The district attorney for Colorado’s most populated county is vying to be the state’s next attorney general.
Fourth Judicial (El Paso and Teller counties) District Attorney Michael Allen is one of two candidates for the Republican nomination. Allen was elected in 2020 and re-elected in 2024. Tired of “one-party statewide dominance” by Colorado Democrats and worried about the potential of Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold becoming the next attorney general, he launched a campaign to provide Colorado voters “a different path — which I think is a positive path.”
Allen, who’s running against David Willson (who once represented former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters on a recount lawsuit) in the GOP primary, sat down for an interview with The Daily Sentinel during a recent trip to Grand Junction.
Asked how his district attorney experience would translate to the attorney general position, the U.S. Navy veteran pointed to the size of his Colorado Springs office as well as his time with the office, which includes prosecuting the Club Q mass shooting case as a hate crime, launching a motor vehicle theft team to reduce theft cases, prosecuting repeat domestic violence abusers, and launching an Organized Crime Unit to increase prosecutions of fentanyl trackers and cartels with sentences of 30-plus years.
“I’ve been in prosecution for over 20 years. Using that experience to be the elected DA and run one of the biggest offices in the state of Colorado for prosecutors offices, we have 93 attorney positions in my office, 259 total employees, and we always have between 50 and 100 volunteers. It’s a big operation. You get that sort of executive-level leadership opportunity to see and enact different policies that can have a positive impact on your community. That can be a huge translation point. The AG’s office is a big operation. It’s over 600, maybe 700 employees. You’ve got to have somebody who can lead a big office, have a vision, know how to allocate resources to the right places. Those things are going to be natural,” Allen said.
“The other things that are not necessarily on the forefront of people’s minds is that we’ve seen a lot of areas of the law that have been watered down and decriminalized. Despite that, in my office, we’ve been able to hold people accountable and use the law — even though it’s not great — to really affect positive change.”
Larry Robinson/The Daily Sentinel
Michael Allen, current District Attorney for Colorado’s 4th Judicial District and Republican candidate for the attorney general race in Colorado, speaks to Grand Junction locals during a meet and greet at the local Republican office on June 11. Tired of “one-party statewide dominance” by Colorado Democrats and worried about the potential of Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold becoming the next attorney general, Allen launched a campaign to provide Colorado voters “a different path — which I think is a positive path.”
Larry Robinson/The Daily Sentinel
‘RESTORING COMMON SENSE’
Allen said the motor vehicle theft team, made up of a prosecutor and an investigator, helped decrease motor vehicle theft cases by 50% from 2024 to 2025. He would look to set up such a team at the attorney general’s office and also allocate more sources to fentanyl and drug trafficking enforcement, floating the idea of using statewide grand juries that can transcend jurisdictional boundaries to prosecute offenders.
These are elements of his approach to “restoring common sense” in the attorney general’s office.
“If you don’t hold (criminals) accountable, it emboldens them. They’re going to continue to offend. They’re going to continue to victimize folks. They’re going to continue to drive up crime,” Allen said.
“(Current Attorney General Phil Weiser) was on the forefront of some of our decriminalization efforts on illicit drug possession like fentanyl. We need to be the opposite of that on these types of cases. That doesn’t mean you have to go throw a drug addict in prison; it means you go after the distribution networks, the cartels bringing it in. It ultimately comes back to the idea of driving down crime to decrease the cost of living and make Colorado more affordable and prosperous.”
The key to driving down crime, Allen said, is being a supportive and collaborative partner with law enforcement. He said his attorney general’s office’s priorities would be to “get strong investigations, go after the people doing bad things, hold them accountable, and remove them from society if needed for a period of time.”
Allen believes decreasing crime rates would lead to decreased costs for Coloradans, citing insurance companies’ dependence on crime statistics when setting rates.
When Allen was attending the University of Kansas School of Law, he was interested in water law and natural resource law, but his time as an intern with the Johnson County District Attorney’s Office altered his career trajectory.
As Colorado attorney general, however, Allen would have the opportunity to directly engage with water law once again, calling it one of his top priorities if elected, partially because agriculture’s livelihood depends on it.
“We’ve really been taken advantage of by states down the river basin,” Allen said. “We need to fight more for our resources.”
Michael Allen, current District Attorney for Colorado’s 4th Judicial District and Republican candidate for the attorney general race in Colorado, smiles while speaking to Grand Junction locals during a meet and greet at the local Republican office on June 11, 2026.
Larry Robinson / The Daily Sentinel
SHAPING THE OFFICE
Allen said he would work to bring down the budget of the attorney general’s office through fiscal conservatism, pointing to his time as the El Paso County district attorney, in which he claims he’s only added one new position and has otherwise operated through resource allocation.
He said he could reduce the size of the office over time by letting some positions go vacant after employees leave, opting for this approach over a “fire sale” that would be “bad for business” and “bad for the state of Colorado”, as he said the attorney general’s office currently has some “really good people.”
The Fourth Judicial District Attorney’s Office is the only office in the state with a full-time election integrity unit, and Allen would seek to establish such a unit at the attorney general’s office. He said, in his experience, voter fraud is real on “an individualized basis” and is “not this big conglomerate thing that’s happening in Colorado that’s overturning elections and subverting the will of voters,” but it must be prosecuted when it occurs.
APPROACH TO FEDERAL LAWSUITS
Weiser has been litigious with the Trump administration, launching or joining more than 60 lawsuits.
If elected, Allen would be Colorado’s attorney general for the final two years of the Trump administration before another administration steps into power. He was asked what his approach would be to suing the federal government.
“My approach will always be looking at what the Constitution says, what the laws of the state of Colorado say, whether people in the state are being disadvantaged or taken advantage of or hurt by the actions of the federal government or a business or what have you. There will be times to go after the federal government, but you cannot use your own politically motivated future to leverage that and file lawsuits based off of those things,” Allen responded.
“We can’t be hyper-focused on just a person. Let’s focus on all six million Coloradans and what interests they have and serve those interests, as opposed to being politically motivated and trying to advance a political career.”