Weiser’s Record: The Lawsuit Machine and the Scorecard

By Shaina Cole | Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

Marya Washburn is a federal Forest Service firefighter. She was fired by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins last year, right before fire season. At a January forum in Denver, Attorney General Phil Weiser singled her out by name as evidence of what his office has accomplished.

“My office got involved in one of the 50 lawsuits we brought against this administration,” Weiser told the Colorado Young Democrats forum. “We got our job back.”

It is also incomplete in ways voters should understand.

The lawsuit Weiser was describing is captioned State of Maryland v. USDA. Maryland filed it. Maryland’s attorneys drafted the complaint and argued the case. Colorado was one of several states that added its name to the filing. Weiser’s own campaign website noted in April 2025 that Washburn’s reinstatement order “is set to end on Saturday” — a temporary court order, in a case Colorado did not lead, presented to a campaign audience as a completed win.

The Washburn story is a small thing on its own. But pull that thread and a larger pattern comes into view — a record of 64 lawsuits that is considerably more complicated than the number suggests, and a separate performance record at the Department of Law that the campaign has never mentioned.

What 64 lawsuits actually means

Weiser’s office maintains a public tracker at coag.gov listing every federal lawsuit it has been involved in since January 2025. The list is real. Sixty-four cases. The question is what Colorado’s role has actually been in each of them.

A review of the filed complaint PDFs tells a different story than the one Weiser tells on the campaign trail. In four of the 64 cases, Colorado is the sole named lead plaintiff. Those four cases involve Space Command’s relocation to Colorado Springs, terrorism prevention grants withheld by DHS and FEMA, the EPA’s rollback of Colorado’s air quality plan, and a federal order requiring the Craig coal plant to stay open. As of this writing, all four are pending. None have produced a final result.

In roughly eight others, Weiser’s press releases describe Colorado as a co-lead alongside named partner states. Of those, one carries a “Won” designation on the office’s own tracker — a preliminary injunction blocking a Department of Energy funding cap, a case Oregon filed in federal court in Eugene. The case remains open. Preliminary injunctions are temporary orders subject to appeal and further court proceedings; they are not final judgments. The rest of the co-lead cases are pending or ongoing.

In 52 of the 64 cases, Colorado joined lawsuits that were filed and led by other states. California accounts for approximately 16 of those cases. New York leads roughly 14. Massachusetts leads eight more. In the majority of what Weiser presents as his litigation record, another state’s attorney general initiated the case, selected the venue, and directs the litigation. Colorado added its name and its specific injury claims to cases already underway.

That practice is common, and Colorado’s participation ensures state residents benefit from any relief ordered. That still requires real legal work.

The more important question is whether those 52 cases can accurately be described as lawsuits Weiser’s office “brought” or “filed.”

That point has also come up on the campaign trail.

Sen. Michael Bennet, Weiser’s opponent in the June 30 Democratic gubernatorial primary, raised the distinction directly at the same January forum. “There is a difference,” Bennet said, “between signing on to other people’s lawsuits and then walking around suburban Colorado saying I’ve been fighting Trump with my 50 lawsuits.” 

He returned to it later: “My opponent spends a lot of time talking about fight[ing] Trump… lawsuit, lawsuit, lawsuit. But what we really need in this nation, in addition to fighting Trump, is a vision for what the future is going to look like.” He closed with this: “We’re not going to sue our way to more housing. We’re not going to sue our way to better healthcare. We’re not going to sue our way to better child care in Colorado.”

Weiser has pushed back. At the January 20 legislative oversight hearing he told legislators the litigation had protected “close to $900 million” in federal funding for Colorado, at a supplemental cost of $600,000 in new staff. Weiser argues the moment demands precisely the legal expertise his office has spent three years developing.

A review of the cases behind that figure raises two questions the number alone does not answer. The majority of the $900 million traces to cases led by Illinois, New York, Washington, and California — states whose attorneys general filed the suits, chose the courts, and control the proceedings. The largest item in which Colorado holds a named co-lead role is approximately $80 million in education funding. 

