WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:07.040 We have Ron Schultz who is running for Minnesota Attorney General. I'm just going to read their 00:07.040 --> 00:12.240 intros for you. He frequently introduced or frequently recognizes one of the top lawyers 00:12.240 --> 00:19.360 in the country. He was named to Forbes inaugural list of America's top 200 lawyers in both 00:19.360 --> 00:26.360 2024 and 2025. Ron began his career by serving as a military lawyer in the United States Army 00:26.360 --> 00:32.280 Jake Court, where he prosecuted felony court martial laws. And now for over two decades, 00:32.660 --> 00:37.580 he has been included in the list of Minnesota's super lawyers and most years has been listed 00:37.580 --> 00:42.960 among the top 10 super lawyers in the state. Though currently serving as a board member of 00:42.960 --> 00:47.660 the Center for the American Experiment, a member of the Federal Society since 1993, 00:48.520 --> 00:53.400 advisor to Upper Midwest Law Center, who we've had them speak here before too as well. 00:53.940 --> 00:58.860 Ron Schultz has decided to step from advisor to active participant by running for Attorney 00:58.860 --> 01:04.360 General of Minnesota. So, Ron, why don't you come on up. 01:08.580 --> 01:14.840 Thank you, Dennis. So the first thing is the guy who ran last time, his name was Schultz, 01:15.240 --> 01:20.940 almost like mine, S-C-H-U-L-T-Z. I have no L in my name. So I'm trying by the end of the 01:20.940 --> 01:27.900 campaign. Everybody does this. By the end of the campaign, people will have my name down. It shoots 01:27.900 --> 01:36.760 S-C-H-U-T-Z. So thanks for the kind introduction. What I'll do is give you a little bit of a 01:36.760 --> 01:41.960 background again. I'll flesh out some of the things that Deeta said. I'm a lifelong 01:41.960 --> 01:48.120 Minnesota and I was born and raised here. I grew up on a dairy farm in the southwestern 01:48.120 --> 01:55.880 part of the state. If you go all the way south to Interstate 90, head west, stop about 40 miles 01:55.880 --> 02:01.920 before you hit Sioux Falls. There's a town there called Adrien. When I grew up on a dairy farm 02:01.920 --> 02:09.860 outside of Adrien, went to a small town high school. The typical, I think there were 74 kids, 02:10.040 --> 02:14.760 or 78 kids in my high school class, kind of a typical small town high school existence, 02:14.760 --> 02:23.180 played some sports. But we didn't have a lot of money. I was fortunate to get a four-year 02:23.180 --> 02:29.820 Army ROTC scholarship. I used that to go to Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 02:29.820 --> 02:36.940 where I got a degree in mechanical engineering. After I graduated from Marquette, I went to 02:36.940 --> 02:42.140 the University of Minnesota law school, got my law degree there, and then I went into the Army 02:42.800 --> 02:49.360 and spent four years in the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, which is the, 02:50.140 --> 02:55.340 those are the Army's lawyers. And I spent the first part of my career as a defense lawyer, 02:55.520 --> 03:01.320 and the second half of the four years I was in as a prosecutor. Almost all the cases were 03:01.320 --> 03:08.500 felony level cases. I was at a base with the Seventh Infantry Division, so there were 03:08.500 --> 03:14.580 20,000 infantry troops there. And we prosecuted all crimes that any of the service members 03:14.580 --> 03:20.980 committed on post. Well, when you got a lot of testosterone charged 18 to 20-year-olds, and 03:20.980 --> 03:27.180 you got a big population like that, you're going to have problems. And the cases typically 03:27.180 --> 03:35.420 were assault cases, rape cases, some larceny cases, drug cases. On the defense side, 03:35.420 --> 03:43.440 I did have a murder case on the prosecution side. Several rape cases, some child molestation cases, 03:43.620 --> 03:48.560 those were really hard. But it was a great experience and served me well through the 03:48.560 --> 03:55.720 rest of my career. When I got out, I came, we were stationed in California, Fort Ord, California. 03:56.700 --> 04:03.600 When I got out, my wife and I, I was married, I got married in between my junior and 04:03.600 --> 04:09.940 junior year of college to my high school sweetheart, Janet. She's the co-campaign manager 04:09.940 --> 04:14.260 on the campaign right now and has really been responsible for keeping me on track during 04:14.260 --> 04:20.840 the course of this campaign. Janet and I came back to Minnesota with two of our three children. 04:21.060 --> 04:27.820 Two were born in Army Hospital in Fort Ord. Came back here. I spent most of my career 04:28.500 --> 04:35.160 in private practice, when I got out in private practice, at a large law firm in downtown Minneapolis, 04:35.440 --> 04:40.980 200 lawyer law firm. I resigned from it in February to concentrate on running for attorney general. 