Attorneys General and Ticketmaster
On April 15, 2026 a U.S. federal jury found Live Nation Entertainment and its subsidiary Ticketmaster in violation of federal and state antitrust laws. The jury found that the corporations had illegally monopolized live events like Post Malone and Jelly Roll at Washington-Grizzly Stadium.
In a wild move, the U.S. Department of Justice abandoned ship just as trial got going, leaving the state Attorney Generals to go it alone. The Montana AG remained part of the 33-state coalition that rejected the DOJ settlement to pursue a full jury trial.
For Montanans, this was a tangible win. By refusing the initial settlement, which state AGs argued failed to address the core monopoly, the coalition secured a verdict that allows them to pursue deeper structural remedies and financial penalties.
But the Ticketmaster success is an outlier for Montana’s Attorney General.
Large settlements that return money to ordinary people are the product of multistate coalitions working through shared infrastructure. The National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) is the bipartisan organization that was key to the $206 billion Master Tobacco Settlement Agreement, and the $26 billion national opioid settlement in 2021. Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, and Oklahoma earmarked portions of the Tobacco Settlement endowment funds for tobacco control and health care programs.
Rather than leverage that infrastructure, AG Knudsen sued it. In June 2023, Knudsen filed a lawsuit against NAAG in Lewis and Clark County District Court, alleging that the organization was mismanaging Montana’s share of settlement funds and investing them in ways that violated state law. This came after Knudsen, along with several other Republican attorneys general, had already left the organization.
This un-necessarily isolates Montana from state-centered actions that provide significant financial redress.
Attorneys General can act as gap fillers, stepping in to sue corporations over privacy violations, deceptive marketing, or environmental harm when the U.S. Department of Justice fails to step up to the plate. But Montana’s AG has gone the opposite direction, to our harm. While states like Minnesota secured settlements from retailers like Walmart over deceptive marketing, and New York pursued PepsiCo for public nuisance claims related to plastic pollution, Montana sat out this wave of consumer-focused enforcement.
The office has been distracted by internal legal and ethical challenges. The Montana Supreme Court issued a public admonition to Knudsen in 2025 for failing to comply with court orders and allowing his staff to accuse Justices of unethical conduct during a legislative dispute.
The Court also ruled that AG Knudsen lacked the statutory authority to revise a nonpartisan judicial election ballot initiative. The Court found AG Knudsen attempted to change the language without first providing a required written determination that the original proposal was legally deficient.
The Ticketmaster verdict proves that a state Attorney General can be a powerful advocate for consumers. Montana’s Attorney needs to focus on Montanans, not politics.
All together.