Nearly two dozen Democratic state attorneys general signed a confidential agreement coordinating litigation against Donald Trump as early as April 2024, almost seven months before voters returned him to the White House.
The document, a "Privileged & Confidential Common Interest Agreement," was obtained by The Center Square and reveals that the first seven signatures landed on April 28, 2024, just weeks after Trump locked up enough delegates to become the presumptive Republican nominee. Thirteen more attorneys general added their names in May and June. The last known signatory, Hawaii Attorney General Anne E. Lopez, signed on November 12, 2024, seven days after Trump defeated Kamala Harris by 2.3 million votes.
Zero Republican attorneys general signed the agreement. The document states that the parties "wish to pursue their common interest concerning Federal Accountability issues and litigation(s) addressing such issues, while avoiding any waiver of the confidentiality of those privileged materials." In plain English: Democratic AGs wanted to plan lawsuits together and keep the planning secret.
Since January 2025, state attorneys general have sued the Trump Administration nearly 100 times. California alone has participated in 82 of those cases. Colorado's attorney general has joined at least 75. Washington State's has joined 70. Arizona's has joined 46. The coordination was not a loose handshake among like-minded officials. It was a signed legal pact, assembled before a single ballot was cast in the general election, built to obstruct a presidency that had not yet begun.
District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb's name appeared first on the agreement, dated April 28, 2024. At that point, Joe Biden was still the sitting president and the presumptive Democratic nominee. The agreement was signed roughly three months before Biden dropped out of the race.
Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown told The Center Square that planning began "as soon as it was clear that Trump was going to get the nomination." Brown framed the effort as prudent preparation.
"We talked through a host of possibilities, and we wanted to be prepared, not to get caught off guard."
Brown added: "I don't think we were going after him, or any AG was, because he hadn't been elected yet." But the timeline tells a different story. The agreement was drafted, circulated, and signed by at least 20 attorneys general before voters had any say in the matter. And the stated purpose, "Federal Accountability issues and litigation(s)", was broad enough to cover virtually any policy dispute with a future Trump administration.
Former Arizona Solicitor General O.H. Skinner, now executive director of the Alliance for Consumers, read the timing differently.
"Whatever they said in public, they privately had at least a solid amount of confidence that Joe Biden was never going to win that election."
Skinner continued: "They didn't have a concern about federal overreach until they thought the other team was going to be in charge... They needed to plan ahead and endeavor to build a juggernaut if they wanted to have any hope of slowing down the president's agenda."
The lawsuits are not free. California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced at a news conference that the litigation has cost California taxpayers $19 million. Bonta called the lawsuits "apolitical" and said he has no plans to stop filing them.
"If (Trump) doesn't want to get sued, all he has to do is follow the law."
California went further than spending existing funds. The state legislature passed SBX1-1, which authorized the California Department of Finance to appropriate $25 million specifically for "federal accountability litigation." That is not a legal defense budget. It is a war chest, funded by California taxpayers and earmarked for political confrontation with the federal government.
New Jersey followed a similar path. Governor Phil Murphy added $1 million to the state's fiscal year 2026 budget for the Project for Federal Accountability. Budget documents described the money as "essential" to fund two positions and to "provide critical support... to protect our residents from reckless and illegal actions by the federal government that harm New Jerseyans." The same documents acknowledged that previous costs of the lawsuits "have been negligible" because the attorney general's office had been "relying on preexisting resources." So costs were negligible, until a dedicated budget line made them permanent.
New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport's spokeswoman, Allison Inserro, declined an interview request from The Center Square.
Public records released by the Washington State Attorney General's Office revealed that the Democratic AGs coordinated through at least two channels: a "Rule of Law Working Group" and the "Project for Federal Accountability." Most of the records, described as hundreds of pages, were released entirely redacted under attorney work-product exemptions. The Center Square successfully appealed some redactions, uncovering the names of individuals on the original emails, and continues to appeal further redactions.
Former Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, now the state's governor, announced the day after the 2024 election that his office had already been preparing potential litigation for months.
"We knew from our extensive experience during his first term that we would need to be prepared from day one if he was reelected."
Ferguson also said his team had gone "line-by-line through Project 2025" and had been "tracking remarks by Trump on the campaign trail." His office did not respond to The Center Square's interview request for the story.
Three Democratic attorneys general, in Oregon, Virginia, and Wisconsin, declined to say whether they signed the agreement. Pennsylvania presents a different wrinkle: voters elected Republican Dave Sunday as attorney general in November 2024 to succeed a Democrat. Sunday took office in January 2025 but has not responded to questions about whether Pennsylvania remains part of the common interest agreement.
Mark Shurtleff served as Utah's attorney general from 2001 to 2013, a Republican who says he now often votes for Democrats. He told The Center Square that common interest agreements among attorneys general are routine. What is not routine, he said, is signing one to coordinate hypothetical lawsuits against a president who has not yet been elected.
