DEMOCRATS 'MIDTERM MEMO' LEAKS... LOOK WHAT THEY ARE ABOUT TO DO
Democratic Attorneys General Prepared for Trump Litigation Before the 2024 Election - But the Fight Is Over What That Planning Proves
A confidential common-interest agreement shows multistate legal coordination began months before Trump returned to office. The document is real; the more disputed question is whether it shows partisan lawfare or ordinary preparation for anticipated federal-state litigation.
State attorneys general have become some of the most important legal opponents of presidential administrations they believe are exceeding federal power.
A newly reported document shows that Democratic attorneys general were preparing for that role against a possible second Trump administration well before voters decided the 2024 election.
According to a confidential agreement obtained by The Center Square, attorneys general from nearly two dozen Democratic-led jurisdictions began coordinating around what was described as the Project for Federal Accountability as early as April 2024.
That was months before President Joe Biden left the presidential race, before Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, and before Donald Trump won a second term.
The timing is what turned an otherwise technical legal document into a political story.
Critics say it shows Democratic officials were preparing to fight Trump regardless of what his administration actually did.
The attorneys general involved offer a different explanation.
They say Trump was already the presumptive Republican nominee, had publicly described major policies he intended to pursue, and had governed once before - giving states a concrete reason to prepare for possible legal conflicts rather than waiting until after inauguration.
That distinction is at the center of the dispute.
The document establishes that the planning happened.
It does not, by itself, establish that every lawsuit filed later was predetermined or legally baseless.
The agreement was titled "PRIVILEGED & CONFIDENTIAL COMMON INTEREST AGREEMENT."
The Center Square reported that seven attorneys general signed it on April 28, 2024. California's signature was undated, while additional Democratic attorneys general signed during May and June. Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez was reported as the last known signatory on November 12, one week after Trump won the election.
At least 22 Democratic attorneys general appear on the agreement, according to the report. No Republican attorney general appears among the signatories.
The agreement said the parties wanted to pursue a common interest involving federal-accountability issues and related litigation while avoiding waiver of privileged material.
That language is important, but it can also sound more dramatic than the underlying legal mechanism actually is.
A common-interest agreement is a tool lawyers use when separate clients or government offices share a legal interest and want to exchange privileged strategy without automatically waiving confidentiality.
Former Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, a Republican during his time in office, told The Center Square that he had signed similar agreements while serving as attorney general.
His objection was not to the existence of a common-interest agreement itself.
It was to the timing.
Shurtleff said he had not seen states organize around hypothetical litigation so far in advance of an administration taking office.
"That's not normal at all," he told the outlet.
He also criticized the increasingly partisan way state attorneys general in both parties campaign on fighting presidents from the other party.
Democratic officials involved in the planning dispute the idea that they were preparing lawsuits without regard to the law.
Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown told The Center Square that preparation began once it became clear Trump was going to win the Republican nomination.
"We talked through a host of possibilities, and we wanted to be prepared, not to get caught off guard," Brown said.
He also emphasized that the states did not file those lawsuits before the election.
Former Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, now Washington's governor, publicly acknowledged immediately after the 2024 election that his office had spent months preparing for a possible second Trump administration.
Ferguson said his team had reviewed Project 2025 and tracked Trump's campaign statements because of Washington's experience litigating against the first Trump administration.
Those statements support the core factual point of The Center Square's report: the preparation was deliberate and began before the election.
They also show why the attorneys general reject the description of the effort as a secret plan to manufacture lawsuits.
From their perspective, they were identifying likely areas of federal-state conflict before a possible change in administrations.
The scale of what followed is substantial.
Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, Democratic state attorneys general have participated in dozens of multistate challenges to federal actions involving immigration, federal funding, education, health policy, tariffs, elections, environmental rules and other issues.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta's office said in August that California had filed 82 lawsuits against the Trump administration in a little more than 18 months, leading or co-leading 55 of them.
Colorado's official federal-litigation tracker listed 75 cases as of August 3.
Washington's attorney general listed 70 cases as of the same date.
Arizona's public tracker had reached 48 federal-action lawsuits by August 3 - slightly higher than the 46 cited in the original report as the tally continued to change.
Those numbers should not be added together as if they represent separate lawsuits.
Many are the same multistate cases joined by several attorneys general.
Bonta has rejected the claim that California's litigation is partisan for its own sake.
At a news conference cited by The Center Square, he described the lawsuits as "apolitical" and said California had spent approximately $19 million pursuing them.
"If Trump doesn't want to get sued, all he has to do is follow the law," Bonta said, according to the report.