04:41.460 --> 04:48.460 But while I was there, my practice was basically complex litigation because I have an engineering 04:48.460 --> 04:53.940 degree. I did a lot of patent litigation. So it was technical, very technical complicated 04:53.940 --> 05:00.960 stuff where most of the time I represented either individuals or small companies against 05:00.960 --> 05:08.420 corporate giants. I have taken on the likes of the entire MRI industry because I've represented 05:08.420 --> 05:13.140 the inventor of the MRI industry, Dr. Raymond Damadian. God bless his soul. God rest his 05:13.140 --> 05:19.000 soul. He's passed away. But we sued everybody in the MRI industry. General Electric, Siemens, 05:19.220 --> 05:23.580 Hitachi, Phillips, you just go on and on with all these major multinational corporations 05:24.260 --> 05:32.560 that we asserted Dr. Damadian's patents against them successfully. One case I won $110 million 05:33.280 --> 05:38.420 and it basically saved the company. It injected that money into the company that had been crushed 05:38.420 --> 05:44.480 by these bigger corporations. But I've also sued a lot of tech companies, the Microsofts, 05:44.520 --> 05:50.860 the Amazon, the Samsungs, the Sonys, the Cannons of the world. One of the things that 05:50.860 --> 05:59.800 the Democrats are going to try to do in this election is just paint me as fancy big firm lawyer 06:00.980 --> 06:06.240 who, you know, represented corporate America. Well, from time to time I would represent some 06:06.240 --> 06:11.020 larger corporations because they're entitled to lawyers too and they want to hire the best 06:11.020 --> 06:15.700 lawyers and I ended up getting hired by some of those folks. But I would say the vast majority 06:15.700 --> 06:19.260 of the cases I had were representing a little guy against major corporations. 06:20.540 --> 06:28.460 I ultimately became chairman of this 200 lawyer law firm from 2019 to 2024. And at that point, 06:28.600 --> 06:36.820 I went through what a lot of people do when they're at kind of my stage in life where you've 06:36.820 --> 06:42.080 reached the pinnacle of your profession or you've been a CEO or the head of a company. 06:42.840 --> 06:48.080 And it's time to move on from that, but you've got a lot of energy. I knew there was another 06:48.080 --> 06:53.380 chapter in my life. I just wasn't exactly sure what it was. I'd been around politics a long time. 06:53.960 --> 06:58.720 I was the chair of the Judicial Selection Commission for Tim Palenti when he was governor 06:58.720 --> 07:04.840 and worked with Governor Palenti to appoint 104 district court judges and four of seven 07:04.840 --> 07:12.880 Supreme Court, Minnesota Supreme Court justices. And I'd been approached to run for public office 07:12.880 --> 07:19.680 several times in the past, but the timing was never quite right. Well, now having stepped down 07:19.680 --> 07:26.240 as chairman of my law firm and at this stage of my life, the timing was right. So that's why 07:26.240 --> 07:30.200 one of the reasons I ran for attorney general, I mean, if the state were all hunky gory and 07:30.200 --> 07:34.180 everything was fine, I wouldn't need to have done that. But as you all know, and one of the 07:34.180 --> 07:41.240 reasons you're sitting here right now is it's a mess out there. It's a mess out there. Somebody 07:41.240 --> 07:45.420 asked to step up to the plate and do something about it. I've always been a doer and I'm not 07:45.420 --> 07:50.200 afraid of doing hard things. I've done hard things all my life, everything from trials to some of 07:50.200 --> 07:55.500 the physical marathons, mountain climbing, other things I've done in life. And so this was 07:56.540 --> 08:01.660 not intimidating in terms of the challenge. It's a lot of work. A lot of work and 08:01.660 --> 08:06.140 as this campaign goes on, people are going to say bad things about me. And I remember, 08:06.960 --> 08:11.800 I can't remember who the politician was years ago. I was at an event, something like this, 08:11.820 --> 08:15.120 where he was talking, and it was in the throes of the campaign. And he said, 08:15.640 --> 08:21.440 the things they're saying about me are so bad, my wife sleeps with one eye open. Okay. 08:24.520 --> 08:30.800 So we may get to that at some point in the campaign, but I take a lot of comfort 08:30.800 --> 08:36.760 in the fact that my friends and family, you know, love me and support me and they know who 08:36.760 --> 08:40.440 I really am. They won't believe all the bad things that are going to be said about me. 08:41.480 --> 08:48.560 Let me talk now a little bit about the major issues in the campaign. And I'll go a little 08:48.560 --> 08:54.280 deeper than I usually do when I just have five minutes and I'm at a convention event where 08:54.280 --> 08:59.960 I just don't have time to go deep. But what I want you to have when you leave here 09:00.620 --> 09:04.940 is some ammunition. All right. When you're out there talking to your friends, 09:05.420 --> 09:10.820 your neighbors, your coworkers, other people in the place of worship, and you talk about 09:10.820 --> 09:16.460 the attorney general's race, I'm going to give you some specifics that you can use 09:16.980 --> 09:23.640 to have a rational discussion and convince them that we need to fire Keith Ellison and 09:23.640 --> 09:29.860 how you mean. Okay. So let's start with an issue that everybody's campaigning on and that's fraud. 