Alaska's attorney general flew to South Africa and France. A corporate-funded group paid.

In the state of Alaska’s published travel report for top administration officials, the Department of Law disclosed spending $650 to send Attorney General Treg Taylor to a two-day conference in Colorado last year.

Not mentioned in that report, however: at least $20,000 that a corporate-funded group spent on a trip for Taylor and his wife, Jodi, to the Normandy region of France last summer.

Attendees stayed at a five-star hotel favored by Hollywood stars and polo players and dined at Le Côté Royal, where patrons can spend 38 euros on braised pork cheeks, according to a schedule obtained by a watchdog group.

Roughly half of the country’s attorneys general participated, according to the Associated Press. Their schedule called for four hours of business meetings and more than two days of ceremonies and sightseeing, including guided tours of World War II battlegrounds and a centuries-old abbey.

Taylor ultimately did report that trip in an unpublished financial disclosure he filed in March that’s only released from state regulators upon request.

The disclosure also reported a 2023 trip to South Africa, where attorneys general were scheduled to take an “educational tour” of wine estates and a daylong trip to a game reserve that offers viewing of lions, leopards, rhinos, elephants and buffalo. Participants were accompanied by corporate officials from firms like Uber, TikTok and Albertsons, the parent company of the Safeway grocery store chain, according to reporting by CNN.

Taylor’s participation underscores watchdogs’ growing concerns about the group that paid for the trips, the Attorney General Alliance, or AGA, which has raised millions of dollars from corporations — including some that have had legal disputes with states.

Taylor recently assumed the alliance’s chairmanship, his department announced earlier this year, and he is holding a cybersecurity focused meeting for the group in Alaska in August.

The alliance, created in 2019, has come under increasing criticism, including from the former head of the century-old National Association of Attorneys General, who said in his retirement letter that the alliance, a competing group, is "overwhelmingly dependent on corporate and lobbyist money" and creates pathways for attorneys general to have their travel paid by entities they are "investigating or suing."

“The simple fact is they are a lobbyist access group with some programming to cover for it,” said Tom Jones, head of the American Accountability Foundation, a conservative group that’s used public records requests to expose some of the alliance’s corporate links and sponsored trips.

Taylor’s office describes the alliance as a nonpartisan forum where attorneys general “work in cooperation to share ideas, educate on emerging issues, build relationships and foster enforcement through meetings, panels, working groups, and social activities.”

In an interview at his downtown Anchorage office, Taylor said he took vacation time for his trips to South Africa and France, on which he flew business class.

And he vehemently defended AGA’s value. In addition to trips, he said, it also provides trainings for state attorneys on subjects like organized retail crime, online gaming and artificial intelligence.

Taylor said that AGA-sponsored trips contain substantive panels and discussions — such as, in South Africa, sessions on intellectual property rights and cybersecurity. 

And he added that the relationships he’s developed with experts and corporate officials on trips have helped him and other attorneys general resolve problems without the need for “long, nasty and expensive” litigation. 

But he also rejected the idea that those relationships make it more difficult for attorneys general to hold corporations accountable: He noted that states have sued and litigated against major sponsors of AGA like Amazon and Pfizer.

“The only benefit they have is that I do know who they are. And they do know who I am, and they can reach out,” he said. “But that doesn’t stop us from doing our jobs as AGs, as we’ve proven over and over again.”

Taylor is a former top attorney for a large, Indigenous-owned oil and gas contracting business, and he began his tenure in state government in 2018 as deputy attorney general in charge of the civil division at the Alaska Department of Law.

Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed him attorney general in 2021. 

The AGA was created in 2019 by a group of western attorneys general and has grown to include more than 40 states and territories, according to its website.

Alaska pays some $10,000 in yearly membership fees. But Taylor acknowledged that a “very, very low percentage” of the AGA’s budget comes from those dues and that the rest comes from sponsors. 

CNN reported that the group collected nearly $27 million in sponsorships between 2019 and 2023 — and allows companies, depending upon the size of their contributions, to suggest "speakers, panelists, working groups, white papers and events.” 

Jones, from the conservative advocacy group, said one problem with the corporate participation in the trips to foreign countries is that “the other side of that conversation” is not happening there.

People who would advocate for tougher legal scrutiny of corporations, he said, “don’t have the tens of thousands of dollars a year to pay into associations to buy time in Normandy with the attorneys general.”

Taylor said he understands criticism that traveling internationally for AGA programming isn’t necessary in the Zoom era, which, he added, “is why I take personal time for those trips.”

He also said that he paid for his six children and one of their spouses to accompany him on the trip to Normandy, which they followed with a week-long stay at an AirBnB on southern France’s Mediterranean coast to explore the Pyrenees, “since I’m already there.”

Amid a spate of negative press coverage and public records requests about the alliance, though, Taylor acknowledged that the group has room for improvement and will consider potential changes.

“AGA is a worthless organization if AGs can’t take advantage of the things that they offer,” he said. “And if they can’t take advantage of the things that they offer because of the types of trips that are occurring, then we need to change those types of trips.”

Detailed documentation of Taylor's alliance-paid trips — including travel confirmations and receipts for plane tickets — is not public because expenses covered by a third party do not need to be recorded, said Alan Birnbaum, a state attorney and public records specialist who handled a Northern Journal request to the Department of Law.

[Read the Department of Law's response to Northern Journal's records request]

Birnbaum cited a state administrative manual that says that if travel is “immaterial” to an agency travel budget, related transactions don’t need to be “recorded as an expenditure and a revenue.”

At Taylor's direction, Birnbaum later released some general itineraries for the trips, though more detailed documentation was still withheld.

Taylor said he did not know whether he’d deleted the requested records, but, he added: “I cull my email all the time.” He also said that state law aims to define what he described as “the limits of a public record.”

“Any time we start to diminish what a public record is, that’s something that I worry about, because that is a slippery slope: ‘Well, you did it in this case. Why, now, won’t you release the memo that you wrote the governor on this issue? Do you have something to hide?’” Taylor said. “That’s just one of those roads that I’ve just made a policy decision, we’re not going to go around.”

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