Under Attorney General Tong’s leadership during his first term, the Office of the Attorney General generated and protected $2.7 billion for the state, over 21 times its operating costs. This includes millions of dollars in direct restitution to Connecticut families who needed help with travel disruptions, scammers, canceled reservations, and unscrupulous businesses. This does not begin to include the billions saved by state taxpayers through competent and professional representation and defense of our state agencies.
Attorney General Tong has secured historic recoveries against the addiction industry, delivering over $50 billion to fight the opioid epidemic, breakthroughs in multistate efforts to curb obnoxious robocalls and bring scammers to justice, strong settlements and concessions to begin to stabilize the state’s unaffordable energy rates, relief from predatory student loan practices, and hundreds of millions of dollars and a commitment from JUUL to stop marketing their vaping products to kids. He’s fighting in every court in every state where reproductive freedom is under attack. He’s standing up to the gun lobby to protect Connecticut’s assault weapons ban and high capacity magazine ban from baseless legal attack. He is taking on ExxonMobil to end its ongoing, systematic campaign of lies around fossil fuels and climate change. He has led some of the largest data breach and privacy settlements in world history, including those with Equifax and Anthem, and recently announced a $391.5 million settlement with Google over its location tracking practices. After decades of litigation, under his leadership the Office of the Attorney General resolved two of the most challenging, longest running state lawsuits – committing to historic investment in educational opportunities for Hartford students to end more than 30 years of litigation and court oversight in the Sheff v. O’Neill case, and finally ending court oversight of the Department of Children and Families following documented, significant improvement on behalf of our state’s most vulnerable children.