Ahead of Colorado’s primary elections, June 30, the IJN spoke with two Republican candidates for Attorney General: Michael Allen and David Willson. The IJN also spoke with three Democratic candidates: Michael Dougherty, Jena Griswold and David Seligman. The IJN also reached out to Democratic candidate Hetal Doshi.
Michael Allen has been the District Attorney of Colorado’s 4th Judicial District since 2020. He is a Navy veteran.
What are your top priorities as Attorney General? How do they affect the daily lives of Coloradans?
My two primary priorities go hand in hand — how Colorado’s criminal profile interacts with and impacts the cost of living. Our crime stats have been upside down for a while, and cost of living is also getting out of control.
The cost of housing is 48th out of 50 states. Auto, property and business insurance rates in Colorado are some of the highest in the country. These two issues impact the ability to afford to live here.
The Attorney General’s office has the ability to impact both of those two primary areas.
El Paso and Teller counties are not immune to impact of crime. What we’ve done differently is hold criminals accountable. If you look at motor vehicle theft — insurance companies look at a myriad of factors in setting their premium. They look at your ZIP code and the crime rate.
When you see that we are 47th out of 50 motor vehicle theft in the entire country, of course the insurance companies are going to pass those higher costs to insure your vehicle onto the consumer.
So if we can drive down the prevalence of motor vehicle theft across the state of Colorado, that should have a big impact on our premium costs.
In 2024, we had roughly 5,000 reported instances of motor vehicle theft in my district. Using my data-led prosecution model we then allocate resources toward the issues that are emerging. I reallocated a prosecutor and an investigator and their only job was to work on motor vehicle theft.
In one year, working with other law enforcement agencies, we drove down motor vehicle theft by 50%, which far outpaces the reduction in motor vehicle theft across the state of Colorado.
That’s what I mean by holding people accountable for the bad actions that are costing people — from a criminal perspective but also financially.
We’re all paying higher insurance premiums because of the out of control motor vehicle theft in Colorado. If we start holding these networks, these bad actors accountable, oftentimes we’re seeing motor vehicle theft defendants committing numerous motor vehicle offenses around Colorado, especially in the Front Range corridor up and down I-25.
That’s how we know that we can impact the cost of living by going after the things that are actually impacting those numbers in Colorado.
How do these issues fall under the remit of the Attorney General’s office?
The scope of authority for the Attorney General’s office is quite large. You are general counsel for the entire state of Colorado, so you’ve got a wide swath of jurisdictional authority.
One is the statewide grand jury. So if you’ve got criminal networks that are operating across jurisdictional boundaries, you can investigate that case through the grand jury process, get criminal indictments and then prosecute that case from the grand jury and the Attorney General’s perspective.
Motor vehicle theft: There is a prevalence of offenders traveling up and down from Pueblo to Fort Collins committing these offences. Human trafficking is a statewide concern. We’re the 13th worst in the entire country using the statewide grand jury to go after human trafficking. That’s another area where the Attorney General can have a big impact.
Then there is consumer protection. I worked in the Kansas Attorney General’s office in consumer protection. That’s another area that can have a big impact on cost of living.
If you’re standing up for consumers who are victimized by businesses or financial transactions, that will help clear the field and allow honest businesses to thrive and not be held accountable unnecessarily and unfairly. That should also drive down costs.
But that needs to be very balanced. You can’t just go after the business community because you want to have a strong consumer protection division.
Water is another issue.
It’s a scarce resource in Colorado in the arid West. The Attorney General can have a huge impact on what happens with water in our state. In the northeast of the state, Nebraska is intending to build the Perkins Canal, which will collect water coming out of northeast Colorado and divert it into Nebraska.
This canal they intend to build would bisect farmers’ and ranchers’ land and make it virtually impossible for those families that are affected by it to continue to do their farming and ranching business.
Look at the Western Slope. I was recently in Grand Junction visiting a family-owned farm. They’ve owned this farm for multiple generations, growing peaches and now venturing into grapes. The impact of the drought and the upriver use of water has a big impact on their ability to grow their crops.
Then downriver, all of the states in the Colorado River Compact are allotted the same amount of water — 7.5 cubic acres. But downriver states — California, Arizona and Nevada — have been far exceeding that, and it’s having a detrimental impact on our farmers and ranchers on the Western Slope.
They rely on Colorado River basin waters to provide the resources that they need to feed our state and our region.
