Phil Weiser

Philip Jacob Weiser (born May 10, 1968) is an American attorney and politician who has served as the attorney general of Colorado since 2019. He is the Hatfield professor of law and telecommunications, executive director and founder of the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, and dean emeritus at the University of Colorado Law School. He previously served in the Obama and Clinton administrations in the White House and Justice Department. A member of the Democratic Party, he was elected Attorney General for the State of Colorado in the 2018 election, defeating Republican George Brauchler on November 6, 2018. He was re-elected in 2022.

On January 2, 2025, Weiser announced his candidacy in the 2026 Colorado gubernatorial election. He won the Democratic nomination on June 30, 2026, defeating U.S. Senator Michael Bennet in the primary.

Early life and education Weiser was born to an Ashkenazi Jewish family. His grandparents survived the Holocaust, and his mother, Estare, was born in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.

After high school, Weiser studied political science at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1990 with a Bachelor of Arts with high honors. He then attended the New York University School of Law, where he was an Articles Editor for the New York University Law Review. He graduated from NYU Law in 1994 with a Juris Doctor degree and Order of the Coif honors.

Academic and federal government career

Law clerk and Clinton administration After graduating, Weiser served as law clerk to Judge David Ebel of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals from September 1994 to August 1995. He was then a law clerk to Justices Byron R. White and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the U.S. Supreme Court from September 1995 to August 1996. Following his clerkships, he was senior counsel to Joel Klein, the Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's Antitrust Division from 1996 to 1998. He also founded the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship and he wrote and taught in the areas of competition policy, innovation policy, and Internet policy.

From June 2011 through July 2016, Weiser served as the fifteenth dean of the law school, and he was named one of the National Jurist's most influential leaders in legal education. Through the Silicon Flatirons Center, Weiser developed a range of programs to build up CU Boulder's support for entrepreneurship and has linked it to the local startup community.

Obama administration

In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Weiser as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department's Antitrust Division. He took the post in July 2009, taking a leave of absence from the University of Colorado Law School.

Attorney General of Colorado

Elections

Weiser was elected Attorney General for the State of Colorado in the 2018 election, defeating Republican George Brauchler on November 6, 2018.

In the 2022 Colorado Attorney General election, Weiser was re-elected for a second term, defeating Republican challenger John Kellner and winning over 54% of votes cast. At a February 2026 news conference, Weiser said that his federal litigation had restored or protected more than $1 billion in Colorado funding. The following cases, selected for their impact on Colorado and presented in chronological order, illustrate the range of Weiser's federal litigation.

On April 1, 2025, Weiser's office led a coalition of 25 states and territories in suing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services over its abrupt termination of $11 billion in federal public health funding the previous week. The administration had justified the termination by declaring the COVID-19 pandemic over and the grants therefore "no longer necessary," although Congress had reauthorized the funding as recently as June 2023, after the formal end of the pandemic emergency. The complaint alleged that the affected funds supported infectious-disease tracking, immunization access, emergency preparedness, mental health and substance abuse services, and public health data infrastructure across the plaintiff states. In Colorado specifically, the terminations threatened the state's Behavioral Health Administration and 68 of its grantee partners, including the Mobile Crisis Response program and the Assertive Community Treatment program, which served more than 650 individuals with serious mental illness. The court granted a temporary restraining order within two days of filing, entered a preliminary injunction six weeks later requiring HHS to restore the funding, and saw the administration's appeal voluntarily dismissed shortly thereafter.

On October 28, 2025, Weiser joined attorneys general from 25 states in a lawsuit to prevent the Trump administration from suspending payments under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). SNAP provides approximately $120 million in benefits to 600,000 Coloradans each month. USDA had taken the position that it lacked authority to use approximately $5 billion in SNAP contingency funds to cover November 2025 benefits during the ongoing federal government shutdown.

On January 9, 2026, Weiser joined attorneys general from California, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York in suing the Trump administration over a freeze of more than $10 billion in federal funding for child care, cash assistance, and social services programs across the five states. The administration had announced the freeze days earlier, citing concerns about fraud and benefits going to undocumented immigrants, although undocumented immigrants did not qualify for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program or Colorado's child care assistance program under existing rules. The same day the suit was filed, the court granted a temporary restraining order requiring the administration to release the funds. A preliminary injunction followed in February 2026, blocking the administration from re-imposing the restrictions. The three programs at issue provide Colorado with approximately $300 million annually and support more than 27,000 children in the state's child care assistance program, more than 50,000 children through TANF-funded cash assistance, and another 14,400 children through prevention and intervention services.

On February 18, 2026, Weiser's office co-led a coalition of 13 state attorneys general, with California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, in filing suit opposing the Trump administration's termination of approximately $8 billion in clean-energy and infrastructure awards nationwide, including more than $600 million for Colorado projects affecting Colorado State University, the Colorado School of Mines, and the University of Colorado. The complaint alleged that the executive branch could not unilaterally cancel funding Congress had appropriated under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The case remained pending as of mid-2026.

Opioid settlement In July 2019, Weiser amended Colorado's existing lawsuit against Purdue Pharma to name eight members of the Sackler family, which privately owned Purdue, along with several former company executives. The amended complaint alleges "fraudulent and reckless conduct" under three Colorado statutes: the Consumer Protection Act, the Organized Crime Control Act, and the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act. The complaint also alleges that warnings about addiction risk were brushed aside in pursuit of sales.

