), (2), or (3) to perform legal services on behalf of the state, the sole consideration for the legal services shall be a monetary amount bargained for in an arm’s length transaction with the person and the Office of the Attorney General or another Minnesota governmental entity, and must state under what authority that office enters the contract.”

Bloomberg SAAGs Called Out

During the committee’s hearing on the bill, state senators repeatedly highlighted Ellison’s employment of two SAAGs from the Bloomberg-funded SEEIC.

When Ellison filed his climate lawsuit against energy and industrial companies and trade associations in 2020, he specifically cited the work of the Bloomberg SAAGs in his press conference, thanking them for their “excellent, excellent work.” Those SAAGs, Leigh Currie and Peter Surdo, are also listed as counsel on the complaint, though their status as privately-funded attorneys was not disclosed.

State Sen. Mark Koran asked Laura Taken-Holtze, the policy director for the attorney general’s office, “how many Bloomberg-funded attorneys do you have working on behalf of the attorney general’s office?”

Taken-Holtze replied, “that I am not prepared to answer that question,” before Koran said that “the number one issue that we haven’t heard any information on from the AG’s office to date is about the Bloomberg-funded, bringing in outside organizations to operate under the guise of the Minnesota Attorney General.”

Taken-Holtze then claimed she wasn’t even sure the Bloomberg-funded SAAGs qualified as the office receiving outside support:

“I’m not prepared to even accept the premise that any of our office is funded by a non-profit.”

She later doubled down on that point:

“I want to be clear: I can’t accept the assertion that there is any non-profit money coming in.”

Yet, state senators continued to press the issue. State Sen. Eric Pratt said:

“But yet we’ve got outside attorneys potentially coming in and while we can say they’re working under the direction of the attorney general; the concern is that we’re bringing in politically motivated activist attorneys funded by activist organizations to have undue influence within this department. And we all know that at the end of the day, you answer to the person who writes your check, and so that’s the concern here Mr. Taken-Holtze and I think it’s extremely important we have transparency in this project.”

State Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer then stated:

“The Bloomberg-funded [SAAGs] around the country are refusing to produce documents in response to data practice requests in over 35 matters involved in activist attorneys general in other states. As we are hearing today, a representative of the [Minnesota] Attorney General’s office on this very topic did not come prepared to give information to this committee which has authority in this area.

“So, we realize that they are claiming that because they have shared interest with these out-of-state activists, they’re not going to have to comply with Minnesota’s data practice law.”

Criticism of SAAGs Program

Attorneys generals in 11 states have enlisted SEEIC SAAGs and many are working on climate litigation, as is the case in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.

This arrangement that allows private organizations to place their own attorneys in state government offices has been heavily criticized.

The Daily Caller reported:

“Republican attorneys general are arguing that billionaire Michael Bloomberg is using his vast wealth to embed an army of lawyers into state offices for the purpose of taking on oil companies and President Donald Trump.

“Republican Georgia AG Christopher Carr is also expressing concerns about the optics of such a mission. ‘AG Carr has serious concerns about this program and the ability of these lawyers to represent a state in an unbiased manner,’ Katie Byrd, a spokeswoman for Carr’s office, told the DCNF.”

Real Clear Investigations did a deep dive on the SAAG program and noted that, “Although many government agencies have employees funded by outside sources, critics say using special interest money for targeted government action is inappropriate.”