Keith Ellison's Office Says It Has Sued the Administration 75 Times. Ron Schutz Says Most of Those Cases Were Filed Somewhere Else. I Built the Docket List. They're Both Right, and the Count Is Higher.

The number at the October 2 debate on MPR News was 75. During Trump's second term, MPR reported, Ellison's office "has sued the administration 75 times, according to a spokesperson." In MPR's account, Ron Schutz didn't fight the number. He fought the address. "The overwhelming majority of these cases are filed somewhere other than Minnesota," he said. "Minnesota is not the lead plaintiff and there's no transparency in the sense that a Minnesota judge or a Minnesota jury hears the case." MPR's write-up also has him saying Ellison is acting as a surrogate for the California attorney general.

So I built the list. Every suit, every court, every caption, lined up against the office's own scorecard. Both men are right about something. Neither one told you how the machine works, and the machine's the story.

One plain disclosure before the facts. I ran against Keith Ellison in the August primary and lost. I've also said publicly that I'm supporting him in this one. Weigh what follows with that in mind. Everything below comes from records you can open yourself, and they're listed at the bottom.

As I post this, late on election night, the Secretary of State's unofficial count has 2,849 of 4,105 precincts in and Ellison ahead, 55.1 percent to 44.8. Hennepin is nearly all counted and Ramsey mostly isn't. The number to quote is the one the State Canvassing Board certifies later this month.

Three numbers, one office

The Attorney General's office keeps a public scorecard of these fights, a web page it calls the Minnesota Litigation Tracker. The top of the page reads "Current Tally: 80 Lawsuits", last updated October 1, 2026. So the website said 80 as of October 1, MPR's October 2 story quoted a spokesperson's 75, and neither one is the number of times Minnesota sued the federal government.

Start with eight of the 80 entries. They carry the office's own "[DEFENSE]" tag, which means Minnesota is the one getting sued: over in-state tuition for undocumented students, the state's voter-registration data, its "sanctuary" policies, its hiring, its trans-athlete policy, its SNAP data, its background-check law for gun purchases, and three prediction-market suits bundled into a single entry. One more entry, Minnesota v. Abbott, is a suit against the governor of Texas to force the extradition of an ICE agent. That's a real lawsuit. It's just aimed at Austin, not Washington.

Pull those nine and you're down to 71 suits against the federal government. So far the website's overselling.

Then it cuts the other way, and hard. I ran the tracker against the federal dockets that name Minnesota as a party and turned up 14 more suits against federal agencies that aren't on it. Two came after the October 1 update, a fuel-economy petition on October 2 and a Corporate Transparency Act suit on October 27, so that's timing, not bookkeeping. Nine more were filed before the update and got their own press release from the office, and still never made the scoreboard: the Alex Pretti evidence suit, the childhood vaccine schedule, the federal endangerment finding, the mercury rule, the Indiana coal orders, a second homelessness-funding suit, the HFC rule, and two Endangered Species Act suits filed the same day. The office sent out a press release on every one. Then nobody wrote them down.

That leaves three dockets that list Minnesota as a plaintiff or petitioner, where no release from the office describes them and I couldn't confirm the subject from the public docket. So call it 85, or 82 if you set those three aside. Either way, the office has sued the federal government more often than its own website says. You don't read that sentence every day.

I want to emphasize what kind of error this is. It's bookkeeping. The page labels every defense case "[DEFENSE]" in plain text, and it has a topic filter called "DOJ Challenges to Minnesota Law", though that filter pulls up only two of the eight defense cases, plus two suits Minnesota brought. Nobody's hiding anything. The page just adds them into the headline anyway, and its own introduction calls the list "examples". A running tally of examples is a new one on me. Undercount and overcount, on the same web page. That takes some doing.

The table

Schutz has the address right

Eighty of 85 were filed outside Minnesota. That's 94 percent. Nineteen are in federal district court in Massachusetts and 15 in Rhode Island. Seven each landed in the Northern District of California and in Oregon, six in Maryland, and four apiece in western Washington, the Southern District of New York and the district court in Washington, D.C. Six more are petitions in the D.C. Circuit and two in the First Circuit. Three are tariff cases in the Court of International Trade, one is in the Court of Federal Claims, and there's one each in northern Illinois and eastern Virginia.