We need to do a better job of standing up for and holding those downriver basin states accountable for their overuse to make sure that families who rely on that water to make a living are protected.
You’ve spoken a lot about statewide and interstate activity. What is the role of the Attorney General with regard to the federal government?
There’s always going to be tension between states and the federal government. There’s always going to be the potential that the state has to stand up for the interests of the residents of the state. There are times when it is appropriate and necessary to go after the federal government. But it should never be driven by who the president is.
I’m always on the side of Coloradans. If our interests are being impacted negatively, and it doesn’t matter what the entity is, whether it’s businesses or other states or the federal government, I’m going to fight for the people of this state to make sure their interests are protected.
We’re going to have a new president two years after the next attorney general takes office in January. You’ve got to be hyper-focused on what we need in this state, as opposed to hyper-focused on who’s sitting in the Oval Office.
That’s what the focus has to be, is how are we positively impacting the residents of this state? Or are we doing things just for our own politically motivated futures? I’m never going to go down that second path. I’m always going to make sure that this remains a beautiful, livable place that is affordable for families of all economic stratifications.
How does being a DA impact the job of Attorney General?
You have to know how to practice law. You have to have been in the fights and know what’s a viable argument to make and what’s not.
The AG isn’t going to be in the courtroom every day, very similar to being DA. I rarely get to go to court anymore because I run a big DA’s office and it’d be the same for attorney general. But when you’re leading an office, you have to understand what the law says on any given issue.
You have to have the experience to appropriately guide your staff in what they pursue.
You have to understand how to achieve an outcome that is lawful and then direct your staff to go out and do the things that are appropriate. Sometimes you’ve got to pull your staff back and say, that’s not how we’re going to spend the resources of the attorney general’s office or the DA’s office because the law says X, Y or Z.
I’ve been in court hundreds and thousands of times over my career fighting for justice and achieving justice for victims. That’s the kind of experience you need to have as Attorney General.
How do you navigate the fine line between free speech, which includes hate speech, and criminal threat?
I’ll answer that with a case we prosecuted, Club Q, the deadly attack on an LGBTQ bar in Colorado Springs. It was obviously a hate crime, a terrorist type crime. A perpetrator targeted members of the LGBTQ community just because of who they are. These are people who are often targeted by hate speech or criminal actions.
I went after hate crimes charges because it was a hate crime.
But also, to send a signal that I’m not going to tolerate that kind of behavior in the jurisdiction that I have authority over. I’m going to hold those folks accountable.
It’s horrific that in the United States we are seeing a turn in this kind of rhetoric.
If you look at the rhetoric that’s been spewing out there about Israel and Jews, from lots of different circles, it’s disgusting. I do think we’re in a dangerous time.
We need to have more people calling it out and calling it what it is, which is hate speech. That is inappropriate in a civil society like the United States.
There’s a candidate for a different office in Colorado who said that Israel deserved what happened on Oct. 7 (when Hamas invaded and massacred Israelis).
That is disgusting commentary from somebody who wants to be in an elected office in Colorado.
That should disqualify somebody for being considered for an elected office because you’re signaling that you’re going to serve in favor of a particular group and then potentially target a different group just because of who they are. That is absolutely wrong.
We’ve seen this stuff from both sides of the aisle. The one that I just mentioned is a Democrat running for Congress. But we’ve seen it from the right in Colorado, when people talk about the synagogue of Satan and wanting to hang people.
It’s deplorable. It needs to be called out. These people need to be held accountable in the court of public opinion.
And if they do commit a hate crime, just know that if I’m in authority, I’m going to hold them accountable.
Israel is defending itself against entities that want to wipe it off the face of the earth and exterminate the Jewish population in the Middle East. My son, who serves in the US Navy, was in Bahrain after Oct. 7, when Iran was launching missiles at Israel. We all pay a price for this.
We need to stand up to evil in the world. Otherwise it flourishes.
Why Attorney General?
I’m a native of this state, raised my kids in this state, and I want this state to be strong going into the future, something that we can be proud to hand off to our kids and our grandkids.
That’s ultimately what my goal is. The people who are going to be here long after us are depending on us to turn over a state that is a strong, economic, safe state for them to raise their families in.
If we don’t do that, we’re failing as a society.
There’s always going to be political winds blowing different directions. What you’re going to get from me as Attorney General is somebody that is driven by a strong adherence to the Constitution, the rule of law and standing up for victims of crime or fraud, and for the people of this state.
© IJN 2026
