In the fall of 2001, a law student in Minneapolis who had already accepted a Marine Corps commission watched the towers come down and went on active duty. Anders Folk spent the next four years as a judge advocate — prosecuting Marines, defending Marines, and learning the hardest lesson the military legal system teaches: that the person across the table from you is entitled to the whole law, not the convenient part of it.
I know that lesson because I learned it in the same schoolhouse, in a different uniform. I served as a Captain in the United States Air Force JAG Corps, and I was a base Chief of Justice. So when I tell you Folk's service is a real qualification and not a line on a résumé, understand that I am telling you what it did to me.
What the training actually does
Civilians tend to imagine military law as summary justice. It is closer to the opposite. A court-martial is a criminal trial run in front of people who outrank you, under a code that gives the accused rights, in a system where the commander who convened the proceeding is watching. Three things get built into you there, and they are exactly the three things a county attorney or an attorney general needs:
You learn to deliver an unwelcome answer to a powerful person. In the JAG Corps you will, sooner or later, walk into a colonel's office and tell him that the thing he wants to do is unlawful, or that the case he wants charged cannot be proven. There is no version of that job where you get to be agreeable for a living. A prosecutor who has never had to do that — who has only ever been rewarded for going along — is an unknown quantity the first time a mayor, a police federation, a donor, or a party chair leans on the office.
You learn that the defense function is not the enemy. Military lawyers rotate. The officer prosecuting this month may be defending next year. You cannot build a career on believing that everyone charged is guilty, because next quarter your client is the one charged. That rotation produces prosecutors who know what a weak case looks like from the inside — which is precisely the instinct that prevents wrongful convictions and, just as importantly, keeps the office from burning its scarce resources on cases that will collapse.
You learn that the process is the product. In the military, an outcome obtained the wrong way is not a win; it is a reversal, and worse, it is a corrosion of the only thing that makes the system work — the belief among the people subject to it that the rules are real. Nobody who has sat through a suppression hearing at a court-martial ever again believes that shortcuts save time.
Folk's record is the argument
Look at what he did when the stakes were highest. As Acting United States Attorney for Minnesota in 2021 — the year this state was under a microscope it had never known — his office filed the federal civil-rights indictment of Derek Chauvin and three other former officers, and opened the federal pattern-or-practice investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department. In the same year, the same office prosecuted the man who bombed the Dar al-Farooq mosque in Bloomington and pursued violent extremists who came here to exploit our grief.
Hold those two facts next to each other, because together they are the whole job: he held police accountable under federal civil-rights law, and he protected a Muslim congregation from the people who firebombed their prayer space. That is not a politician picking a side. That is a prosecutor applying one law in both directions in the same calendar year, in the hardest year Minnesota has had in my lifetime.
Before that he spent years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney taking on terrorism, narcotics, and financial fraud, including the investigations into al-Shabaab's recruitment of young Minnesotans — work he testified to before Congress. He later served as senior counsel to the Deputy Attorney General of the United States. His firm biography lists the Navy Commendation Medal and admission to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.
The relationships matter now — maybe more than ever
Here is a part of the case that has nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with the moment we are in. A prosecutor does not operate alone. The hardest cases — public corruption, terrorism, organized violence, civil-rights abuses, cross-border fraud — are worked shoulder to shoulder with the federal government: the U.S. Attorney's office, the FBI, the Department of Justice. And the relationship between Washington and the states has rarely been more fraught than it is right now, when federal power is increasingly something that can be pointed at a state, or withheld from it, depending on the politics of the week.
In that environment, it matters enormously to have people in our key law-enforcement offices who know the federal system from the inside — who have actually sat at that table. Folk didn't just visit it. He ran Minnesota's U.S. Attorney's office and served as senior counsel to the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, the second-ranking official at the Department of Justice. He has working relationships across federal law enforcement and the national-security community that most local prosecutors never build in a career.
Those connections are not a vanity credential. They are the difference between a county that can get the federal government to show up when Minnesotans genuinely need it — and push back on it when it oversteps — and a county left shouting into the void. His military service and his federal service are cut from the same cloth: both taught him the machinery from the inside, and both built the relationships that let a person actually move it. In times like these, that is exactly the kind of standing Minnesota should want on its side of the table.
Let me be precise about one thing
Precision is the entire brand of this campaign, so I will not shade this: no source documents an overseas deployment for Folk. He served on active duty stateside as a judge advocate, prosecuting and defending Marines in courts-martial. That is honorable, demanding service, and it is exactly the experience relevant to running a prosecutor's office. It is not the same as a combat tour, and I will not dress it up as one. If anyone in this race or any other tells you Minnesota's choice is between a war hero and a civilian, they are inventing a story neither candidate asked for.
And to be equally clear on the other side: I am not saying military service should be a requirement for these offices. It isn't in the law, it shouldn't be, and I wouldn't want to live in the state where it was — plenty of the finest prosecutors I have faced never wore a uniform, and a categorical rule would wrongly write off people I respect. What I am saying is narrower and, I think, undeniable: military legal service is highly valuable experience for this work, it is evidence of the exact traits the job demands, and in Minnesota we barely weigh it at all. We ask candidates about their endorsements and their fundraising. We rarely ask the question that predicts the job best: when the pressure came, and telling the truth cost you something, what did you actually do? Folk's service answers that with evidence instead of a promise — and so does a career prosecuting the cases nobody wanted brought.
There are only a handful of jobs in Minnesota where one person decides whether the machinery of the state comes down on a citizen. The Hennepin County Attorney is one of them. For that job, I want someone who has already proven — under oath, under orders, with something on the line — that they will follow the facts to the answer nobody wants, and who has the standing and the relationships to get the rest of the system to follow.
Anders Folk has. That's why I'm with him, and why I'd ask you to weigh his service the way I do.
— Dave Madgett Attorney. Captain, U.S. Air Force JAG Corps (veteran). 2026 DFL candidate for Attorney General.
Sources
Folk's Marine Corps judge advocate service, 2001–2005, active duty entered after September 11, 2001, prosecuting and defending service members in courts-martial: Jones Day attorney biography; andersfolk.com "About"; Veterans Defense Project board profile. Navy Commendation Medal and admission to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces: Jones Day biography (firm biographies are self-reported). Assistant U.S. Attorney, D. Minn., including al-Shabaab recruitment investigations and July 2011 congressional testimony; First Assistant U.S. Attorney 2018–2021; Acting U.S. Attorney March–November 2021; senior counsel to the Deputy Attorney General of the United States: Jones Day biography; Star Tribune (March 2021). Federal civil-rights indictment of Derek Chauvin and three former officers, and the opening of the pattern-or-practice investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department during his tenure: campaign materials and contemporaneous reporting; Dar al-Farooq prosecution (Emily Claire Hari sentenced September 2021) per U.S. Department of Justice releases. No overseas deployment is documented in any source reviewed. Qualifications for the offices: Minn. Stat. ch. 388 (county attorney) and the Minnesota Constitution, art. V (attorney general) — neither requires military service. Veterans-organization endorsements (With Honor, VoteVets): andersfolk.com/endorsements.
This is a personal endorsement from Dave Madgett for Hennepin County Attorney, an office separate from the Attorney General race. It reflects his assessment of the candidate's qualifications; biographical details drawn from self-reported and secondary sources are attributed above. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.