09:30.400 --> 09:36.360 All right. We have a massive fraud problem in the state and we've had it for a long time 09:37.140 --> 09:45.600 and it really started ramping up 2017, 2018, 2019. Well, Keith Ellison came in office. He was 09:45.600 --> 09:52.040 elected in 2018. All right. He is going to try to convince people that he is now a fraud 09:52.040 --> 09:57.600 fighter. I mean, that's what he's going to try to convince people. And if somebody says that to you, 09:57.700 --> 10:03.580 you have to say, well, wait a minute, where's he been the last eight years? Okay. We've had 10:03.580 --> 10:10.460 billions of dollars stolen from taxpayers in this state and where has he been? He can't now 10:11.000 --> 10:15.520 come to the forefront and claim he's a fraud fighter because that's a joke. It's just an 10:15.520 --> 10:20.760 absolute joke. Yes, he prosecuses a fraud case here or there. If somebody, some investigators 10:20.760 --> 10:26.820 plop the file on his desk, but take defeating our future fraud scandal, for example, that was all 10:26.820 --> 10:32.060 done by the feds. And a lot of what this other stuff is done by the feds. I saw recently where 10:32.060 --> 10:36.020 he said, wow, that's the feds, you know, because they have more power to do that. Well, that, 10:36.060 --> 10:43.240 again, is a bunch of hogwash. The attorney general has broad, broad investigatory powers 10:43.240 --> 10:49.620 to ferret out fraud and be proactive. The other thing that is, I don't know if it's 10:49.620 --> 10:55.180 unique to Minnesota, but the way we're set up, the attorney general is the primary 10:56.640 --> 11:02.860 regulator of the state's nonprofits. And a lot of the fraud's been committed by 11:02.860 --> 11:09.600 nonprofit entities. The attorney general can has free reign to investigate nonprofits. 11:10.160 --> 11:16.340 He can go in, look at the books, start taking depositions of people and shut them down if 11:16.340 --> 11:21.640 they're committed. Engage in fraud, he hasn't done that. You're all probably, I'm going to 11:21.640 --> 11:26.280 keep an eye on the time, you're probably all aware that he had a meeting with the fraudsters 11:26.280 --> 11:31.560 in December of 2021. Deda mentioned the Center of the American Experiment Organization on whose 11:31.560 --> 11:38.840 board I've been sit for 18 years has obtained a secret recording where he's meeting with 11:38.840 --> 11:44.400 the soon to be indicted fraudsters and offered to help them. If I had more time, I could, 11:44.400 --> 11:50.340 I could walk you through more real interesting things in the transcript of that meeting, 11:50.360 --> 11:55.240 but I, I, that we'll have to wait for another day. So that's on the fraud. Just give you a 11:55.240 --> 12:04.340 little ammunition on the fraud stuff. The other thing is his, he's a charter member 12:04.340 --> 12:11.200 of the anti-police movement. Just to be blunt, he hates cops. He always has and he hates cops. 12:13.260 --> 12:23.180 Back after the George Floyd riots in the fall of 2021, the city of Minneapolis, the city council, 12:23.740 --> 12:29.380 you know, those of you out here, God bless you, you're somewhat insulated from the 12:29.380 --> 12:32.500 craziness that goes on the city of Minneapolis. We have a communist city council. I mean, 12:32.520 --> 12:38.620 literally a Democrat, socialist of America, communist city council. And they proposed an 12:38.620 --> 12:44.860 amendment to the city charter that would have done two things. The first thing the amendment would 12:44.860 --> 12:52.840 have done was eliminate the numerical requirement that there be a certain number of police officers 12:53.360 --> 12:58.520 per population city, Minneapolis, because there's a requirement. You got X number of people, 12:58.700 --> 13:03.980 you got a Y number of police officers, that would be eliminated. The second thing it would have done 13:04.600 --> 13:10.380 is abolish. Yes, abolish the Minneapolis police department and replace it with a so-called 13:10.380 --> 13:14.980 department of public safety, which, and this is language right out of the proposed charter 13:14.980 --> 13:21.680 amendment, which could, if necessary, have licensed police officers. Well, that was their 13:22.300 --> 