Ron Schutz fires back at campaign attacks

All right, we continue our conversations with candidates ahead of the midterm elections, which are now under two weeks away. And we've invited candidates from four major statewide races plus a Hennepin County Attorney's Office race for ten minutes to talk to us about the issues, their response to various maybe attacks on their candidacy, etc. So today we are joined by Ron Schutz, who is the GOP candidate for Minnesota Attorney General. Thanks for your time today. Glad to be here, Rob. Let's start quickly with a little biography for people who maybe don't know anything about your background. I know you went to Marquette Engineering, ROTC, and then went into the, you were assigned to the 7th Infantry Division, but you were a military lawyer. I was. What did you do there as a military lawyer? I was the equivalent of a assistant district attorney in a large felony practice. So I prosecuted, it was a large military base, 20,000 soldiers, and it was typical felony crimes. You'd have rapes, assaults, drug cases, that was kind of a mix of what we have. Okay, also your personal life, you're quite the adventurer that I found very interesting that you've hiked or trekked to the Everest base camp, Machu Picchu and Mount Cotopaxi's refugio. At 16,000 feet, it's down in Peru. I did that a couple years ago. As part of an effort to raise money for cancer research, we climbed five mountains in Peru. Wow. And solo skydiving? Yep. Mount Kilimanjaro? Triathlete? Yes. Okay. Marathoner. Outdoorsman? Yes. Okay. Why is that important for people to know that about you? Well, it's because I don't shy away from hard things. I seek out hard things. I've done a lot of hard physical things in my life. You run a marathon, a triathlon, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, trek to Everest Base Camp, which was actually incredibly difficult. It gives you the resilience that you need if you're going to take on challenges and other aspects of your life. Okay. You have held positions on boards, GOP leadership, a delegate to the Republican National Convention, et cetera. Why, after everything that you've done, are you jumping in or did you jump into this race? Well, I love Minnesota. I'm a lifelong resident of Minnesota, having grown up on a dairy farm in the southwestern part of the state. And I think the state has gone down the wrong direction. And that's been proven true as we've been on the campaign trail. People feel the state has gone down the wrong path and they're looking for a change. I felt the same way. I love the state. I've got three grandchildren here. And I'd like them to grow up in a state that looks a little more like the state I grew up in, the land of 10,000 lakes instead of the land of 10,000 frauds. I want to give you the opportunity to respond to some of the accusations made against you. We've seen a lot of ads, obviously. A lot of ads out there, all packed with lies, I might add. Well, let's address some of them. There's one ad that's run quite a bit saying that you are on the board of an organization that supports hate groups. We've seen that one a lot. How do you explain that? Well, so I'm on the board of an organization called the Center of the American Experiment, experiment, which is basically a mainstream conservative think tank. And the charges of course are ludicrous, let me just give you an example. The Star Tribune, which is not exactly a conservative publication, 12 times over the last two years they have had senior policy fellows from the Center of the American Experiment write editorials. The Star Tribune hosted a North Star Summit about a month ago, one of the keynote speakers was an economist from the Center of the American Experiment. There are 12,000 yearly donors to the Center of the American Experiment. It's a conservative think tank. And I guess the left would like to claim that it's a hate group, which is, of course, absolutely preposterous. I think the accusation here is that it contributed money to a group, the Horowitz Freedom Center, which was listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Well, the Southern Poverty Law Center, as you know, is under federal indictment right now for having in fact funded KKK members. And so the Southern Poverty Law Center probably won't be around much longer because of their criminal activity. So to have the Southern Poverty Law Center make accusations is, I just hope Minnesotans step back and just think about the absurdity of a criminal organization, one under federal indictment, making allegations against an organization that I belong Okay, the accusation that you've defended healthcare companies accused of wrongdoing. I have never defended a healthcare company. Over the course of my long career, I have been involved in three cases representing healthcare companies as plaintiffs suing fraudsters. And so it's the exact opposite of what these ads try to portray. We were suing people who were stealing from the healthcare companies and in effect driving up premiums for average Minnesotans or the average policy holders for there. But I've never defended a healthcare company that has