Cannizzaro, Conine clash in Democratic AG primary

In campaign ads, and in separate interviews with the Nevada Current, the two Democrats vying to be the state’s next attorney general are criticizing each other’s records, prior positions, experience, and campaign contributors.

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford is term limited and cannot run for re-election. He is instead running for governor. He has not endorsed either of the Democrats hoping to succeed him: Nevada Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro and Treasurer Zach Conine.

The competitive primary has earned “duel endorsements” from Culinary Union and AFL-CIO.

The winner of the Democratic primary will advance to the November general election, where they will face off against the winner of the Republican primary between Danny Tarkanian and Adriana Guzmán Fralick.

The Nevada Attorney General’s Office has more than 400 employees, including 155 attorneys and 62 investigators, according to its most recent biennial report. The Nevada office represents the state in lawsuits. That can include major nationwide litigation, like those filed against pharmaceutical companies or social media companies or the federal government. It can also be criminal cases, such as those related to Medicaid provider fraud.

Why they want to be AG

Cannizzaro sees the attorney general’s office as a natural nexus of her career. She’s spent 10 years as a state senator, where she says she has advocated “for real solutions, for real issues that face Nevadans.” She also has 16 years of experience as an attorney, first as a criminal prosecutor and more recently in civil law.

“I love the advocacy that comes from being able to give people a voice in the courtroom, whether that’s a client or a victim of a crime who’s looking for justice within our system,” she said. “The Attorney General’s Office is sort of the perfect blend of getting to do those two forms of advocacy.”

Conine sees himself as a problem solver who wants to take his experience leading the state treasurer’s office to the attorney general’s office.

“We have been able to manage, I think, the state really, really well through a number of periods of crises since” 2019, he said. “That is really the job of the executive branch, to be able to lead and motivate teams through periods of good times and bad.”

The Nevada attorney general’s office has been a springboard for higher office. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, went from AG to governor in 2005. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, went from AG to the U.S. Senate in 2015. Republican Adam Laxalt, served on term as AG then in two subsequent elections, ran for governor and U.S. Senate, though he was unsuccessful both times. Ford is now running for governor.

Neither Cannizzaro nor Conine would acknowledge a desire for higher office. But neither ruled it out.

What qualifies them

Cannizzaro has emphasized her prosecutorial experience, which includes more than a decade as a criminal prosecutor within the Clark County District Attorney’s Office. Following a longstanding legal debate on whether Nevada’s citizen legislators are allowed to be public employees, Cannizzaro quit the DA’s Office to work for Richard Harris Personal Injury Law Firm.

She describes herself as a seasoned litigator with around 40 jury trials under her belt. Cannizzaro graduated from UNLV’s Boyd School of Law in 2010 and passed the Nevada bar that year.

“I am the only candidate in this race who has any sort of courtroom experience,” she says. “I’m the only candidate in this race who has ever had to put a case together and walk into a courtroom and argue before a judge or a jury about how that law is applied and what it is we are fighting for.”

That experience, Cannizzaro continued, is “incredibly important for an office that is the largest law firm in the State of Nevada. You cannot substitute that experience.”

Conine says the claim that he has never represented a client inside a courtroom is not true, but he did emphasize that as a business and transactional attorney one way to protect your clients is to avoid costly litigation.

Conine instead emphasized leadership skills. He says he believes the primary job of the attorney general is “to lead and manage a team of people that are all working together in order to protect Nevadans.” He sees his experience, through working in private practice and leading the state treasurer’s office, as the most relevant to being attorney general.

Conine graduated from UNLV’s Boyd School of Law in 2013 and passed the bar in 2015. He says his law firm and attached consulting company, Beare Law, “has had hundreds of people under management in multiple states.”

Both Democrats emphasized the need for Nevada’s attorney general to “fight back” against the Trump administration.

Democratic AGs across the country have signed onto dozens of lawsuits challenging actions by the Trump administration. As of mid-January, Ford’s office had joined 40 such lawsuits since the start of Trump’s second term, and the number has risen since.

Cannizzaro pointed to the Legislature passing safeguards designed to keep immigration enforcement officers off school grounds. Conine pointed to him invoicing the Trump administration for the tariffs that were found to be illegal.

In a crack at Cannizzaro, Conine added that Nevadans need someone as attorney general who “isn’t going to put the state in a place to pass unconstitutional bills” — a reference to two 2019 tax bills passed by the Nevada State Legislature that were deemed unconstitutional by the Nevada Supreme Court because they did not pass the Senate by a two-thirds majority. Cannizzaro was senate majority leader at that time.

