The district attorney for Colorado\u2019s most populated county is vying to be the state\u2019s next attorney general.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cone-party statewide dominance\u201d 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 \u201ca different path \u2014 which I think is a positive path.\u201d<\/p>\n
Allen, who\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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\u2019s office is a big operation. It\u2019s over 600, maybe 700 employees. You\u2019ve 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,\u201d Allen said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe other things that are not necessarily on the forefront of people\u2019s minds is that we\u2019ve seen a lot of areas of the law that have been watered down and decriminalized. Despite that, in my office, we\u2019ve been able to hold people accountable and use the law \u2014 even though it\u2019s not great \u2014 to really affect positive change.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Larry Robinson\/The Daily Sentinel<\/p>\n
Michael Allen, current District Attorney for Colorado\u2019s 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 \u201cone-party statewide dominance\u201d 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 \u201ca different path \u2014 which I think is a positive path.\u201d<\/p>\n
Larry Robinson\/The Daily Sentinel<\/p>\n
\u2018RESTORING COMMON SENSE\u2019<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
These are elements of his approach to \u201crestoring common sense\u201d in the attorney general\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you don\u2019t hold (criminals) accountable, it emboldens them. They\u2019re going to continue to offend. They\u2019re going to continue to victimize folks. They\u2019re going to continue to drive up crime,\u201d Allen said.<\/p>\n
\u201c(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\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The key to driving down crime, Allen said, is being a supportive and collaborative partner with law enforcement. He said his attorney general\u2019s office\u2019s priorities would be to \u201cget strong investigations, go after the people doing bad things, hold them accountable, and remove them from society if needed for a period of time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Allen believes decreasing crime rates would lead to decreased costs for Coloradans, citing insurance companies\u2019 dependence on crime statistics when setting rates.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Office altered his career trajectory.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s livelihood depends on it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve really been taken advantage of by states down the river basin,\u201d Allen said. \u201cWe need to fight more for our resources.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Michael Allen, current District Attorney for Colorado\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Larry Robinson \/ The Daily Sentinel<\/p>\n
SHAPING THE OFFICE<\/p>\n
Allen said he would work to bring down the budget of the attorney general\u2019s office through fiscal conservatism, pointing to his time as the El Paso County district attorney, in which he claims he\u2019s only added one new position and has otherwise operated through resource allocation.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cfire sale\u201d that would be \u201cbad for business\u201d and \u201cbad for the state of Colorado\u201d, as he said the attorney general\u2019s office currently has some \u201creally good people.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Fourth Judicial District Attorney\u2019s 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\u2019s office. He said, in his experience, voter fraud is real on \u201can individualized basis\u201d and is \u201cnot this big conglomerate thing that\u2019s happening in Colorado that\u2019s overturning elections and subverting the will of voters,\u201d but it must be prosecuted when it occurs.<\/p>\n
APPROACH TO FEDERAL LAWSUITS<\/p>\n
Weiser has been litigious with the Trump administration, launching or joining more than 60 lawsuits.<\/p>\n
If elected, Allen would be Colorado\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy 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,\u201d Allen responded.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t be hyper-focused on just a person. Let\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The district attorney for Colorado\u2019s most populated county is vying to be the state\u2019s next attorney general. Fourth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":340994,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[943,294,4383,138,140,139,48,18396,121625,26112,5502,121624],"class_list":["post-340993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-colorado","tag-crime","tag-district-attorney","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news","tag-law","tag-lawyer","tag-motor-vehicle-theft","tag-prosecutor","tag-theft","tag-united-states-attorney-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/340994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}