A MESSAGE FROM META

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Over the weekend, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin, along with New York’s Letitia James and 17 other Democratic attorneys general, sued the Trump administration, securing a preliminary injunction to stop Elon Musk and his DOGE minions from accessing the Treasury Department’s internal payment and data systems, which includes Social Security numbers and banking information. The A.G.s’ rapid, coordinated response underscored the anxiety that Elon’s disruption campaign has unleashed in certain pockets of the country. But it’s also yet another indication that Democrats may have more leverage outside the Capitol than within. The injunction was celebrated by Democrats badly in need of a win. (As one insider told me today, “The phones have just started to die down.”) It also provided a momentary victory-lap moment for Platkin, who eagerly jumped on the phone on Super Bowl Sunday—three hours before kickoff, no less—to discuss his argument that Americans’ privacy rights are being violated, why he believes the administration’s funding freezes are illegal, and his warning to Trump voters who may be getting more than they bargained for. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Abby Livingston: What’s the layman’s explanation for what this group of attorneys general is doing? Matthew Platkin: Attorneys general are responsible for keeping the residents of their state safe and for representing their interests in court. So we’re the ones who sue on behalf of residents when they’re hurt, whether that be by social media companies or opioid manufacturers or gun retailers or federal administrations. We’ve taken on Democratic and Republican administrations, and so when the president or his administration does things that violate the law and hurt our residents, we have an obligation to stand up for them. So when Trump froze $3 trillion in spending, illegally—money that funded our healthcare, our education, law enforcement—we sued, and very quickly got a federal court to say that what he did was illegal and that they couldn’t keep doing it. They had to pay the money that Congress had appropriated.

A MESSAGE FROM META

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Who in New Jersey is being hurt by what’s being done right now?  With DOGE, the argument was that by giving this unelected billionaire and his team unfettered access to information that’s supposed to be very secure and that laws protect—information like people’s Social Security numbers and tax information—it was hurting our residents. There’s privacy rights to that information, and the people who were accessing it did not have the necessary background checks and qualifications, according to the federal law, to access it. For the funding freeze litigation, money comes to the state for Medicaid, Head Start, law enforcement—a whole range of services, trillions of dollars in services across the country. That money had been appropriated in a law by Congress, and the president does not have the authority to change that without going back to Congress, and it hurt our state. Can you describe the mechanics of how these state attorneys general got together and worked as a unit, rather than as disparate states? This is something we do all the time—we regularly come together in multistate lawsuits. Some of the biggest ones would be when we sued TikTok and Meta for harms caused to our kids. We did the opioid litigation, which has brought back over $50 billion in recoveries from companies that fueled the opioid epidemic. We sued Big Tobacco. We sued gun manufacturers who harm our state. While we certainly can sue on our own, when you sue in a coalition of states who are all suffering similar harms, you can get better relief, and you can get relief for millions of people across the country in addition to your own state. Your suit mentions data privacy and security. Talk to me about your concerns, specifically, with DOGE gaining access to that information. I think Americans rightfully are concerned about their privacy—whether that’s information on the internet, or on their cell phones, or on apps, or what they give to the federal government—and there are laws that protect that information. Social Security numbers, tax and financial information, all the federal spending information—we’re not saying no one can access it, we’re saying they have to meet the legal requirements for who can access it. And an unelected billionaire, the richest man in the world, who has companies that receive billions and billions of dollars a year in federal contracts, who has financial incentives to do things with that information that the public had not signed up for when they turned it over to the federal government, and who may not serve the federal government’s interests—that clearly is outside the bounds of what people expect about who would access information from their government, and the law says so as well. That’s why a judge, early Saturday morning, said that DOGE can no longer access that information, and they have to delete any information that they collected since January 20.

President Trump is obviously adept at using delaying tactics in court. Can the courts move fast enough to have any impact?  I think you’ve seen them move very fast. The lawsuit was filed at 11 p.m. on Friday night, and the order was issued at 4 or 5 a.m., so you’re talking about five hours. We got a restraining order in a matter of days on the funding case, which means that they can’t keep freezing federal funds illegally. We got a restraining order immediately on birthright citizenship, when he attempted to rewrite the Constitution for the first time in 157 years to eliminate birthright citizenship. That’s a function of how prepared we were, filing lawsuits in less than 24 hours after actions that violate the law and hurt our residents. I can keep hearing, “Oh, they’re flooding the zone.” That’s just a fancy way of saying they’re doing a lot of illegal things all at once. And I expect that courts will continue to step in if they keep violating the law. I think we should all be pretty troubled by what J.D. Vance said Sunday morning, which basically implied that they’re not going to follow court orders. If that happens, then we have a full-blown constitutional crisis on our hands. When we say we have a rule of law in this country, it means that we have to obey what the courts say. And the law does constrain what an administration can do.

That was my next question. What happens if they don’t follow what the court tells them to do? What do you do next? You can see contempt, and there can be civil and potentially criminal penalties for that. But I’m hoping it doesn’t get there, and I hope they understand that there’s a reason why we have courts. And by the way, President Trump put a lot of judges on those courts, so he has a reason to follow them, too. If this administration just thumbs its nose at judicial orders, then I think you’re going to have to see people respond in a very public way, because that would mean, for the first time in our nation’s history, a president is refusing to follow the law, and refusing to follow what the courts say the law is. And then you have a real breakdown of the democratic system.

The Trump camp says they are confident that the Supreme Court will rule in their favor on some of these questions. Would you venture to speculate about that? I understand the Supreme Court has shifted right, but there’s still, I believe, a commitment to the rule of law in this country. And not even this Supreme Court, I don’t think, is going to say that the 14th Amendment—which plainly provides citizenship to all people born in the United States—is not actually in the Constitution. I don’t think the Supreme Court is going to say that you can freeze $3 trillion in federal spending, cause people to die, cause people to lose their homes, cause kids to not have school, cause seniors to lose their nursing homes—I don’t think they’re going to say you can do that simply because you wake up one morning and don’t like something somewhere that you can’t even adequately articulate. I’m confident the Supreme Court is not going to say that some unelected billionaire can access your tax records without any guardrails. New Jersey is one of those states that’s still Democratic, though it shifted toward Trump in 2024. What does it feel like on the ground?  I’m not elected attorney general; I’m appointed. But regardless of how people voted, they still have rights in this country, and those rights didn’t change on January 20. If people voted because they were upset about the price of eggs, and the economy—which, by the way, I agree with them on, and I share those concerns—I don’t think they then turned around and voted so that this administration would gut their healthcare, or gut their education, or end law enforcement in their communities, or make it so they have to pay more in medical debt and junk credit card fees. Like I said, the Constitution is the Constitution, the laws are the laws, and until those change, he has to abide by them. So we’re going to keep standing up. I’m focused principally on, is Trump violating the law, and is he hurting our residents? If the answer to those questions is no, then he can do it. He’s duly elected. None of my colleagues are challenging his election, which is a meaningful difference from where we were four years ago. He’s entitled to perform the policy agenda that he sees fit, and he has broad powers. But he’s not a king, and he can’t disregard the law at his whim.

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