A Montana state judicial panel recommended suspending Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen’s license to practice law for 90 days over his actions related to the appointment of conservative judges. Knudsen defended a law allowing Montana’s Republican Governor Greg Gianforte to fill judicial vacancies without the input of the state’s judicial commission, which had been passed due to concerns about the commission’s bias.
The charges arose out of Knudsen’s tangling with the Montana Supreme Court over the matter; Knudsen believed that the state supreme court was overstepping its constitutional power and usurping the authority of his client, the state legislature.
The Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC) initiated the complaint against Knudsen in September 2023. He was charged with 41 counts of misconduct. They included some of the same broad, vague ethics rules used to target conservative attorneys, such as prohibiting criticism of judges, which many consider a violation of the First Amendment.
They also included Rule 8.4(d) of the Montana Rules of Professional Misconduct, which states that attorneys may not “engage in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice.” The 41 counts consisted of the same handful of ethics rules allegedly repeatedly violated.
A spokesperson for Knudsen, Emilee Cantrell, told KTVH, “The allegations are meritless and stem from a legitimate dispute between two branches of government. No one should be persecuted for holding a different opinion than those in power.”
“This is nothing more than a political stunt,” she said. “The hand-picked ‘investigator’ is a long-time Democrat activist and donor. It’s curious timing that this is released after more than two years — but right before a Democrat is set to announce he will run for attorney general.” Knudsen won reelection earlier this month.
The ODC’s chief disciplinary counsel, Pam Bucy, was the Democratic candidate for attorney general in 2012. She brought in Timothy Strauch to conduct the investigation, according to KTVH.
A hearing was held last month. The controversy began in 2021 when the Montana Legislature began drafting a law to eliminate the Judicial Nomination Commission, which screens judicial applicants. Legislators discovered that a state supreme court administrator used government computers to survey judges about the legislation for the Montana Judges Association. The administrator deleted the emails, but the legislators were able to subpoena and recover all 5,000.
The Montana Supreme Court quashed the subpoena, prompting Knudsen to appeal to the Supreme Court. He argued, “Judicial self-dealing on this scale might be unprecedented in the Nation’s history.” He said it was inappropriate for the court to rule on a case that dealt with their own policy and employees.
The law passed, ending the commission and giving the governor the power to appoint new state judges if a seat was vacated between elections. The law was challenged in court, and some of the judges who responded to the survey and said they would not support the legislation were forced to recuse themselves from the litigation over the new law. The Montana Supreme Court upheld the law in June 2021.
Knudsen or attorneys under his supervision “routinely and frequently undermined public confidence in the fairness and impartiality of our system of justice by attempting to evade the authority of the Montana Supreme Court and assaulting the integrity of the judiciary and the individual Justices who were duly elected by Montana citizens to make decisions,” Strauch said in the complaint.
The Montana Supreme Court will decide whether to accept the recommendation to suspend Knudsen or not. The court is composed of multiple justices who were appointed by Democrats.
Since the Montana Constitution requires the attorney general to be “an attorney in good standing admitted to practice law in Montana who has engaged in the active practice thereof for at least five years before election,” a suspension could affect Knudsen’s ability to hold the position.
Knudsen angered the left with some of his previous actions. He tangled with the state supreme court over ballot language describing a radical abortion-until-birth initiative. He initially determined that the ballot measure wasn’t legally sufficient, but that court overturned him. Then he revised the ballot language describing it to state that it would “allow post-viability abortions up to birth,” eliminate “the State’s compelling interest in preserving prenatal life” and potentially “increase the number of taxpayer-funded abortions.” The court ended up writing its own description instead, and the measure passed.
Knudsen sent a Montana Highway Patrol trooper to a hospital after the hospital refused to provide a COVID-19 patient with ivermectin. The patient had prescriptions from a doctor outside the hospital for ivermectin. The Right to Try Act was passed by the state Legislature in 2015 and allows people to seek experimental treatments for terminal illnesses. The patient’s family said the hospital also didn’t deliver legal documents, didn’t allow them to see their relative, and at one point cut “off text message communication between them and their family member.”
Knudsen refused to bring felony charges against a man who threatened a restaurant manager with a gun when asked to wear a mask during COVID-19. Knudsen’s office gave him a plea deal of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. The man’s attorney said he never pulled out his gun.
Numerous Republican attorneys general around the country are coming under investigations by Democratic-controlled state bars or their equivalents. The Texas State Bar began investigating Texas Attorney Ken Paxton in 2022, recommending sanctions over his concerns about election fraud. The Disciplinary Commission of the Indiana Supreme Court filed professional misconduct charges against Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita relating to statements he made about an abortion doctor he was investigating. The Idaho State Bar is conducting an ethics investigation into Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador. Last year, former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich faced a lengthy investigation by the State Bar of Arizona over his work investigating the botched 2020 election.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen” by Austin Knudsen.