In total, the lawsuits Weiser filed and those he joined have brought more than $912 million to Colorado, including at least $32 million from an April 2026 settlement with the Albertsons grocery chain.

Tenant protections Weiser has made housing a major focus of his tenure, pursuing legal action against large rental property owners and managers accused of unfair trade practices.

In a joint action with the Federal Trade Commission, Weiser's office alleged what it called a "pattern of deceptive pricing" identified through a Consumer Protection Bureau investigation. According to the state, Greystar advertised attractive monthly rents while concealing mandatory recurring charges covering services such as pest control, trash removal, concierge services, utility management, and amenity access. The state alleged that prospective tenants could not discover the full cost of a unit until after signing a lease and paying non-refundable application fees.

The case settled with Colorado recovering more than $1 million. According to the state's announcement, the funds would be used for "reimbursement of actual costs and attorneys' fees, future consumer protection or antitrust enforcement, consumer education, or public welfare purposes." Weiser's office later amended the complaint to add Greystar, LivCor, Camden Property Trust, Cushman & Wakefield, Willow Bridge, and Cortland as defendants, alleging the companies coordinated through RealPage's software to suppress competition on rental pricing. Greystar alone operates more than 45,000 rental units in Colorado.

Weiser also reached a settlement with Baron Property Services, which the state alleged had charged tenants for the company's master renters-insurance policy even when those tenants already carried qualifying third-party coverage, in violation of the Colorado Consumer Protection Act. The state separately alleged that Baron, when screening rental applicants, had treated unadjudicated criminal charges as convictions, violating the Rental Application Fairness Act. The settlement required Baron to pay approximately $7,300 in restitution to the 368 affected tenants and an additional $67,635 to the state, and to bring its policies into compliance with both statutes.

PFAS contamination In February 2022, Weiser filed a lawsuit against 15 companies that manufactured a firefighting foam containing chemicals known as PFAS, seeking to make them pay for investigation, cleanup, and monitoring of contamination sites across Colorado. PFAS "have been tied to cancer, birth defects and other illnesses."

According to the complaint, PFAS have been found in soil, surface and ground water in 50 of Colorado's 64 counties. In a 2020 sample covering half of Colorado's public drinking water systems, 34% had detectable PFAS. Contamination sites identified in the complaint spanned the Front Range and included Peterson Air Force Base and Fort Carson near Colorado Springs, Buckley Space Force Base in the Denver area, the U.S. Air Force Academy, the Suncor plant, Colorado's federal airports, and fire districts in Teller and Boulder counties.

Providers facing that opt-out decision would not yet know how much money they stood to receive under the settlement, nor in many cases would they have determined whether their systems were contaminated or what remediation might cost. The coalition also objected to an indemnification provision under which 3M could later seek to recover from settling water providers any damages the company paid to third parties. For example, if residents of a contaminated community developed cancer and sued 3M, the company could turn around and demand reimbursement from the local water utility. The settlement covered only claims by public water suppliers; it did not include the separate, ongoing PFAS-related lawsuits that states, including Colorado, had filed against manufacturers. On October 16, 2020, it was revealed that all three of Colorado's Catholic Dioceses, the Archdiocese of Denver, the Diocese of Colorado Springs, and Diocese of Pueblo, had paid $6.6 million in compensation to 81 victims of clergy sex abuse within the past year, regardless of how long ago the abuse happened.

On December 1, 2020, Weiser's final report revealed that there were an additional 9 credibly accused clergy and 46 alleged victims in both in the Archdiocese of Denver and its suffragan Diocese of Pueblo. Statewide, 52 Colorado Catholic priests were named in Weiser's final report as committing acts of sex abuse. Prominent Archdiocese of Denver priest Fr. Charles B. Woodrich, also known as "Father Woody," was among those listed. Father Woody was known for his work in local homeless shelters. On December 10, 2024, the merger was blocked by a federal district court.

2026 Colorado gubernatorial campaign On January 2, 2025, Weiser announced his candidacy to replace term-limited Colorado Governor Jared Polis in the 2026 Colorado gubernatorial election. Weiser's campaign savings surpassed Bennet's to start 2026, but Rocky Mountain Way, a Super PAC supporting Bennet, made the total funds for each candidate similar.

At the Colorado Democratic Party's State Assembly on March 28, 2026, Weiser won 90% of the delegate vote, and appeared at the top of the ballot for the Colorado Democratic primary on June 30th.

On June 30, 2026, Weiser won the Colorado Democratic gubernatorial primary with 56.7% of the vote, beating U.S. Senator Michael Bennet.

Personal life In 2002, Weiser married Heidi Wald, a physician, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and they now live together with their two children in Denver.

Selected publications Books Phil Weiser & Jon Nuechterlein, Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age (MIT Press 2013) . Phil Weiser, Stuart Benjamin, Howard Shelanski & James Speta, Telecommunications Law and Policy (Carolina Academic Press 2012) . Phil Weiser, The Jury and Democracy: How Jury Deliberation Promotes Civic Engagement and Political Participation (Oxford University Press 2010) .

Articles