Minnesota sued the federal government three times as often in Rhode Island as it did in Minnesota. Fifteen to five. I had to count that one twice.

And the five that stayed home? Every one is a case Minnesota brought as the only state: the trans-athlete funding case, the SNAP recertification case, the Operation Metro Surge case (alongside Minneapolis and Saint Paul), the challenge to a $243 million Medicaid deferral, and the Pretti evidence case, brought for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension alongside the Hennepin County Attorney's Office. Not one multistate case was filed in Minnesota. Not one.

He's mostly right about the lead, too. Minnesota is the first-named plaintiff in 8 of 85, and only two of those eight are multistate, both Minnesota-and-Illinois petitions over federal orders keeping coal plants running.

Why a Minnesota case ends up in Rhode Island

Nobody explained this in MPR's account of the debate, and it's the whole ballgame. Here's how it works. Sue a federal agency in district court and your case goes where the venue statute lets it go. This is the sentence, 28 U.S.C. § 1391(e)(1):

"A civil action in which a defendant is an officer or employee of the United States or any agency thereof acting in his official capacity or under color of legal authority, or an agency of the United States, or the United States, may, except as otherwise provided by law, be brought in any judicial district in which (A) a defendant in the action resides, (B) a substantial part of the events or omissions giving rise to the claim occurred, or a substantial part of property that is the subject of the action is situated, or (C) the plaintiff resides if no real property is involved in the action."

The coalitions usually file in a member state's home district, and the dockets show it over and over. Rhode Island's own case against the President sits in Rhode Island. The Solar for All case, co-led by Washington, sits in western Washington.

Now here's what spoils the easy version of Schutz's point. Minnesota co-led the public-health grants case, a coalition of 23 states and the District of Columbia, and it was filed in Rhode Island, which also co-led. Minnesota led the Solar for All complaint, and it was filed in Washington state. Minnesota also co-led suits filed in Oregon (two), Massachusetts (two) and Washington, D.C. (one). Leading a case doesn't buy you a home game.

Congress wrote subsection (e) into the code in 1962. The clause letters and some of the wording have moved since, but it's still the rule that decides where a coalition's suit against a federal agency can be filed, and so whether a Minnesota judge ever sees it. It's the most important sentence in this whole fight, and neither candidate mentioned it, at least not in MPR's account of the debate.

Twelve of the 85 aren't in a federal district court at all: the eight petitions in the courts of appeals that challenge agency rules and orders, the three tariff cases in the Court of International Trade and the one in the Court of Federal Claims. A different set of statutes fixes the court for those. Every coal petition with Minnesota's name first sits in the D.C. Circuit. So does the mercury-rule petition it co-led.

And the court isn't trivia. It can sink you. The Solar for All case, one Minnesota led, lost on exactly this. The office's own status note says the court "denied plaintiff states' request for preliminary injunction" and then "granted the federal defendants' motion for summary judgment, finding that the Tucker Act vests exclusive jurisdiction over the claims in the Court of Federal Claims." The office had already filed a parallel breach-of-contract claim there. Wrong building, says the judge. Right building, says the backup plan.

Schutz has the driver wrong

MPR's word for Schutz's charge was surrogate, a stand-in for somebody else. The captions don't back that up. New York is the first-named plaintiff in 17 cases. California is first-named in 16, or 14 if you drop the three undescribed dockets, and one of the 16, the clean-energy clawback case, sits on a docket captioned for a nonprofit, Climate United Fund; the tracker calls it California Infrastructure Bank v. Citibank. Massachusetts is first in 9, Minnesota in 8, Washington and Illinois in 7 each, Oregon in 6. If being named first made you the boss, New York would be the boss, and not by much.