been accused of anything. It's always been plaintiff side work. And most of my career have been cases where I have been a plaintiff frequently representing individuals and small businesses against corporate giants. So again, unfortunately, it's the way politics works, but those are lies. I think the accusations of wrongdoing was in the way that some of these insurance companies were billing and related to Medicaid, but that was not what you were involved with as an attorney. Absolutely nothing to what I was involved with. One of the cases, well, two of the cases involved allegations against Regeneron, a multi-billion dollar drug company that was basically defrauding two health care companies. And the other one was on behalf of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida against DaVita for DaVita's basically a several hundred million dollar scheme to defraud Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida. So, again, plaintiff's cases seeking to recover money for fraud, which is exactly what what I intend to do in this job if I'm elected, which is pursue people who are defrauding the state of Minnesota. The other accusation that you support cutting Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, and you said you've never proposed that. Well, I've never commented one way or the other on that. I mean, that was a head scratcher. I've had people come up to me and say, what is that about? Where did that possibly come from? And of course, my response is, well, that's just another bald faced lie made up by people that don't wanna see me in office. You know, Rob, the fraudsters and the criminals do not want to see me get elected. They absolutely do not want to see me get elected. And the attacks on me are absolutely false, as I've laid out here. And I'm hoping that Minnesotans look at my track record. I've been recognized as one of the top lawyers in America, repeatedly recognized as one of the top lawyers in America. And I have fought hard on behalf of my clients. I'm the only person in a race who's actually spent his career in the courtroom. It really is a contest between a career trial lawyer who has gone into court and personally won tens of millions of dollars on behalf of his clients, including many individuals and small businesses, versus a career politician. What would you do differently if elected to the Attorney General's office? Well, a lot. For one thing, I would aggressively prosecute the rampant fraud that we have in the state. And I probably don't have time to get into the details of what I would do differently than what Keith Ellison would do. But trust me, I didn't get to be recognized as one of the top lawyers in the country by doing anything other than being extremely aggressive and creative in court. And I will bring that same aggressiveness, the same creative lawyering to fighting fraud and working on behalf of the taxpayers in Minnesota. Okay, there is just as an example, there's a current case that the Attorney General has against Glock, accusing them of the way their weapons are designed, that they're easy to convert. Is an example there, is that something that you would continue or is that something that you would not pursue? I mean, that is one example of a number of things that are ongoing in the Attorney General's office and just using as an example. Well, if the Attorney General had his way, he would abolish handguns. Let's just be frank about that. And if he had his way and he had his way in the state of Oregon, for example, the school shooting that just happened in Oregon would have been a far worse disaster than it was because it was an armed citizen legally carrying a concealed firearm who stopped that shooter in that Oregon school. And quite frankly, the person who went in, I don't know what make of handgun he had, but it was probably a Glock because it's the most popular handgun here. I've not looked at that case and I've not looked at the allegations of that case, but I think that is just an example of a political case that the Attorney General has filed. Because his real agenda is to make sure that law abiding citizens don't have handguns. And if you were to wave a magic wand, even if you didn't like the idea of handguns and you were to wave a magic wand and outlaw handguns, does anybody think that would really work? Because it's been tried with drugs, it's been tried with everything else and we have a number of restrictive laws. Anybody who tries to buy a handgun in this state has to have either a permit to purchase or a concealed carry permit which requires a lot of training. And so again, law abiding citizens have to go through a number of hoops to buy handguns. Okay, 30 seconds, any final comment from you? No, again, I hope Minnesotans step back and ignore the negative ads. I hope they spend some time and really think about who they want representing them in court as the next Attorney General. And I hope they look at my track record, see what I've accomplished, and I hope they vote for me. Okay, Ron Schutz, GOP candidate for Minnesota Attorney General. Thank you for your time today. You bet. I appreciate you coming in. Bye. All right.