Financial backing draws criticism

Cryptocurrency millionaire Jeff Berns has contributed $2.5 million to Conine’s PAC, Let’s Get To Work Nevada, since 2024. Berns also contributed $10,000 to Conine’s campaign in 2020 and another $60,000 to Conine’s PAC in 2021.

Significant contributions from a single source to a politician’s PAC is hardly new in politics. But most major political donors are corporations rather than a single person. And most large donors spread contributions across numerous candidates or are publicly involved in politics in other ways.

Berns so far has been Let’s Get To Work Nevada’s sole donor this campaign cycle. And he hasn’t spread his wealth among other candidates. (Berns did give $10,000 to Lombardo’s campaign in 2024 and $250,000 to the Democratic Party of Washoe County in 2022.)

When asked by the Current about Berns, Conine described him as “a Nevadan who cares about good government” and who is more than just the Blockchains CEO who in 2021 pitched a widely panned proposal to allow his company to set up its own quasi-government in the desert in Storey County.

“Jeff is, by his nature, a consumer protection attorney,” said Conine. “He made his money and spent his time suing Wells Fargo and other banks during the Great Recession.”

Berns did make significant amounts of money litigating against some 60 banks that offered deceptive “option adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) loans,” according to reporting from the Reno Gazette-Journal. After that endeavor, he moved into the cryptocurrency space, taking a risk on a volatile cryptocurrency called Ethereum and making hundreds of millions of dollars from it.

Berns also owns a traditional bank, GenuBank, formerly known as Kirkwood Bank of Nevada, which he purchased in 2019.

Democrats on the whole have been ore skeptical of cryptocurrency, though some, including Nevada’s Democratic U.S. Sens. Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto and Democratic U.S. Reps. Steven Horsford, Susie Lee, and Dina Titus, have signaled some level of support.

Conine in 2024 attended an “America Loves Crypto” voter outreach event alongside representatives for Lombardo and Republican Lt. Gov. Stavros Anthony. Cryptocurrency PACs that year were spending millions across the country influencing elections.

Conine defended his attendance alongside Republican lawmakers at the 2024 event as being about promoting the state.

“If there’s an opportunity for me to go to an event and promote Nevada as a place where companies should do business — to promote Nevada as a place where we want to increase our tax base — you will see me at that event.”

Conine told the Current that he has never owned any crypto himself but doesn’t fault those who see crypto as something that works for themselves.

“I believe we should have, with all new technologies, a regulated market that is safe for the people using it,” he said of crypto.

Conine doesn’t see his major donor as a sign of political corruption or conflict of interest, but he is quick to criticize Cannizzaro for taking campaign contributions from the payday lending industry. He has noted that only Lombardo has taken more money from the payday lending industry than Cannizzaro.

Cannizzaro sees Conine’s insinuation as unfair.

“I am the only person in this race who has ever actually taken on payday lending companies,” she said. “Actually look at my history. I am the only person in this race who has any sort of record of actually reining in bad corporate actors, whether that is payday lenders, whether that is any other corporation that has taken advantage of Nevadans.”

In 2019, the Legislature passed a bill creating a payday lender tracker, though lawmakers opted not to advance a proposal to cap interest rates at 36%.

Cannizzaro added, “I’ve also received the majority of my campaign contributions from working people, from labor unions, and from regular ordinary folks in the community.”

The senate majority leader in the first quarter of the year brought in significantly more in small donations of less than $100 — $10,900 compared to $2,800 for Conine, according to campaign finance reports.

Cannizzaro’s Battle Born and Raised Leadership PAC took $25,000 from Leading Builders of America, an association of homebuilders, and $25,000 from Healthy Nevada PAC, which is associated with Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PHRMA).

Death penalty

In April, Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson, whom Cannizzaro once worked for, told the Las Vegas Review Journal he would seek execution warrants for three death row inmates.

The announcement reopened legislative wounds from a 2019 and 2021 push to abolish the death penalty in Nevada. Those years, Democrats had a trifecta in Carson City. But, despite getting closer than it had in prior attempts, both sessions came and went without being passed.

Then-Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, took much of the blame from advocates, but so too did Cannizzaro, who led the majority caucus of the Senate  where the bill was never brought to a floor vote.

“It was made very clear to me that Governor Sisolak was not signing that bill, so there was not a path forward for that piece of legislation,” said Cannizzaro of her role in killing the bill to kill the death penalty. “I do not support the death penalty in place. I would be happy to vote for legislation that comes up if we have a way to pass it.”

Conine is against the death penalty, saying it’s racist and expensive.

“As the attorney general your job is to enforce the law,” he told the Current. “But I think another piece of the attorney general’s job is to use the bully pulpit to call a right thing right and a wrong thing wrong. The death penalty is consistently wrong.”

This story was updated to correctly characterize Conine’s consultant company.