The press releases are better evidence, because many of them say who led. Of the 85, the office's releases that I read name a lead state in 35. California is among the leads in 22 of them, more than anyone. Massachusetts is in 14, Washington in 12, New York in 11, and Minnesota and Illinois in nine each. Minnesota's nine, in the office's own words: it "co-led a coalition of four attorneys general" on the clean-energy clawback; it "co-led a coalition of 23 states and the District of Columbia" on the public-health grants; "Attorney General Ellison co-led the coalition filing the lawsuit" on the Education Department's DEI certification conditions; "Attorney General Ellison, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser led the filing" on the Energy Department's indirect-cost policy; it "co-led a coalition of states" on the sexual-education grants; "Attorney General Ellison led the filing of the complaint along with the attorneys general of Arizona and Washington" on Solar for All; the SNAP funding suit was one "which he co-led alongside the attorneys general of Arizona, California, and Massachusetts"; it "co-led a coalition of 21 states and local governments" on the mercury rule; and Ellison and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul filed the Indiana coal petitions together.

California leads more often than anyone. That's real. What Schutz got wrong is the relationship. This isn't one state with 20 proxies. It's a carpool, and who's driving changes from case to case. The median coalition is 20 states, and 68 of the cases with a count have ten or more.

The scoreboard

Now give the office its due. This is its best fact, and it's a big one. I read the status note on each of the 71 tracker suits. Forty-three describe a court granting the states relief at some stage: a restraining order, an injunction, a summary judgment, or in the first tariff case, a Supreme Court ruling that the administration "did not have authority under IEEPA to impose the challenged tariffs." The office's FAQ page says the suits have made sure "that over two billion dollars in federal funding placed at risk by the federal government's actions are spent actually improving the lives of Minnesotans." That's the office's figure, not mine.

Some of those wins didn't hold. In the Education Department firings case, "the Supreme Court stayed the injunction, permitting the Trump Administration to proceed with firings while the lawsuit and appeal proceeded." In the clean-energy clawback case, the injunction "was vacated by a panel of the D.C. Circuit", which then granted rehearing by the full court. In the federal layoffs case, the appeals court ruled "that the fired employees, not the Plaintiff States, had standing to challenge the terminations, and vacated the preliminary injunction, with instructions to the district court to dismiss the case for lack of standing." Five were turned down early: the courts denied preliminary relief in the Affordable Care Act rule case, Solar for All, Metro Surge, the Medicaid deferral case and the TANF data case, that last one on September 28, 2026. Seven more ended or paused without a ruling for either side, most after the government agreed to stop or released the money. In one, the ATF "agreed in writing that they will not return any seized machineguns to Plaintiff states."

And the defense cases the tracker lumps into its headline? Some of them are wins, which is one more reason to count them separately. The office's notes report that Minnesota got the federal government's suits dismissed in the tuition case on March 27, 2026, in the voter-registration case, and in the sanctuary case on July 20, 2026. The United States has appealed all three. Minnesota lost one: in the prediction-market cases, the court "granted the private and federal plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction, enjoining the prediction market ban from going into effect."

Whatever you think of the politics, this isn't a stack of press-release lawsuits. It's a docket.

The two shootings

Two Minnesotans were killed. This section sticks to the record, and it's short on purpose.

Renee Good was killed on January 7, 2026. In the office's words, "a DHS agent shot and killed Renee Good." The office issued a statement that day. I found no lawsuit over her shooting alone. Her case is one of three in the District of Columbia suit below.

Alex Pretti was killed by DHS agents on January 24, 2026. That same day the office filed Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension v. Mullin in federal court in Minnesota, No. 0:26-cv-00628, for the BCA and alongside the Hennepin County Attorney's Office. That evening the court issued a restraining order. The office's release the next day quotes it: the defendants "are ENJOINED from destroying or altering evidence related to the fatal shooting involving federal officers that took place in or around 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis on January 24, 2026".

At the debate, Ellison put it this way: "That's why I filed a lawsuit that very night to make sure that the federal agents did not somehow spoil the scene of the crime." The docket and his office's release back the timing. Filed January 24. Order that evening.

Then the order came off. The court heard argument on January 26. On February 2 it ruled that the restraining order "is DISSOLVED" and denied further relief, adding: "This denial is without prejudice to any future motion Plaintiffs may file should they believe circumstances have changed or narrower relief is required." Judgment entered the same day. On March 24, the BCA and the County Attorney's Office filed a notice of voluntary dismissal.

