Alke, Knudsen vie for attorney general position

Montana’s attorney general race features an incumbent self-branded as a defender of women and children versus a challenger who says the state’s justice department has been thrown into chaos under current leadership.

Attorney General Austin Knudsen presents himself as a hands-on defender of the weak in commercials, a message delivered with a soundtrack of buzzing guitars and pounding drums. He emphasizes the many lawsuits he’s brought with other Republican attorneys general against the federal agencies of Democratic President Joe Biden. 

Democratic challenger Ben Alke argues that behind Knudsen’s rhetoric there’s disarray at Montana’s Department of Justice. A Helena native who now practices law in Bozeman, Alke points to Knudsen’s low marks as a manager by the Montana Highway Patrol and the attorney general’s hearing this month on 41 counts of professional misconduct as proof.

“I’m concerned broadly with how our government is functioning on all levels and how society is functioning, and I think that it’s so important to have the justice system function properly and be impartial, and you can see cracks in the system,” Alke told Montana Free Press. “And when you have somebody like the current attorney general who doesn’t appear to be bound by the law or the facts, I think that’s a dangerous direction to go.”

Knudsen declined to interview with MTFP for this story. Every Montana attorney general to seek a second term since 1942 has won reelection. Three of the five office holders immediately preceding Knudsen went on to higher office. Republican Marc Racicot and Democrat Steve Bullock became governors. Democrat Mike McGrath is currently Chief Justice of the Montana Supreme Court.

Knudsen was surrounded by supporters the week of Oct. 9 as he testified in his own defense against allegations that he and his office had refused to comply with a Supreme Court order. Knudsen himself was accused of undermining public confidence in the judicial system by disparaging the justices.

Outside of the conservative flash of his campaign, the attorney general characterized himself in that hearing primarily as an administrator.

“I’m the administrator of the Montana Department of Justice. So within the Montana Department of Justice, there are a number of bureaus and agencies that I oversee. People typically think it’s lawyers, but honestly, it’s much more so other duties,” Knudsen said. “For instance, I’m in charge of the Motor Vehicle Division. That’s the single biggest division inside the Department of Justice. The Office of Consumer Protection is under my purview, the Montana Division of Criminal Investigation, which is the state’s, I guess, probably the best analogy to the FBI. We have a number of narcotics agents and major crimes agents and human trafficking agents that go out throughout the state when they’re requested by local law enforcement. Also in charge of the Montana Highway Patrol. That’s probably the closest I get to ever actual hands-on law enforcement duties in Montana, and no authority over sheriffs or local [police departments]. Also in charge of the state crime lab.” 

Knudsen characterized his trial experience as limited, but something that he has trained for. “I’m going to say dozens of criminal trials. That’s probably about the best I can do, and maybe a handful of civil trials,” Knudsen told attorney Tim Strauch, who prosecuted the case against Knudsen for the Office of Disciplinary Counsel.

Knudsen graduated from the University of Montana law school in 2008, then located to Roosevelt County to practice law. He’s originally from Bainville, which was caught up in the Bakken oil boom when Knudsen returned from law school. Eastern Montana’s economic growth was explosive. Two years into his legal career, Knudsen ran for public office and won, unseating Democrat Julie French, of Scobey, in a state House race.

By 2015, Knudsen was House speaker, one of the more demanding jobs in a Legislature that meets for the first several months of every other year. He held the speakership through 2017. 

In 2018, Knudsen won the race for Roosevelt County Attorney. He served less than year in the county attorney’s office in Wolf Point before filing his candidacy for attorney general.

Knudsen’s tenure as attorney general was contentious from the start. He made headlines for intervening in a Helena criminal case involving a man who brandished a gun in a Helena restaurant where masks were required in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Knudsen recommended against felony charges against the man. That same year, Knudsen sent state troopers to a Helena hospital where medical staff were refusing to administer ivermectin, a horse dewormer widely promoted, but not medically indicated, as an alternative remedy for COVID-19 patients.

“You’ve got the AG coming in to tell someone to drop charges. It was clear that he was doing it for political reasons, whether he’s trying to pander to the anti-COVID folks or the gun folks, whatever the story is, he’s telling a prosecutor to drop criminal charges for political reasons and that’s not appropriate,” Alke said. “I mean, dropping criminal charges for political reasons is just the flip side of the coin of bringing criminal charges for political reasons. That’s never appropriate.”

Alke said the hospital incident offended him as a Helena native. 

The Montana Legislature later appointed a special counsel to investigate the hospital incident. The investigator cleared the Highway Patrol of any harassment of hospital staff, but concluded that three unidentified government officials had pressured the hospital staff to administer a treatment that wasn’t medically proven. 

That same year, the Montana Legislature subpoenaed several thousand emails from the state judiciary. The Supreme Court rejected the subpoena as an overreach. Knudsen intervened on the Legislature’s behalf and the fight leading to the conduct hearing against him was on.

This month, Knudsen said that if he had to do it over, he would have approached the Supreme Court differently, but he also defended his position. There’s been no ruling in the case. Disciplinary action could include disbarment, with the Supreme Court being the ultimate decider. 

There are attorneys who worked for Republican Attorney General Tim Fox for eight years and then left the Department of Justice when Knudsen arrived whom Alke said he would try to hire back. They aren’t partisan, Alke said, but they are experienced.

“They lost the entire Civil Bureau,” Alke said. “You lost a lot of experienced prosecutors and the Department of Justice, typically, is a dream job for a certain portion of the legal community. Why? Because you get to work on big, interesting cases. You don’t get paid as much as people in private practice, but you get to go argue in front of the Montana Supreme Court, you get to be involved in the cases that people are reading about in the paper. And when you’re a younger attorney, you can end up working on much bigger cases than you would if you were in private practice.” 

Alke said he would limit the office’s joint lawsuits with other states to consumer issues, matters in which Montanans are defrauded by businesses and would benefit from class action. 

Alke grew up in Helena when Racicot and Democrat Joe Mazurek held the attorney general’s office. His father, John Alke, was a familiar face in state government as an attorney and lobbyist for Montana-Dakota Utilities. He graduated from Notre Dame and then Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law in Chicago. 

Tom Lutey is a reporter for the Montana Free Press, a Helena-based nonprofit newsroom, and can be reached at tlutey@montanafreepress.org.