At DC AG’s Office, Lucrative Contracts Flow to Allies and Lawsuits Are Aimed at Enemies
30th April 2025
Violent youth crime is on the rise in the nation’s capital, but the Washington, D.C., attorney general’s office is focused on something else: doling out massive contracts to well-connected plaintiffs’ attorneys firms to sue left-wing bugaboos.
Since 2019, the D.C. attorney general’s office has awarded several lucrative contingency fee contracts to Edelson PC to help file consumer fraud lawsuits against prominent corporations—legal efforts that conservative watchdog groups say are designed to achieve left-wing policy wins at a nationwide scale. That includes a contract worth up to $170 million to help the attorney general’s office sue the manufacturers of PFAS chemicals, and a 2023 contract worth up to $55 million to help the district sue Facebook and other social media companies. And there’s one person at the center of many of the cases: former D.C. assistant deputy attorney general Jimmy Rock, a Democratic donor who left his taxpayer-funded post in late 2022 to head up Edelson’s new office in the nation’s capital.
Pursuing left-wing consumer fraud litigation is the sort of work Rock did when he managed the D.C. attorney general’s Public Advocacy Division, where he was the lead attorney in a January 2020 lawsuit against the Trump inaugural committee for allegedly overpaying Trump’s hotels for accommodations during the 2017 inauguration. Rock also represented the D.C. attorney general’s office in a 2018 lawsuit that sought to hold Facebook accountable for allegedly misusing user data during the 2016 elections. That lawsuit is on appeal after a D.C. judge ruled against the district attorney in 2023.