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Attorney General William Tong at WNHH FM.
“We could go to jail for what we are doing.”
“We need to keep a lid on this, if this gets out, we could get into real trouble.”
William Tong got his hands on a diary with those entries in it. He made sure a court got its hands on that diary too — in a quest to take on the generic drug industry.
The “Diary of Collusion,” as it came to be called, features prominently in a complaint Tong filed on behalf of fellow attorneys general from 51 states and territories in a lawsuit they are waging against the industry. The diary, written by an industry exec turned cooperative witness, supports a claim that competing companies colluded to illegally divide up the market and drive up prices on generic drugs. As a result, prices have risen by as much as 8000 percent in a decade on medications people need, Tong said.
The generic suit is an example of a lucrative kind of lawsuit that has become common in Connecticut and the U.S.: attorneys general putting aside partisan difference to band together to take on multinational corporations for harming the public. Tong has been part of such lawsuits against opioid distributors, e‑cigarette makers, fossil fuel producers, and electric utilities.
Those lawsuits bring in hundreds of millions of dollars a year directly to Connecticut, Tong said — as much as $1 billion when you add in savings to consumers. The attorney’s general office does that with a roughly $30 million budget and 200 attorneys.
The lawsuits show the difference that the attorney general, state government’s chief civil litigator, can make in protecting the public, Tong said in an interview Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. He highlighted the cases as a reason he is seeking a second four-year term in the job. He is the Democratic candidate on the Nov. 8 ballot, facing Republican Jessica Kordas and the Green Party’s Ken Krayeske.
“When I was here [as a candidate] four years ago I told you that I should be attorney general because of my experience as a legislator, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and because of my private practice experience working at a big law firm,” Tong said.
“I told you that, to be fair, because that’s what I had. Those were my two leading arguments.
“I really didn’t know how true it would be until I became attorney general. When I became attorney general, I realized that the people who were prosecutors had been one-woman, one-man operations. They were not as good at building coalitions as legislators.
“As a former legislator, I know how to count.”
As an example, he cited the settlement of the attorneys general suit against the opioid distributors. At first, some of the participating AGs announced an $18 billion settlement “without checking out with the rest of us. I held out for more because I knew how to count. I knew whom to include in my coalition. I built a coalition with Democrats and Republicans. I had Florida. I had Georgia. I had Ohio. I had Massachusetts. Democrats and Republicans. Big and small.”
These suits have offered one bright spot in an otherwise gloomy national political environment of partisan demonization (although that too might be changing). Right-wing Texas AG “Ken Paxton was our partner on Juul. Ken Paxton is our partner on Google. We need each other,” Tong noted.
Partisan gridlock has prevented Congress from addressing issues ranging from immigration to climate change to corporate irresponsibility in health care and tech. ”These fights devolve to the states. We can’t wait for Congress,” Tong said.
He was asked about the criticism that it makes more sense to try to change law and set policy through legislation rather than lawsuits.
“Litigation is not the best way to set policy,” he acknowledged, but it’s an important tool, especially when the legislative process is failing.
Who's The Client
Click on the video to watch the full conversation with Attorney General William Tong on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
Tong also addressed criticism raised in an earlier “Dateline” interview by Green Party opponent Krayeske: That the Attorney General’s office reflexively defends the state against allegations of civil rights and other abuses against prisoners and arrestees. Krayeske — who has represented such litigants in lawsuits against the state — said that if elected attorney general, he would not fight cases involving abuse of prisoners or arrestees when the state is wrong. “We don’t have to litigate,” he said. He complained that Tong has made holding state supervisors accountable for misconduct on their watch even harder than before by successfully appealing a lower-court verdict against a supervisor in a 2020 case involving Cara Tangreti, who was repeatedly raped by prison guards: “He got two Trump judges [to] upend the post-Word War II Nuremberg model of supervisory accountability.”
Tong responded that defending state officials and departments is his job.
He said he can’t comment on specific pending or recent cases. But in general, he argued, “when the facts support that somebody’s been harmed, there is a process for us to make that right. That’s why we have cases. That’s why we have courts. That’s why we have judges. …
“I’m not the judge, jury, and executioner. I am the state’s lawyer. I have a constitutional, statutory and ethical obligation to represent my client zealously. …”
Krayeske argued that the attorney general’s “client” isn’t just the government official in question, or generic “taxpayers,” but citizens harmed by the state as well.
“As a legal and ethical matter, the client is the state of Connecticut, its officials acting in their official capacity and state agencies and departments,” Tong countered. He will occasional decline to represent someone who does “something wrong” outside their “official capacity” and “discharge of their duties. … But I have to be really careful about when I do do that. It is my obligation to represent my clients no matter what their political affiliation is or what their position is. So someone at DOT [the Department of Transportation] will get the same representation as someone from DCF [Department of Children and Families]” or the Department or Correction.”
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Tong's response doesn't really address the issue raised by Attorney Krayeske as to manifest waste of time and resources in defending obvious illegal and injurious actions against citizens.
Just as Mayor Elicker and Chief of Police Jacobson have acknowledged the injuries inflicted on Randy Cox and indicated a willingness to negotiate the damages, Tong has the discretion to settle matters.
Experienced litigators know that a good settlement is better than a roll of the dice before a judge or jury.
While I congratulate Attorney General Tong on seeking to reduce the cost of drugs to the public, it should be noted that his Democratic colleagues in the Congress and President Biden completely have sold out to the drug companies while simultaneously proclaiming success in reducing the cost of drugs. In reality, only a few drugs have had price caps imposed.
Many people are already buying their prescriptions in Canada or Mexico.
Not only do we not have affordable and universally available healthcare, we are still being ripped off by the drug companies.
But carry on.