Most of the favorable outcomes behind that figure are preliminary injunctions—temporary rulings that can be appealed and continue through the courts, not final decisions. In some instances, court orders have been issued and the money still has not arrived; Colorado’s own emergency management officials reported in December 2025 that the state was using stopgap funds to cover FEMA shortfalls despite rulings in its favor.

Those are arguments for voters to weigh. What the complaint documents establish is this: of the 64 cases Weiser presents as his record, only four bear Colorado’s name at the top — and all four are still pending.

The scorecard

Every year, Colorado’s attorney general is required by the SMART Government Act to file mandatory performance reports with the state legislature — targets set, actual results reported, across the office’s core statutory functions. The filings are public. They have received almost no attention.

They document four consecutive years of missed targets in core duties the office is supposed to carry out: consumer protection enforcement, criminal appeals, support for rural prosecutors handling violent crimes, and law enforcement training grants. In each area, the office set its own goals—and in each, the trend moved the wrong way.

The strain is not invisible to Weiser. At his January 20 oversight hearing—the annual review of this data—he said as much. Consumer complaints to his office have grown more than 200 percent since 2019. “We can’t take on every case, including many righteous cases,” he told the Joint Judiciary Committee. “It’s unfortunately just a judgment call I have to keep making as we see different harms. How do we constantly triage what is a limited portfolio of cases vis-a-vis all the harms that are out there?”

On the same day, Weiser asked legislators not to cut funding for his Special Prosecutions Unit, the team that assists rural district attorneys who lack the resources to handle homicides, trafficking cases, and organized crime. The unit, he told the committee, “was getting far more requests than we were able to meet.” He did not mention that it had filed 55 cases in fiscal year 2025 against its own target of 75, or that it had filed just 11 through the first half of the current fiscal year.

In November 2025, Weiser submitted his annual budget request to the Joint Budget Committee. His cover letter disclosed that “due to the significant budget challenges, I have imposed a hiring freeze on the Department for the remainder of this calendar year.” He has said the federal Trump litigation was handled largely by existing staff, working on it alongside their regular duties.

At the close of that January 20 presentation — in which he did not mention the performance targets his office had missed, and no legislator asked — Weiser offered the legislature his assessment: “The Department of Law is working in a way that I’m deeply proud of. Smarter, harder, more innovative to meet the challenges of this moment.”

The question for voters

Weiser faces U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet in the June 30 Democratic primary for governor. He holds the endorsements of four sitting governors and has made his federal litigation record the central argument of his candidacy. The Colorado Department of Law did not respond to questions submitted for this story.

What those documents show is a gap between the record Weiser presents on the campaign trail and what his own filings report at home.

In the Department of Law’s January 2026 performance report, multiple core functions fall short of their own targets—from criminal appeals backlogs that are growing instead of shrinking to special prosecutions and consumer protection cases coming in well below stated goals.

Data through December 2025 shows several core functions falling short of annual targets, including criminal appeals, special prosecutions and consumer protection work. Note: Higher appeals backlog numbers indicate increased case delays. Source: Office of the Attorney General, Colorado Department of Law performance report (Jan. 15, 2026).

Whether that gap reflects deliberate choices about where to direct limited resources, structural underfunding of the office, the demands of federal litigation, or some combination of all three is a question Weiser has not addressed.

The campaign has made Weiser’s courtroom record a centerpiece. Voters deserve to weigh that record against what his own filings show was happening inside the office he already runs.

Editor’s note: This article launched RMV’s Weiser’s Record series, which expanded into a four-part review of Attorney General Phil Weiser’s litigation record, consumer protection performance, criminal appeals backlog and special prosecution resources. Readers can continue with 27,000 complaints. 17 settlements., A system falling behind and The special prosecution paradox.