This scathing 2005 report from a nationally recognized think tank basically accuses W.A.D. Edmondson of using his office in manner that more resembles a plaintiff’s law firm than as the state’s top legal official.

Capital Research Center:

Summary: Oklahoma’s Drew Edmondson, Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, Illinois’ Lisa Madigan and Michigan’s Mike Cox are little known outside their states. But as their states’ attorney general they exercise an extraordinary power that can be easily abused.

State Attorneys General: A National Association of Aspiring Governors?

The office of state attorney general reached its high-water mark in prestige in March 1999, when eleven tobacco companies reached a settlement with the attorney generals of 46 states and agreed to pay the states $246 billion dollars over the next 25 years. State attorneys general were the new giant-killers and anti-smoking advocacy groups were overjoyed.

In the past half-dozen years many other nonprofit advocacy groups have attempted to emulate the strategy used by the anti-smoking groups. They are looking to state AGs to help them bring all sorts of corporations to heel. The most targeted businesses are gun-makers, which have been sued for “gun violence,” and fast-food restaurants, blamed for the “epidemic of obesity.” But ambitious state attorneys general are devising creative theories of liability as they seek out new targets of opportunity. The private sector is a bulging piñata and the AGs wield a big stick.

Drew Edmondson: Star Activist

An aggressive and veteran attorney general is Oklahoma Democrat W.A. “Drew” Edmondson, now in his eleventh year in office. Last June he received the highest award conferred by the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) and was touted by Vermont attorney general William Sorrell, NAAG’s president, as “a star in our ranks.” Edmondson was born to politics and has pursued a career in public life from an early age.

The tobacco settlement for Oklahoma generated $250 million in private attorneys’ fees. Edmondson hired two out-of-state firms (that got $150 million), which then selected four Oklahoma firms from a list he gave them (they split the other $100 million). Earlier Edmondson had gotten Oklahoma law changed to permit him to file lawsuits independently of the request of a state agency.

The connections between Edmondson and those local law firms raised some eyebrows. The Daily Oklahoman reported that the law firm Riggs, Abney, Neal, Turpen, Orbison & Lewis received $30 million for its participation in the suit and that 29 attorneys and employees of the firm contributed thousands of dollars to Edmondson’s campaign for attorney general in the years following the settlement. Many also contributed to Edmondson’s election campaign before the firm was awarded the tobacco contract. After the suit, Edmondson also received campaign donations from Preston Trimble and Norman & Edem; they received $10 million and $30 million, respectively, for their work on the case. The choice of Trimble, a former district attorney and judge who had only been in private practice for a few years, also struck some as favoritism. Trimble had been a special prosecutor appointed to investigate donations to Edmondson’s opponent in his 1994 campaign for AG. Read more…