“Over the last two months I have been encouraged to consider entering the race for Attorney General. After much prayer and consultation with friends, family, and fellow conservative grassroots leaders, Heidi and I have decided now is simply not the right time for a statewide campaign. This spring I will be on extended military leave and I must place my service and family ahead of politics.

This was an excruciating decision. After discussing the race with well over one-hundred conservative leaders across the state, it is apparent Wisconsin Republicans desperately want a pro-liberty candidate for Attorney General that has experience with big constitutional questions. Wisconsinites deserve to have an Attorney General that is willing to stand up for individual rights and law and order. I am certain we would have had the resources and support to win the primary. And it is clear a red wave is coming – Mr. Kaul is
destined to be a one-term Attorney General.

I have long felt it is more appropriate to view the position of Attorney General as the state’s “top cop” AND “top lawyer.” To be sure, ensuring our men and women in uniform who put their lives on the line each and every day have the resources and legal support they need to carry out their mission is critical to the Department of Justice. We live in scary times when “backing the blue” is viewed as a pejorative phrase. And let’s be clear – urban leadership in Milwaukee, and elsewhere, is utterly failing its residents. Since 2019, non-fatal shootings in Milwaukee are up 110.69% and fatal shootings are up 60.6%. We need more and better funded cops, not less.

But the Attorney General also must have a firm understanding of the issues that most directly impact Wisconsin residents, such as promoting and defending parental rights, religious liberty, election integrity, government transparency, separation of powers, Second Amendment rights, the unborn, and balanced environmental enforcement. And he or she must always be willing to fight against unconstitutional mandates, the poison of cancel culture, the abuses of Big Tech, open borders and efforts to defund the police. Simply put, the Attorney General cannot, under any circumstance and in particular in light of the
assault on individual rights happening today, be indifferent, or worse injurious, to the Bill of Rights.

I continue to have grave concerns that Mr. Toney is none of these things. When the state was looking for leadership throughout 2020, Mr. Toney was busy charging fellow Wisconsinites for getting together with friends and family and running their respective businesses. I’m hopeful another qualified constitutional conservative joins the race.

Heidi and I remain committed to doing everything we can through 2022 and beyond to ensure our kids, nieces and nephews, and every young person in this great state have the same awesome opportunities we had to be secure and succeed. Because frankly, at this point in time and on this current trajectory, we’re not sure they will…”

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Jake Curtis is a Milwaukee lawyer and First Lieutenant in the Wisconsin Air National Guard. He previously served as the DNR Chief Legal Counsel under Governor Scott Walker, an Associate Counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a policy advisor to Sen. Duey Stroebel, and a Public Service Special Prosecutor in the Milwaukee County Violent Crimes Unit. From 2010-2014 he served on the Ozaukee County Board and was a member of the Public Safety Committee.

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