Guest Speaker: Mn. Deputy Attorney General Jessica Whitney

February 14, 2023 (SAINT PAUL) — Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced today that he has named Jessica Whitney as Deputy Attorney General in the Office of the Minnesota Attorney General. Ms. Whitney is an 18-year veteran of the Office of former Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller. She will serve as one of four deputy attorneys general in the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office.

Ms. Whitney most recently served in former Attorney General Miller’s office as deputy attorney general for public policy and consumer protection. In that role, she supervised legal representation for State of Iowa in antitrust, tobacco regulation, civil rights, veterans’ affairs, and labor, and advised the attorney general on civil law, policy and other matters of strategic concern.

In 2022, when Attorney General Miller served as president of the non-partisan National Association of Attorneys General, she spearheaded his Presidential Initiative entitled “Consumer Protection 2.0: Techs Threats and Tools.” For seven and a half years, she also served as director of the Consumer Protection Division of the Iowa Attorney General’s Office, in which role she led one of the strongest consumer-protection divisions in an attorney general’s office in the country. (For two of those years, she served concurrently as deputy attorney general.)

Prior to that, she served for 11 years as an assistant attorney general in the Consumer Protection Division. Ms. Whitney has led a variety of consumer-protection cases and won restitution for consumers in the areas of fraud and deceptive practices by for-profit colleges and universities, debt collection, illegal lending, auto-finance fraud, and other areas. She has also worked extensively in consumer education.

She holds a bachelor's degree from Grinnell College and a J.D. degree from the University of Michigan Law School.