13:28.800 entree to completely defund the police. Keith Ellison stumped the campaign trail 13:28.800 --> 13:35.180 for months seeking to get that passed. But even the people of the city meant for the people of 13:35.180 --> 13:39.920 the city of Minneapolis, that was a bridge too far. They refused to vote for that. It went down 13:39.920 --> 13:46.380 56% no votes or it didn't pass. So when Keith Ellison claims, as he tries to do from time to 13:46.380 --> 13:51.140 time, that he was never in favor of defunding the police, it's a lie. It's just a flat 13:51.140 --> 13:56.920 out lie. All right. And we've got copies of speeches. I mean, he can't run away from it, 13:56.920 --> 14:03.060 the fact that he voted for this. The other issue that is central to our campaign 14:03.780 --> 14:09.360 is getting back to having fairness in girls' sports. As I frequently say when I'm out on the 14:09.360 --> 14:14.540 campaign trail, I plan on restoring some common sense to the Office of Attorney General, 14:14.820 --> 14:21.140 where the criminals are the bad guys, the cops are the good guys, and boys are boys, 14:21.140 --> 14:31.180 and girls are girls. He has led the legal fight that forced girls to have to compete against boys. 14:32.180 --> 14:37.940 And here's how he's done it. Back in February of 2025, a little over a year ago, he issued an 14:37.940 --> 14:42.380 Attorney General opinion, which is within the power of the Attorney General to do, 14:42.780 --> 14:47.320 if asked by a state agency. He was asked by the Minnesota State High School League 14:47.320 --> 14:54.400 whether they had to allow boys who identified as girls to play on girls' sports teams. He issues a 14:54.400 --> 15:01.680 four-page legal opinion saying that under the Minnesota Human Rights Act, if a boy who identifies 15:01.680 --> 15:07.600 as a girl wants to play on the girls' sports teams, you have to allow it. If when I was 15:07.600 --> 15:13.260 in private practice, a young lawyer would have put that legal opinion on my desk, I would 15:13.260 --> 15:22.240 have fired them. It is the worst, axially deceptive piece of legal work that I have ever seen in my 15:22.240 --> 15:27.700 life. If it were submitted to a court, he would be sanctioned by the judge for that. Let me tell 15:27.700 --> 15:33.020 you why. The Minnesota Human Rights Act, 60, you can print it out, you print it out, it's 15:33.020 --> 15:39.040 like 60 pages, okay, single spaced, very extensive. But if you read through it, 15:39.720 --> 15:55.440 there is a specific section titled exceptions. And section, its missile statutes, chapter 363a.23 is 15:55.440 --> 16:02.900 a statutory section. It has a specific exception for sports teams, for educational sports teams 16:02.900 --> 16:07.220 over high school sports teams. And it says, and this is really what's important about this, 16:07.220 --> 16:16.100 because in lawyer ease, when you have statutes that start out by saying not withstanding any 16:16.100 --> 16:23.360 other provision of this statute or any other law, that's basically saying we don't it, we the 16:23.360 --> 16:30.160 legislature in adopting this language, it overrides everything, no matter what any other 16:30.160 --> 16:34.460 statute of law says when it starts out with that not withstanding any other law language. 16:34.460 --> 16:42.180 And it goes on to say that educational institutions can have single sex sports teams. 16:43.020 --> 16:49.240 Not gender, sex. And there's a difference between sex and gender. And they'd like to say sex and 16:49.240 --> 16:53.300 gender are the same. They are not legally the same. And they're not, they're not the same, 16:53.400 --> 16:58.680 even under the definitional sections of the Minnesota Human Rights Act. The first thing 16:58.680 --> 17:05.520 that I will do when I get in office is I will revoke that attorney general opinion and issue a 17:05.520 --> 17:12.820 new one. That's the very first thing I'm going to do. All right. He's also the Trump administration 17:12.820 --> 17:17.960 has recently sued the Minnesota State High School League for violating Title IX 17:18.600 --> 17:23.320 for this very thing. And we'll see how that works its way through the court system, but 17:23.320 --> 17:28.160 the case should resolve the way I've just laid it out from a legal perspective. All right. 17:29.220 --> 17:35.920 So that's basically, you know, the major issues there, you know, other, you know, issues that I 17:35.920 --> 17:41.820 could get into, but in the interest of time and everything. I think I'll probably stop my remarks 17:41.820 --> 17:46.860 now and turn it back to Deetta. And I understand we're going to have a Q&A section later. So if 17:46.860 --> 17:51.300 there are some things that are in particular that you all are interested in, I hope that 17:51.300 --> 17:54.040 you'll ask those questions when we get to the Q&A section.