The same day, March 24, Minnesota sued the U.S. Department of Justice in federal district court in Washington, D.C., No. 1:26-cv-01007. The tracker describes it as "Challenging federal government's attempts to block state and local authorities from investigating shootings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Julio Sosa-Celis". Minnesota is the only state plaintiff; the other two plaintiffs are Drew Evans and Mary F. Moriarty. It's the one suit on the list with Minnesota as the only state plaintiff that was filed outside Minnesota, and the record doesn't say why. The tracker reports that Minnesota amended its complaint on June 18, 2026, and that cross-motions for summary judgment are being briefed. MPR's debate story reported that, after a legal fight, "Ellison's office received evidence from the federal government related to both shootings and state officials are currently weighing a charging decision."

Each man's best case

Ellison's best case is the docket itself. These are real suits, and by the office's own notes 43 of its 71 tracked suits won relief at some stage. The releases put Minnesota's stake in dollars: the public-health grants suit was over "$11 billion in critical public health grants to the states, including more than $250 million to Minnesota"; Minnesota "was counting on more than $62 million of federal solar funding" in Solar for All. When the grievance was Minnesota's alone, the office filed at home five times out of six. On the day Alex Pretti died, it did what he said it did, in the courthouse Schutz says he wants.

Here's what his side doesn't get to claim. The scoreboard is sloppy in both directions. It counts nine entries that aren't suits against the federal government and leaves off nine suits the office announced. A tracker page isn't a docket. It took the dockets to find 85.

Schutz's best case is simple: his first sentence was true, word for word. Ninety-four percent of the suits were filed outside Minnesota, Minnesota is first-named in fewer than one in ten, and not a single multistate case is in front of a Minnesota federal judge. His alternative was plain: "Whether it's the Trump administration or any administration that comes after, if they are truly hurting Minnesotans, we'll sue the Trump administration and we'll sue them in Minnesota".

Here's what his side doesn't get to claim. The surrogate line doesn't survive the lead count. California is the most frequent co-lead, and it's still one of 17 states named as a lead or co-lead somewhere in those releases. And the promise to sue in Minnesota runs into the cases Minnesota actually led: seven went to federal district courts outside Minnesota (two in Massachusetts, two in Oregon, and one each in Rhode Island, Washington state and Washington, D.C.), and two petitions went to the D.C. Circuit, where a different set of statutes picks the court. Every one of these dockets is public, too. I read them without leaving the state.

What we can do

Whoever holds the office in January inherits this web page. Fix it. None of this needs a new law or a task force. It needs somebody with the password, and every fix below uses something the office already has.

Split the headline into two numbers. The page already tags every defense case "[DEFENSE]" and already has a "DOJ Challenges to Minnesota Law" filter; put all eight defense cases under it, and only those. Put two counts at the top: suits Minnesota filed against the federal government, and suits filed against Minnesota. Both are worth knowing. The defense column has three dismissals in it.

Add the suit the day the release goes out. Nine suits the office announced never made it onto the page. The office already does the hard part, the press release. Copying the case into a table is the easy part.

Add three columns: the court, the lead states, and Minnesota's dollars. The office's releases often say who led and often put Minnesota's stake in dollars. The tracker already links each docket. That's an afternoon with a spreadsheet.

When Minnesota leads a district-court case, say where it was filed and why. The release for the HHS grants suit said Minnesota "co-led" and that the case was filed in Rhode Island. It didn't tell a Minnesota reader why. One sentence would have answered Schutz's question before he asked it.

Seventy-five was the wrong number. So was 80. Count the suits Minnesota filed, count the ones filed against it, put the court next to each, and let the voters argue about the rest.

First the facts. Then the fix.

