Frederica Freyberg:

Well, as 2013 came to a close, I sat down to talk to Wisconsin attorney general JB Van Hollen. As we've reported before, he will not run for re-election, but Van Hollen says there is still a lot to get done in the next year. Here’s what he says are the important issues facing the Wisconsin Department of Justice in 2014.

JB Van Hollen:

Making sure that competent litigation on all of these cases continues is always very important, because I want to make sure that a desire to win a case based upon, that you like the policy or you like the law or the other way around, should never prevail in our department. It’s always very important that we focus on making sure that we defend the law, we defend the law objectively and neutrally, to make sure that the rule of law prevails, and that we’re officers of the court. We give them the best legal argument and we even give them the parts that hurt us. That’s always a challenge, is making sure that in a politically elected office you maintain your objectivity and your ethics. From a law enforcement standpoint, heroin is a huge issue facing us that we have to try to find a way to address. Is it necessarily the problem of the Department of Justice? No. It’s a problem of all of us. But as a de facto law enforcement leader in the state, we have the ability to try to rally the troops and come up with ideas, and hopefully come up with and maybe actually lay out some solutions. And I always think, and will continue to think, and have since day one, that protecting our nation’s youth is our number one priority and always should be. We still have kids being sexually abused over the internet, sexually trafficked in untold numbers. And we as a government can do more and more about it all the time and I think we should.

Frederica Freyberg:

To date, as attorney general, what is your proudest accomplishment?

JB Van Hollen:

You know, the proudest accomplishment is a very vague one, I think, and it is that I believe the Department of Justice has established a level of credibility and integrity that it did not necessarily have in the past. We have given legal opinions based upon the law. We’ve irritated republicans and democrats alike with those opinions, because they weren’t based in politics. We’ve defended government agencies, whether we liked the law or the actions that we’re defending, and we defended them to the best of our ability. We came up with law enforcement programs that weren’t supplanting local law enforcement, but giving them the assistance, whether it be a police program or a prosecutor going out and helping local prosecutors, or whether it be having the crime lab backlog gone so that we could help them solve their cases sooner. We’ve given law enforcement the assistance to better do their jobs and to keep their communities safer. And I think you have to look no further than, you know, the margin of victory in my last election, the endorsements that I got from democrat and republican sheriffs and chiefs of police and district attorneys and others to realize that, I think, our Department of Justice as a whole has developed a level of credibility and integrity that has helped us better do our jobs. I think that in and of itself is a tremendous success.