But Cromwell, a Democrat who ousted a 26-year Republican incumbent in a razor-thin race for county attorney in 2022, had never established such a policy. Nor had she received any direct communication from Knudsen.
Cromwell said her office heard nothing more until April 2, when the press release turned a routine exchange between federal and local government employees into a political powder keg—just a few months before the state’s June primaries. On April 30, after refusing multiple invitations from Cromwell to assume legal responsibility for future CCJI requests, Knudsen placed Cromwell’s office under “supervisory control,” a rarely used authority with undefined limits that allows the attorney general to oversee and overrule the actions of an elected county attorney.
During her first week on the job, in January 2023, Cromwell said she discovered three cardboard boxes of unprosecuted criminal cases in an office closet. Eventually, hundreds of other cases were discovered on shelves and in filing cabinets. Cromwell then expanded the number of attorneys in the chronically understaffed office from six to 46 and cleared over 600 backlogged cases—including 113 sexual assaults, 52 of which involved children—within a single year. When I visited her office in June, further evidence of a culture shift was on display. Cromwell had recently remodeled the office space, which now consisted of open doors, airy cubicles, and plenty of young attorneys.
Knudsen, a former county attorney and speaker of the Montana House (2015–2019), is known for his heavy hand. Elected as attorney general in 2020, he dispatched at least one Highway Patrol officer to St. Peter’s Health Hospital in Helena after a request from the family members of a Covid patient to prescribe ivermectin had been denied, among other complaints, and Cromwell wondered whether he would use similar tactics to intimidate her. (Knudsen did not respond to multiple requests for comment through the Montana Department of Justice website and to his communications director.)
Such confrontations between Knudsen and other elected officials, including judges, over where his power ends and others’ begins have become commonplace during his tenure. In December 2025, he was cleared of a 41-count charge by the state Office of Disciplinary Counsel that resulted from a series of disparaging statements he made about the judicial branch.
“There will be penalties,” Gianforte said. “In Montana, we don’t tolerate defiance, and we support our local law enforcement.”
The Helena City Commission hired outside legal counsel to help the city attorney navigate the conflict and spent at least $17,000 on initial legal costs. Then, during a heated public meeting in March, commissioners voted to rescind the resolution, despite public affirmations of its legality by the city attorney and outside counsel.
“To me, the risk of not standing up so far outweighs the risk of standing up,” she added. “I mean, today, it’s an immigration issue that some people may not feel is important to them. But what if next time it’s our water rights?”
“There is this culture shift within the Republican Party. This kind of aggressiveness is now equated with strength,” Rob Saldin, professor of political science and director of the Mansfield Ethics and Public Affairs Program at the University of Montana, told me. “There is almost a cruelty to it, and it’s off-putting, which is maybe the point.”
Montana isn’t the only red state where local officials have endured unprecedented threats, investigations, and lawsuits by state prosecutors to enforce Trump’s agenda and discourage judicial review. “Republican A.G.s are using state laws and public pressure campaigns to force local jurisdictions into cooperation with ICE,” said Cassandra Charles, senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. “They’re not waiting for the federal government to act—they’re making their threats loud enough that most jurisdictions cave before even getting into court.”
“Sometimes, A.G.s don’t have to do too much heavy lifting,” Charles added. “State legislatures are also handing them new enforcement tools to use.” In Georgia, a new law empowers private-property owners to sue local governments over perceived failures to remove immigrants and unsheltered people from public spaces, essentially deputizing individual citizens to do what the attorney general can’t always do directly.
“There isn’t a clean narrative here,” Charles said. “The polls seem to indicate that red-state voters continue to support the enforcement agenda, but they’d also like to see specific aggressive tactics—like raids at schools or targeting people without criminal records—toned down. The data shows some fissures, but no explicit shift.”
When Knudsen first threatened supervisory control over her office, Cromwell told me, she had taken the weekend to consider the hazards of an extended fight. “I had to do an ethical analysis,” she recalled. “The attorney general has prosecutorial powers, and he could charge me with the crime of official misconduct. So, was that a risk that I was willing to take?”
Of course, there are political ramifications as well. In November, Gallatin County voters will decide whether to reelect Cromwell for a second four-year term or install her challenger, a Republican prosecutor who’s been endorsed by the Republican county sheriff. It was possible Knudsen had staged this act of political theater so that he could make immigration enforcement a more visible issue on Election Day. “It’s a show, in my opinion,” Cromwell told me, ahead of the primary on June 2.
That question carries extra weight when one considers the coincidence of presidential and gubernatorial elections in 2028. Many have speculated that Knudsen will run for governor in two years, and in a state where Trump won the last three presidential elections by an average of 18.7 points, Knudsen’s path to victory likely ends with the primary rather than the general election.
“Both the attorney general and [county attorneys] are elected by voters,” Constance Van Kley, a constitutional law professor at the University of Montana, told me, “and what do you do when one elected official is allowed to use their powers to supersede the powers that are entrusted to a local elected official by the voters of that jurisdiction?”
This trend also informed Cromwell’s decision to stand her ground. In the end, however, the tipping point was a matter of principle rather than politics. “I always stand up to bullies, and I always have,” she told me. “In this position, I’m a voice for people who don’t have a voice, and I take that responsibility really seriously, and if that means putting myself on the line, then that’s OK.”
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