Dunleavy and his new AG exaggerate his ties to Alaska and experience here

Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the new Alaska attorney general are exaggerating the Alaska experience of the politically connected Texas lawyer chosen for the state’s top legal job—Stephen J. Cox.

“Stephen brings a proven record of service and commitment to Alaska,” Dunleavy claimed in this press release.

He has a short record of service and commitment to Alaska.

I expect someone to borrow the old line from Mead Treadwell about Dan Sullivan and say "I've got a jar of mayonnaise in my refrigerator that's been there longer than Stephen Cox’s been in Alaska.

Cox, 48, claims in the Dunleavy press release that “Since 2011, I have been privileged to work on Alaska’s development, and my family and I were blessed with the opportunity to move to Anchorage and make Alaska our home.”

Very little of what Cox has done in his career since 2011 has had anything to do with Alaska. This deceptive claim is a terrible way to begin his time as Alaska attorney general.

Cox became a member of the Alaska Bar Association on May 7 of this year and was not registered to vote in Alaska as of May, Sen. Bill Wielechowski wrote on Facebook after Dunleavy named Cox AG. His appointment will be subject to legislative confirmation.

(The Division of Elections says that Cox registered to vote in Alaska in July 2021.)

Cox has worked for the Justice Department, the FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for a private law firm, an oil company and other entities since he completed law school in 2006. Since 2021 he has worked for Bristol Bay Industrial.

Cox has deep ties to Texas going back to his college days at Texas A&M and his law studies at the University of Houston. His Linkedin page still lists him as the president of the Houston lawyers chapter of the Federalist Society.

Among his jobs in Texas, he served as U.S. attorney in the Eastern District during the first Trump administration.

When Cox was named to that position, Sen. Ted Cruz said he had been a close friend of Cox’s for two decades and called him “a principled Texan.”

Cox served as the co-chair of the national finance committee for Cruz’s presidential campaign in 2016.

He was a resident of Houston when he became the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District five years ago, and planned to move to Beaumont. He was a member of the Texas and District of Columbia bar associations at the time.

Dunleavy’s press release makes much of Cox’s tenure as a lawyer with the Apache Corporation of Houston, Texas to portray him as someone with deep experience in Alaska.

“Earlier in his career, beginning in 2011, Cox was a principal attorney for Apache Corporation’s Alaska operations, focusing on new oil-and-gas ventures and coordinating regulatory efforts in the Cook Inlet region,” Dunleay claimed.

But other documents about Cox’s career, including some prepared by the new AG, make it clear that the focus of that job was not on Alaska.

“Mr. Cox served as corporate counsel for Apache Corporation, where his practice focused on technology, ethics and compliance, and commercial transactions,” says a biographical note prepared about Cox when he worked for the Justice Department.

“Cox has also spent time in private practice at Apache Corporation and WilmerHale, dealing with white collar investigations, ethics and compliance, commercial transactions, and corporate governance,” says another summary of his career.

After Joe Biden’s election, Cox resigned as U.S. attorney and went to work in 2021 for Bristol Bay Industrial, which calls itself “a strategic investor and portfolio manager in a broad range of sectors ranging from energy and industrial services to telecommunications, utilities, and manufacturing.”

Even the press release from Bristol Bay Industrial announcing his hiring, was more reserved in its account of his Alaska work: “He spent several years as Corporate Counsel for Apache Corporation, handling corporate and commercial transactions for new ventures in Alaska and abroad; ethics, compliance and internal investigations; technology, intellectual property, cyber-security and data-privacy matters; corporate governance and shareholder relations; and environmental regulatory issues.”

He was “corporate counsel for international business” at Apache in 2011, this announcement said.

Cox won the Texas prosecutor position after the previous occupant left following a dispute over whether Walmart would be prosecuted for its handling of opiod prescriptions, the Associated Press reported on May 27, 2020.

His name came up in this 2020 ProPublica investigation about how Trump appointees stopped a potential indictment of Walmart over suspicious opiod prescriptions. Josh Russ, the head of the civil division in the Eastern District of Texas, was ready to file a civil action against Walmart, but Cox claimed the prosecution wasn’t ready and helped block the action, ProPublica said.

“Cox, who had never been a federal prosecutor and joined the agency from Texas energy company Apache, appeared upset that the Texas prosecutors had sought emails between compliance officials and their bosses, senior executives at Walmart. He seemed to view that tactic as overly aggressive, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The Texas prosecutors said they did so to find out what top Walmart executives knew,” ProPublica found,

Russ resigned in 2019, saying the department leadership prevented his office from filing a lawsuit.

“Russ and others contended the civil suit was ready to be filed. Cox said it wasn’t. To spur Cox and his colleagues to action, Russ began to send daily examples of what the prosecutorial team viewed as particularly egregious prescriptions Walmart pharmacists had filled. His message: People had died because of opioids Walmart had dispensed, and every day that passed meant another lost opportunity because of the ticking clock on the statute of limitations,” ProPublica said.

Cox was named by Sen. Dan Sullivan in 2023 to a private committee to look at potential candidates for federal judgeships in Alaska. Cruz placed Cox on a similar committee to review Texans for federal judgeships in 2013.

He was scheduled to be one of the speakers at the “First Annual Alaska Federalist Society Summer Social” August 13 in Anchorage.

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