Eric, Tony, thanks for joining us.
It's great to be with you to talk about the Attorney General's race and the importance
of it for Wisconsin.
So give me a sense of why you decided to run again.
It's not often we see repeat candidates for these statewide elections.
You know, within a week of that race back in 2022, I had so many people already encouraging
me to do it, but it wasn't sure it was something that I would want to do because there's a
lot of time and energy that goes into these statewide races.
But for me, I really had a clarifying moment in 2023.
I ended up in probably August when I later learned to have a mini-stroke in the office,
lost control of my legs for about 20 seconds.
I was impatient at the hospital here in Fond du Lac.
The next day, cardiologist at some testing came in and said, your aortic valve is destroyed
and you need open heart surgery.
I was starting to think about what do I want to continue to do if this surgery goes well.
But I was, at that point, just trusting God through the hands of my medical team that
hoping and praying things would go well, and as it got closer, knew that I would want
to run again.
When we're looking at a rematch in this environment, what should voters be thinking of in terms
of how did I vote last time or what's different about this match up this time?
One of the things people can look at with me is what I've done since then, as the president
of the District Attorneys Association, I've always talked about putting public safety
over politics.
I stood with our attorney general after that 2022 race, helping him get more crime lab
positions in that state budget, working with Republican legislators behind the scenes.
I helped get a transformational investment into prosecutors, public defenders in our
judicial system in that budget that the Wisconsin Law Journal awarded me as an unsung hero for
what they described as helping and a constitutional crisis.
Those are all things we do together, working with the Democrat governor and the Republican
legislature to deliver those results.
And then in contrast, you see, during the tenure of our attorney general, we've seen periods
of record homicides in places like Milwaukee, record drug deaths, and other increases in
crime.
And I've never been one to say it's one individual person's responsibility when that
happens because there are so many different factors that go into why crime happens in
different areas.
But what we have to look at is what are people doing with the resources they have.
And so what we saw our attorney general do during this period is put a hiring freeze
in place.
And so I mentioned those crime lab positions I helped him get.
Well, over a year later, we saw a nonpartisan audit released of our crime labs, and they
said he hadn't even filled those positions.
We saw that he had less DNA positions filled compared to 2020.
And we see that they're taking for DNA, for example, taking on average over twice as
long to test less from when he started to where we are now.
So the attorney general points to crime statistics being down in Wisconsin as they are across
the country.
He also singles out that crime statistics in Fondolac County are up.
Why should either one of you get credit or blame for crime statistics when as the, you
know, either the prosecutor or the attorney general, you don't control whether crimes
are committed or even how they're investigated.
That's a great question to ask the attorney general because he's been the one trying to
take victory laps when he see crime numbers go with what he thinks is in his favor, despite
cherry picking what those stats are.
I don't think anybody heard from him when we were seeing record homicides in Milwaukee.
But now because we're seeing crime down in many areas, including Fondolac County, crime
is down overall.
And I've never taken credit for the crime numbers we've seen during my almost four
or 14 years as a district attorney because I know it's a team effort when we do these
things and crime doesn't stop at county lines.
When we look at attorney general's races in the past, historically they followed right
below the gubernatorial election.
The last time there were members of different parties was 2006 to win these races.
So are you trying to separate yourself from Tom Tiffany in his race for governor or do
you think you're going to follow right along with him?
I'm running my own race from when I got into this back in October of 2025, I talked about
the forensic testing failures, the fentanyl epidemic, and how partisan our attorney general
has become.
I mean, we have driven home issues that affect people in all 72 counties, and that's what
I've been focused on is what our Department of Justice can do to help protect everybody
in Wisconsin by putting public safety over politics.
Again, it all comes back to what do you do with the resources you have?
And so what we're seeing is broken promise after broken promise from our attorney general.
He campaigned on the fentanyl and opioid epidemic, and there is accountability for
pharmaceutical manufacturers, but talk to anybody in law enforcement or public safety,
and they will tell you the overdoses that we're seeing by and large are coming from
fentanyl, which is coming across the border, and then here into Wisconsin, and parents
are burying their child, and our attorney general's broken that promise, he won't even
talk about that issue because it doesn't maybe be popular with his liberal base.
We look at the forensic testing, he actually promised back in 2020 that we were going to
see a dramatic improvement in DNA testing because he had more analysts in his predecessor
and he had improved technology, and his own policies were the reason that they were testing
less, limiting what law enforcement can send in, and now on average, he's taking over
twice as long, and he campaigned against all of the political lawsuits when he first ran,
and now that's effectively what he's running his entire campaign on is those lawsuits where
he's putting politics over public safety.
Well, let's talk about those lawsuits.
Obviously, the Department of Justice has filed and joined a lot of these federal lawsuits
against the Trump administration.
If you were the AG, would you have joined any of these?
So one of the things I've always talked about is putting public safety over politics, and
when we see the attorney general, he's not filing lawsuits.
What he's doing is called joining them.
So the vast majority of those lawsuits, whether he signs on to that or not, are going to continue
to move forward because other attorneys general across the country have actually done the
legal work on those.
And so what I will be doing as attorney general is making sure we are prioritizing our resources
for public safety, ending the hiring freeze that's been put in place by him to make sure
we have those crime lab positions filled that we're always filling our DCI and other public
safety positions, and we'll evaluate any case that's been filed on a case-by-case basis
to make sure that we're following the facts and the law.
One more question on the federal lawsuits.
In some of those cases, if you weren't a member of those, you didn't get the benefits.
And Wisconsin has seen some of those benefits from being a part of those winning cases.
As AG, would you have joined any of those cases?
So one of the things that we have to do at our Department of Justice, it can't be who's
in the White House or who's in the governor's office.
We have to look at these on a case-by-case basis, and unfortunately, we haven't seen
our attorney general do that.
He's talked about joining over 60 of these lawsuits in the last 18 months or so, compared
to probably five or less during the four years of the Biden administration and has effectively
given a free pass to Tony Evers.
So to me, it's not going to matter who's in the White House or who's in the governor's
office.
We're going to make these decisions based on the facts and the law.
So I would expect, whether it's a Republican or Democrat governor, president, that we
would be joining lawsuits when it's needed to protect Wisconsin.
One of the issues that Josh Call says is interesting about this rematch is looking at some of
your position statements from the last race, and he brings up abortion specifically.
At that time, he had filed a lawsuit that eventually was passed by the Wisconsin Supreme
Court, which guaranteed the right to abortion in Wisconsin.
He, at that time, you criticized his part of that lawsuit.
Do you still think that was the wrong choice for him for the state to file that lawsuit
against the 1848 abortion law?
Well, the original Dane County judge actually didn't support the ultimate legal finding
that was made by the Supreme Court, but we have to look at where the law is now, and
there are five-month protections in place for women.
I have not, and I'm not advocating for any changes to the law in Wisconsin, and if there
is going to be any change, that's something that needs to be voted on by the people of
Wisconsin, and not decided on by politicians in Madison.
We need to create an environment that supports women and girls in our state in every corner,
and you look at what our Attorney General's comments have been in recent years on this.
He was actually asked about those five-month or 20-week protections in 2024 in the fall,
and he said it's not a protection, it's a restriction.
He said there should be no government intervention calling for the legislature to take action,
effectively arguing for a nine-month abortion here in Wisconsin.
Eric, Tony, thanks for your time.
Greatly appreciated.
Thank you.