His office separately says the litigation has produced dozens of preliminary or final orders in California's favor and has protected large amounts of federal funding that the state says were threatened by administration actions.
The Trump administration and Republican critics see the same litigation differently.
They describe much of it as lawfare: using courts to delay or defeat policies that Democratic officials could not stop through elections or Congress.
That is a political characterization, not a legal category.
Whether a particular suit is abusive ultimately depends on the legal claims, the evidence and what courts decide - not simply on how early the plaintiff prepared for it.
That is why one claim in the original commentary requires particular caution.
The article suggested Democratic attorneys general were likely "judge shopping" by filing before Democratic-appointed federal judges.
The reporting cited in support of the broader story does not establish that allegation.
Federal plaintiffs can sometimes make strategic venue choices when more than one court has jurisdiction, and political actors from both parties regularly complain about forum shopping.
But proving judge shopping would require evidence about venue selection in particular cases - including where the states were legally permitted to sue, why a district was chosen, and whether the choice was made to obtain a specific judge.
The common-interest agreement does not provide that proof.
The record of litigation outcomes also resists a simple partisan narrative.
The Center Square cited a Just Security tracker for a subset of concluded cases, reporting that 11 had closed in favor of plaintiffs and four had been resolved in favor of the federal government at the time of its review, while many more remained pending.
Broader litigation trackers contain hundreds of challenges brought by states, nonprofits, individuals, businesses and other plaintiffs, so those figures should not be read as the win-loss record for every lawsuit against the administration.
More importantly, state-led litigation against presidents is not unique to Democrats or to Trump.
Republican attorneys general repeatedly sued the Biden administration over immigration, student debt, environmental regulation, vaccine policies and other federal actions.
Research by Marquette University political scientist Paul Nolette, cited in reporting on state litigation, found Republican attorneys general won a large share of decided cases against Biden, while Democratic attorneys general had also posted a high success rate against Trump's first administration.
The broader pattern is that state attorneys general of both parties have become national political and legal actors whenever the opposing party controls the White House.
That historical context does not make the 2024 agreement politically meaningless.
Organizing a multistate legal network before an election demonstrates how institutionalized presidential litigation has become.
The attorneys general were not merely waiting to see what a future administration might do and then deciding whether to coordinate.
They were building the coordination mechanism in advance.
New Jersey budget records cited by The Center Square later included additional funding tied to the Project for Federal Accountability, while California lawmakers authorized money for federal-accountability litigation after Trump's election.
That shows the preparation became more than an informal conversation.
It became part of how multiple state governments organized legal resources for expected conflicts with Washington.
The confidentiality language has generated a separate transparency dispute.
The agreement was designed to preserve attorney-client, work-product and common-interest protections while states shared information.
The Center Square reported that hundreds of pages produced by Washington's attorney general were heavily redacted under legal-work-product exemptions and that the outlet was continuing to challenge some of those redactions.
Critics argue the public should know more about how taxpayer-funded offices prepared litigation over policies that had not yet been enacted.
The states can respond that revealing litigation strategy before a case is filed can undermine the same legal interests that privilege rules are designed to protect.
That is a real transparency question, but it is separate from whether the eventual lawsuits had legal merit.
The most defensible conclusion is therefore narrower than the language of either side.
The documents and public statements show that Democratic attorneys general prepared early, coordinated across state lines and expected to litigate against a second Trump administration if he pursued policies they believed were unlawful.
The timing was unusually early in the view of at least one former attorney general and has obvious political significance.
But preparation before an election is not proof that the later cases were fabricated, nor is a confidential common-interest agreement evidence that the attorneys general conspired to obtain favorable judges.
Each lawsuit still has to stand or fall on jurisdiction, standing, statutory authority, constitutional claims, evidence and the rulings of the courts that hear it.
That is also why the word "lawfare" can obscure as much as it explains.
To Trump's supporters, the sheer volume and advance coordination look like a political campaign conducted through litigation.
To Democratic attorneys general, the same preparation looks like federalism working as a check on a president whose first administration had already generated extensive state litigation.
Both descriptions contain a political judgment that the confidential agreement alone cannot resolve.
So the newly disclosed document settles one important factual question: Democratic attorneys general were preparing a coordinated legal response to a possible second Trump administration months before the 2024 election was decided.
What it does not settle is the larger accusation attached to that fact.
Planning to sue is not the same as proving a lawsuit was partisan abuse.
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And in a system where Republican and Democratic attorneys general alike increasingly use the courts to challenge presidents from the other party, the harder question is no longer whether states will prepare for legal war with Washington.
It is how voters and courts distinguish legitimate constitutional oversight from litigation pursued primarily for political advantage.
