Last year I wrote in praise of Steve Marshall, the attorney general of Alabama, when he officially cut ties with the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG). That organization purports to be a nonpartisan forum for state attorneys general, but it in fact thrives on lucrative ties to plaintiffs’ firms. The firms collect enormous attorneys’ fees from the litigation they land from this relationship, and NAAG itself financially benefits, with payouts including a $15 million consent judgment in in multistate litigation against McKinsey & Co. last year. After years of substantial payouts from such other deals as the tobacco master settlement, the national mortgage settlement, and the Volkswagon diesel emission cheating settlement, NAAG finds itself with a sum of $250 million across its nonprofit arms. It is not an exaggeration to say that the organization acts more like a plaintiffs’ firm than a neutral non-profit.
In recent years, NAAG has increasingly been used as a platform to advance initiatives favored by Democrats, including expanded regulation for a wider expanse of the economy and consumer-protection initiatives. The organization can accurately be described as a left-wing laundry, where progressive ideas are brought to be cleaned up and made to look bipartisan.
Attorney General Marshall explained that he could not “justify spending taxpayer dollars to fund an organization that seems to be going further and further left.” In May of this year, four state attorneys general followed Marshall’s example. A letter jointly signed by three of them—in Texas, Missouri, and Montana—called NAAG’s “leftward shift over the past half decade . . . intolerable.” In the fourth state, Arizona, Attorney General Mark Brnovich noted NAAG’s “partisan permeation” and blasted it for focusing more on getting its cut of multimillion-dollar settlements than on the state’s priority to “get as much restitution back to consumers” as it could. These states’ attorneys general are stalwarts who were at the vanguard of legal battles with the Biden administration.
A May 24 letter written on behalf of eight states by Attorney General Daniel Cameron of Kentucky confronted NAAG on its partisanship and demanded accountability concerning its receipt and use of funds, which potentially violates state law restricting its use to “public purposes only.” States typically have laws designed to prevent outside groups from stashing away public money for their own use. Cameron was joined by the attorneys general of Alaska, Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia. In July, the Wall Street Journal called out NAAG as being the “Attorneys General Racket.”
And now advocacy groups like the Alliance for Consumers are demanding that NAAG send the money in its slush funds back to consumers. Do not be surprised if several of the attorneys general demanding accountability explicitly make the same demands. NAAG just announced a new executive director after the last one’s acrimonious departure. This is a good time for the organization to change its underhanded ways and return the money it is holding to those intended to benefit from it.
If NAAG does not reform itself, the states may well compel it to do so. Either way, the organization’s days of staging faux bipartisanship while operating massive slush funds that feed left-wing lawyers is most likely about to end.