Legislators aimed pointed questions at Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s pick for attorney general during a series of contentious confirmation hearings Thursday and Friday. Attorney General-designee Stephen Cox appeared before two Senate committees ahead of a confirmation vote expected in the legislative session’s final weeks.
Cox is a former U.S. attorney, appointed by Trump to prosecute federal crimes in the Eastern District of Texas in 2020 after three years at the Justice Department’s main office in Washington. Before Dunleavy appointed him last August to fill a vacancy left by gubernatorial candidate Treg Taylor, Cox was the chief legal officer for Bristol Bay Industrial, a subsidiary of the region’s Native corporation.
Cox told lawmakers he’d focused on a few key areas in his nine months in office: resource development, consumer protection, and his top priority, domestic violence and sexual assault.
“I've spent much of my career in law enforcement settings where the stakes are real. Decisions affect liberty, public safety and public trust,” he said. “That experience shapes how I approach this office.”
Cox highlighted a joint initiative with the Municipality of Anchorage focused on combating “quality of life” crimes, including retail theft, illegal camping and public drug use.
Lawmakers, though, raised deep concerns over a number of controversial choices Cox has made in his short tenure as attorney general.
During a Senate State Affairs Committee hearing on Thursday, Sen. Scott Kawasaki, a Fairbanks Democrat, questioned why Cox had advised the Division of Elections to comply with a Justice Department request for voter data designated as confidential by state law.
“The state also has a constitutional right to privacy,” Kawasaki said. “Why was that not your first thought — that Alaska has a constitutional right to privacy, let’s take a pause before we do anything?”
“I think it’s a fair question,” Cox said. “I will concede, I am learning about the right to privacy.”
The Constitution gives the Legislature the power to implement the Constitution’s right to privacy, Cox said, and pointed to a statute that allows the state to turn over confidential voter data for legitimate government purposes. Civil rights groups are challenging the move in court.
Other lawmakers questioned the large number of so-called amicus briefs the state has joined since Cox was appointed by the Dunleavy administration. A Department of Law website shows Alaska has signed onto 117 friend-of-the-court briefs since September 2025, shortly after he was appointed, a rate of about one every two days.
Senate President Gary Stevens, a Kodiak Republican, was briefly emotional while asking Cox why he’d signed onto a brief in support of President Donald Trump’s executive order sharply restricting birthright citizenship.
Some of his own ancestors were immigrants, Stevens said.
“It just baffles me,” Stevens said. “How can you or your department or anyone in the administration argue against birthright citizenship? It's in our Constitution. It's a moral issue.”
Cox said he’d given it a lot of thought — he’d arranged a debate on the issue while at law school at the University of Houston two decades ago, he said.
Cox echoed the heart of the Trump administration’s position — that the children of an undocumented immigrant or another “temporary visitor” should not be granted citizenship.
“My view of the Constitution under the 14th Amendment is that it is not simply birth on the territory, that you also have to be not subject to the foreign jurisdiction, and that there has to be some kind of allegiance,” Cox said. “If you have someone who is sent over here for the sole purpose of having a child and then returning to their home (country), I do not think that the correct interpretation of the 14th Amendment would say that that child is a U.S. citizen.”
Cox also faced tough questions over joining an amicus brief supporting an Election Day deadline for mail-in ballots in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, which advocates worry could disenfranchise rural Alaskans.
In a brief interview after Thursday’s hearing, Cox said he didn’t sweat the sometimes intense questioning, which primarily came from members of the Senate’s bipartisan majority caucus.
“They asked some hard questions and interesting questions and fair questions, and hopefully I answered them right,” he said.
Cox brought his wife and three children to watch the hearings — it was their first chance to see Juneau since Cox moved to Alaska in 2021, he said.
He’s due for another confirmation hearing Monday afternoon in front of the House Judiciary Committee.
A final vote on Cox and Dunleavy’s dozens of other nominees to cabinet positions and various state boards and commissions is expected in the coming weeks ahead of the Legislature’s constitutional deadline to adjourn for the year. Lawmakers initially planned to convene the joint session May 7, but leaders are now planning to hold the series of confirmation votes the following week, Stevens said.