Sources

The Attorney General's Minnesota Litigation Tracker, ag.state.mn.us/Rule-Of-Law/Litigation/, was read on November 3, 2026, with its two data files, lt2025.js (entries 01 through 51) and lt2026.js (entries 52 through 80), and its FAQ page; the tally, the "[DEFENSE]" tags, the topic filter, the entry descriptions and every status note quoted above come from those files. The office's 2025 and 2026 press-release indexes were read the same day, and these releases were read in full from ag.state.mn.us/Office/Communications/: January 7, 2026 (statement on that morning's shooting), January 12, 2026 (Operation Metro Surge), January 25, 2026 (the Pretti restraining order), April 1, 2025 (HHS public-health grants), October 17, 2025 (Solar for All), March 31, 2026 (mercury and air toxics standards) and April 3, 2026 (Indiana coal plants), along with March 19, 2025 (clean-energy funds), April 25, 2025 (Education Department certification conditions), August 15, 2025 (Energy Department indirect costs), September 26, 2025 (sexual-health education grants) and October 28, 2025 (SNAP funding), and the releases for each suit missing from the tracker (February 25, March 19, July 7, July 21, September 9, October 2 and October 27, 2026). The lead-state counts come from every release in those indexes that matches a suit on the list.

The court records are the federal dockets as posted on CourtListener, read November 3, 2026: Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension v. Mullin, No. 0:26-cv-00628 (D. Minn.), including the docket entries for the February 2, 2026 opinion and order (ECF 24), the judgment (ECF 25) and the notice of voluntary dismissal (ECF 32); State of Minnesota v. U.S. Department of Justice, No. 1:26-cv-01007 (D.D.C.), filed March 24, 2026; and the docket, caption, court and, where CourtListener has one, the party list for each of the other 83 suits. The full case list, with docket numbers, courts, filing dates, first-named plaintiffs and coalition sizes, is a 95-row table built from those dockets and the tracker.

The text of 28 U.S.C. § 1391 and its amendment notes, including the 1962 addition of subsection (e) by Pub. L. 87-748, are from the U.S. Code, 2024 edition, at govinfo.gov, read November 3, 2026, and checked against Cornell's Legal Information Institute. The debate quotations are from MPR News, "Keith Ellison, Ron Schutz debate for first time in Minnesota attorney general's race," by Ellie Roth, October 2, 2026.

The election-night figures are from the Secretary of State's unofficial results file for Attorney General (electionresultsfiles.sos.mn.gov, folder 20261103, file attorneygen.txt), read at 11:06 p.m. Central on November 3, 2026, with 2,849 of 4,105 precincts reporting: Ellison 1,134,026 votes (55.08 percent), Schutz 921,727 (44.77 percent). County precinct counts are from the same source's all-races-by-county file at the same time.

What I searched, what I found, and what I could not establish. Scripts built the case list; I read the records; the arithmetic is mine. The list is a floor, not a ceiling. It came from every federal docket on CourtListener whose party data names the State of Minnesota (240 hits, each reviewed), matched against the tracker's 80 entries and the office's press releases. Court of appeals and agency-review dockets often carry no party data at all, so there may be petitions Minnesota joined that this method can't see. Three dockets that name Minnesota as a plaintiff or petitioner, N.D. Cal. No. 4:26-cv-03500, D.C. Cir. No. 25-1218 and 1st Cir. No. 25-1595, have no matching release, and I couldn't confirm their subject from the public docket; every count above that they change is given both ways. Coalition sizes come from the dockets' party lists, which can include amicus states; I caught and corrected that in one case, the SNAP recertification suit, where 16 states appear only as amici. A lead state is named in 35 of the releases I read, which match 63 of the 85 suits; for the rest I don't know who led. Tracker entries that bundle several filings count once (the Solar for All companion claim in the Court of Federal Claims and the extra coal petitions in the same series aren't counted separately), so 85 is conservative. Win and loss descriptions are the office's own status notes, not a reading of every order. The tracker's docket number for Minnesota v. Abbott (26-cv-0090, S.D. Tex.) didn't match any docket I could find, which doesn't affect the count because that suit is excluded. The debate quotations are from MPR's published account; I didn't review the audio. I didn't pull the statutes that fix the court for the agency-review petitions, the tariff cases or the Court of Federal Claims case, so I don't name them here. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.