Nearly all of the $1.3 million that the Maryland Attorney General’s office has paid to two outside law firms since 2023 went out after Anthony Brown became attorney general, and both firms have also written checks to his campaign. That is the central finding of a records investigation by The Center Square, published Sept. 30, five weeks before Brown, a Democrat, asks voters for a second term on the Nov. 3 general election ballot.
The outlet reports that Ballard Spahr LLP, headquartered in Philadelphia, was paid $985,000 and Saul Ewing LLP, headquartered in Washington, D.C., was paid $302,000. The figures come from billing records The Center Square requested from the attorney general’s office, covering outside counsel work from January 2023 through May 20 of this year. They are state spending, so they are taxpayer dollars. The reporting does not allege that the donations led to the work, and the attorney general’s office says they did not.
The timing of the money
According to The Center Square’s reading of state campaign finance records, Ballard Spahr gave Friends of Anthony Brown, the attorney general’s campaign committee, $2,500 on Nov. 2, 2022, six days before Brown was first elected, and another $2,500 on Jan. 8, 2025. Saul Ewing gave $6,000 before the July 19, 2022 Democratic primary and another $6,000 in November 2023. Saul Ewing also gave $6,000 to Katie Curran O’Malley, Brown’s opponent in that 2022 primary, which the outlet notes is the state maximum per four-year election cycle.
Put plainly, the two earlier gifts came before Brown took office and the two later ones came after. Both firms also held contracts with the office before Brown was sworn in on Jan. 3, 2023, which is the heart of the dispute over what the record does and does not show.
What the attorney general’s office says
Jennifer Donelan, a spokeswoman for the office, told The Center Square that Brown’s administration “had no role in selecting either firm,” and that both were chosen through a competitive process run by the prior administration. The outlet reported that calls and emails to Ballard Spahr and Saul Ewing were not immediately returned. This newsroom has not independently reached either firm, and neither the competitive-process claim nor the contract documents behind it has been published.
Richard Painter, who was the chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, told The Center Square that the arrangement raises concerns about politicized attorney general offices, and that firms with business before an attorney general should not donate to that official’s campaign. “The public shouldn’t have to guess what’s going on,” he said. Painter’s comments are an ethics opinion, not a finding about Brown’s office, and nothing in the reporting suggests a quid pro quo.
Rates and the wider pattern
The billing detail shows what the money bought. Ballard Spahr attorneys averaged $515 to $545 an hour on at least 15 contracts representing the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, with some billing as much as $575 an hour, the outlet reported. Its work included two 2024 affordable-housing projects: Great Mills Court in Lexington, Maryland, as the outlet describes it, and Park Heights Place, a senior housing community in Baltimore. Saul Ewing appears in January 2023 records with a rate of $675 an hour for Charles O. Monk II, of counsel, $509 for two partners and $283 for two associates, and it represented the State Board of Education in the long-running Bradford school-funding case, which predates Brown. The Appellate Court of Maryland ruled for the state in 2024.
Those two firms are not alone, according to The Center Square. It counts at least 81 outside firms, legal nonprofits and attorneys under contract with the office since 2023 and says five of them, including Venable LLP, Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll and Whiteford, Taylor & Preston LLP, gave a combined $30,250 to Brown’s campaign committee or a related PAC. The outlet’s earlier July report, which this newsroom covered at the time, found the office agreed to pay Ballard Spahr $570 an hour after first withholding the rates, releasing them only after an appeal to the Public Access Ombudsman.
Where it stands
Brown is the incumbent; his Republican opponent is Harford County attorney James B. Rutledge III, according to the race’s public record, and the contest has been rated safe for Democrats. As of June 7, state board data showed Brown with about $719,000 on hand to Rutledge’s roughly $15,000. In searches through Oct. 8, this newsroom found no new outside-counsel contracts, no ethics complaint, and no response from the Brown campaign or from Rutledge on the donor-contract question. Voters, and anyone who reads the state’s published contracts, will have to weigh whether a competitive process in a prior administration answers the questions Painter raised.
