Luger’s ‘sense of urgency’ served the state well

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Observing the longstanding precedent that a new president appoints the post, United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota Andrew Luger will soon step down — after stepping up twice through appointments by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. During each stint the state faced changes and challenges that Luger and his team — which he’s quick to credit — did and did not anticipate.

“I came into the job in 2014 with a number of ideas and thoughts about how we could continue to best serve our community,” Luger said in an interview. “And we were faced with some issues that I did not anticipate, one of which was the significant ISIS recruitment conspiracy that we spent a lot of time on and prosecuted successfully. The second was the ability to prosecute the Jacob Wetterling murder, and the third maybe isn’t as well known: We prosecuted the country’s largest sex-trafficking organization out of Thailand in a series of trials and cases that brought down one of the largest international sex-trafficking organizations at the time.”

Luger said that during his first term he saw “how we could have an impact by aggressively and appropriately taking on significant matters that made a difference in people’s lives.

“That stayed with me when I left.”

And this answer stayed with this member of the Editorial Board when Luger was asked during his first term what would surprise Minnesotans about emerging scourges: “Heroin,” he quickly said. And not just in urban areas, but throughout the state in a precursor to the deadly drug crisis soon to seize the country.

Along with that bane came a 2021-2022 spike in violent crime, Luger said, along with 70 defendants in Feeding Our Future cases and other complex criminal matters, including prosecuting street gangs.

Which means, he said, that “2025, for this office, will be a year of trials.”

In the courtroom, that is. But not a time of trial in the office, because Luger’s leaving “trial teams in place; I have worked with my leadership team here and we have all of the cases staffed going forward.” On “down the line,” Luger said, “that team stays in place.”

But their leader will not. And while Luger indicated he would have been interested in staying if a President Kamala Harris administration had asked, he’s “fully supportive” that a new (albeit returning) President Donald Trump has “a right to bring in a new team.” That’s “how it works.”

His successor will benefit from the office’s remaining professionals’ focus on well-established criminal threats — and must be ready for intensifying ones, including this one identified by Luger: online child exploitation.

“We have seen it, we’ve had headlines about it,” Luger said. There’s been “a dramatic increase in exploitation of children online.” It “no longer surprises me,” he said, “but it breaks my heart.” We can’t, he sadly added, “raise our kids in 2024 like we did in 1974.”

Indeed, the world, country and state are different now than a half-century ago. Or even 1992, when Luger, a federal prosecutor in New York, moved to Minnesota. Back then, Luger said, “I was astounded — in a pleasant way” — because “violent crime was always a topic of conversation in New York and was rarely a topic of conversation here.”

Regarding recent years, Luger said that “seeing the [violent-crime] spike in 2020 and 2021, knowing some strategies I had seen in New York, knowing how this office can have a positive impact, is an important part of why I came back.

“Because I didn’t think people in Minnesota should settle for a new normal, and my approach with my law enforcement partners is we need to be the Minnesota we were before 2020, and I firmly believe we can and will get there with the right leadership and right focus.”

How Luger may fit into that focus remains to be seen; Department of Justice protocol, he said, keeps him from discussing his next steps (or commenting on current controversies like Trump’s nominations to lead the department or the FBI).

He’s also reticent to recommend advice to lawmakers soon to gather in St. Paul, but did emphasize that “One of the crown jewels of the state of Minnesota is the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” which he called “an incredible force multiplier when it comes to violent crime.”

Luger concluded by saying that for every crime crisis he “wanted to instill in the office a sense of urgency.” For instance, in 2021, the office ranked 75th out of 94 in the country in the number of defendants charged in gun cases. After instituting a violent-crime initiative, the office ranked 14th.

“I believe that these were all problems we needed to be proactive on, and needed to move quickly on with our law-enforcement partners,” Luger said, adding that he was “very proud of this office for doing so.”

He should be. And in turn Minnesotans should be proud of Luger’s two terms as U.S. attorney.