The skyline of Washington, D.C. (Getty Images)

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.

Rock is helping the district sue Facebook again in an ongoing case filed in 2023 alleging that its parent company, Meta, is manifesting a youth mental health crisis. But Rock is representing the D.C. attorney general’s office in that case as a private attorney on behalf of Edelson, and his firm is set to secure a payday worth up to $55 million if it notches a win against the social media giant.

The lucrative arrangements involving Rock, Edelson, and the D.C. attorney general’s office "stink to high heaven," James Copland, the director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute, told the Washington Free Beacon.

"The D.C. attorney general is farming out these consumer fraud cases to plaintiffs' firms like Edelson to chase settlements that change consumer practices across all 50 states," Copland said.

Copland is part of a coalition of conservative watchdog groups that urged congressional leaders in an April letter to investigate the D.C. attorney general Brian Schwalb’s "troubling pattern of awarding lucrative contracts to outside contingency fee counsel who are both political allies and former employees of his office," saying the practice "raises serious questions about the independence and integrity of the District’s legal system."

Edelson emphatically denied it was a political ally of Schwalb in a statement to the Free Beacon.

"The firm has never engaged in political activity on Attorney General Schwalb's behalf or supported him politically in any way," a spokesman for Edelson said.

To Lauren Sheets Jarrell, a vice president at the American Tort Reform Association, Schwalb’s practice of enriching former employees of his office with lucrative contracts is emblematic of the attorney general’s misplaced priorities in a city consistently rankled by high rates of crime. Youth crime, in particular, almost doubled in the nation’s capital from 2021 through 2024, according to D.C. crime statistics. But that’s a problem that Schwalb said "we cannot prosecute and arrest our way out of" in Feb 2024.

"We think that the D.C. AG’s office is pursuing these litigations for political purposes," Sheets Jarrell told the Free Beacon. "Especially at a time when D.C. constituents are concerned about the safety of the city, the AG is going after corporations for political reasons and taking an activist approach to the office."

Edelson PC and some of its attorneys donate heavily to the Democratic Party. Rock contributed $6,200 to Kamala Harris's campaign and the Harris Victory Fund in 2024, and $1,250 to the Biden campaign in 2020, according to campaign finance records.

That includes Jay Edelson, the firm’s founder, who gave maximum campaign contributions to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and $6,000 to the political action committee for the Democratic Attorneys General Association, according to campaign finance reports. The firm has also contributed heavily to the Democratic Attorneys General Association, tax filings show. The firm gave $30,000 to DAGA in 2023 and 2024, according to tax filings.

Edelson has faced scrutiny before over its contingency contracts with state attorneys general in high-profile lawsuits involving Rock. In 2023, the New Mexico attorney general’s office hired Edelson to litigate a lawsuit over a massive wildfire outside Santa Fe in 2022. The state tapped Edelson to work on the case even though it scored behind two other firms during the bidding process, stoking concerns about political favoritism.

All of the contracts inked between the D.C. attorney general’s office and Edelson are contingency fee arrangements where the government only pays up if the suits are won or settled. Sheets Jarrell said the contracts sidestepped the traditional government contracting bidding process, with Schwalb’s office soliciting through a market survey instead of issuing a formal Request for Proposals. The D.C. Council voted to "declare an existence of an emergency" in approving at least four contingency fee contracts to Edelson since 2019 worth $9.5 million up to $170 million.

Edelson told the Free Beacon the contract figures represent the maximum amount it could potentially collect if the lawsuits are successful and are by no means a guaranteed payment. The law firm noted that its contract with the D.C. attorney general to sue the vape manufacturer JUUL was worth up to $55 million, but it only collected $1.9 million in fees after the case closed in 2023.

"When watchdog groups twist facts to manufacture a story, they don't just undermine real criticisms of media bias—they become exactly what they claim to oppose. And in the process, they make it even harder for the public to know who to trust," Jay Edelson, the firm’s founder, told the Free Beacon.

The D.C. attorney general’s office told the Free Beacon the practice of entering into contingency fee contracts with private law firms is "standard in AG offices across the country, both Republican and Democrat." It also said taxpayers "don’t pay a dime" if the city wins the cases and has to give Edelson its cut of the earnings.

But Paul Kamenar, an attorney with the ethics watchdog group National Legal and Policy Center, said it would have been a much better deal for district taxpayers for the attorney general to handle the cases with in-house attorneys.

"The practice of D.C.'s attorney general of hiring certain outside law firms on a lucrative contingency fee basis raises the question of whether those cases can be effectively handled by salaried in-house lawyers, and thus, result in a much greater award for D.C. coffers," Kamenar told the Free Beacon. "This is true especially where it appears that an attorney with the private law firm retained by the AG previously worked in its office handling those or related cases."

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