"That's not normal at all."
Shurtleff pointed to the 2012 lawsuit in which 22 Republican attorneys general, including himself, challenged the Affordable Care Act. That case resulted in a partial victory and partial defeat before the U.S. Supreme Court. But Shurtleff drew a distinction: that lawsuit targeted a law already signed by the president, not a presidency that had not yet started.
He described the current volume of litigation as wasteful and politically driven.
"It's just horrible. It's a big, huge waste of attorney general time and the good things that you could accomplish together. It's a shame. It's way too much. I think it's ridiculous."
Shurtleff also noted that running for attorney general has become a fundraising exercise built around opposition to Trump: "I get lots of emails from people running for attorney general, lots of texts and emails saying, 'We've got to stop President Trump' or 'We've got to work together as state attorneys general. That's why you need to give me money!'"
Retired Connecticut Judge Thomas Moukawsher told The Center Square that common interest agreements serve a legitimate purpose, allowing parties with shared legal interests to communicate confidentially with their lawyers. But Moukawsher questioned whether this particular agreement met that standard.
"But what is their common interest? We can't establish what their common interests are. I don't like it. If I was sitting as a judge on the case, I'd say you need to have something a little more specific. That's just a little strange. 'Federal Accountability?'"
The vagueness is the point. "Federal Accountability" is broad enough to cover any lawsuit against any federal policy. It does not identify a specific statute, regulation, or executive action. It is a blank check for coordinated litigation, wrapped in attorney-client privilege to keep the public from seeing how the strategy was built.
Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, told The Center Square at the Capitol that the Democratic attorneys general "did what Republican attorneys general did with President Obama's stimulus plan in 2009: 'everything he's for, we're against.'" Asked about the results, Kaine said simply: "Look where we are now."
The comparison has limits. Marquette University data collected in 2025 found that 122 multistate lawsuits were filed against the Biden Administration during his full four years in office. Of those, only six were launched by Democrats and two were bipartisan. Democratic attorneys general have filed nearly 100 suits against Trump in roughly 18 months, a pace that dwarfs anything Republican AGs attempted against Obama or Biden.
And the coordination infrastructure is different. No comparable confidential agreement among Republican attorneys general, signed before a Democratic president took office, has surfaced in public records. The "Project for Federal Accountability" was purpose-built to challenge one administration, assembled before that administration existed, and funded with dedicated taxpayer dollars after it began.
California's Rob Bonta has emerged as the most prolific litigant in the coalition, with 82 lawsuits filed. He told reporters he does not expect the cases to be dismissed and that "Trump shows no sign of slowing down, so we will continue to sue him." The $19 million bill to California taxpayers will grow. The $25 million authorized under SBX1-1 ensures there is money to keep going.
The coalition's legal track record is mixed. Data from Just Security, described as a nonpartisan digital law and policy journal at New York University, shows 11 cases have closed in favor of the plaintiffs and four have been dismissed in favor of the federal government. That leaves the vast majority of the nearly 100 cases still pending, an ongoing drain on state budgets and federal court dockets.
The litigation pipeline shows no sign of slowing. Twenty-four Democratic state attorneys general, including Bonta, filed a lawsuit in the United States Court of International Trade challenging the Trump Administration's use of Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a narrow, rarely invoked provision, as an alternative legal basis for tariffs after the Supreme Court struck down earlier tariffs imposed under a different statute. That ruling ordered the refund of roughly $130 billion in collected tariffs. The White House vowed to "vigorously defend" the new tariff authority in court.
The agreement itself was designed to keep the public in the dark. Its stated purpose included "avoiding any waiver of the confidentiality of those privileged materials." The Washington State Attorney General's Office released hundreds of pages of records in response to public records requests, almost all of them completely blacked out under attorney work-product exemptions. The Center Square had to appeal just to get the names of the people on the original emails.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes' communications director, Richie Taylor, downplayed the April 28 signing date in a written response: "There is nothing particularly significant about that date. The office has common interest agreements with Republican AG's as well as Democratic AG's depending on the litigation." But the agreement obtained by The Center Square contains zero Republican signatories. And the litigation it contemplated did not yet exist.
Maryland's Anthony Brown denied knowing the effort's nickname. "Project for Federal Accountability" appeared in Washington State records, not in the agreement itself. But the coordination was real, the signatures were real, and the lawsuits that followed, nearly 100 of them, were real.
Voters chose Trump by a clear margin. Twenty-two Democratic attorneys general chose to treat that outcome as a problem to be managed, not a democratic result to be respected. The planning started before the election, the money started flowing after it, and the secrecy was baked in from the beginning. That is not legal accountability. It is political resistance with a legal letterhead, and taxpayers in blue states are picking up the tab.
