# Rob Bonta Attorney General of California since April 2021 (b. 1972 in the Philippines; raised in California, where his parents organized farmworkers with the United Farm Workers), appointed by [[Gavin Newsom]] to succeed Xavier Becerra, elected in 2022, and running for a second full term in November 2026 after declining the governor's race. Before the AG's office he was a deputy city attorney in San Francisco, an Alameda city councilman, and a state assemblyman (2012–21) — the first Filipino-American in the legislature. He is, by the numbers, the most active state litigant against the second Trump administration. ## The record By the office's own August 4, 2026 accounting: **82 lawsuits** against the administration in eighteen months, 55 of them led or co-led by California; 120-plus amicus briefs; 45 orders of early relief and 21 final orders; and about **$207 billion** in federal funding the office counts as protected. The cases the vault tracks include the birthright-citizenship suit that ended in *[[Trump v. Barbara]]*, the [[Learning Resources v. Trump]] tariff litigation and the follow-on Section 122 win, the [[National Guard]] federalization cases that produced Posse Comitatus findings ([[Trump v. Illinois]] is the sister case), the two election-order suits, and the state coalition's Tunney Act intervention in the HPE/Juniper decree and its Section 7 suit against the [[Paramount Skydance - Warner Bros. Discovery Deal]] — the last two being the actions that have exposed the [[Antitrust Division]]'s capture on a court record. He led the 24 Democratic attorneys general who refused [[JD Vance]]'s fraud-task-force roundtable in May 2026 as a "political performance" ([[Democratic AGs Boycott Fraud Roundtable]]). ## Reading him Bonta is the institutional form of the resistance that works: the state attorney general as the counter-party to a federal executive, with standing, budgets and a bench of career lawyers the federal government has been shedding. The multistate coalition he co-leads with New York, Washington, Illinois and Massachusetts has become the de facto opposition litigation office, and the wins are disproportionately procedural — injunctions, vacaturs, findings — which is the point the [[Resistance Hub]] page makes: process is where the second term is losing. His own critics note the office's aggressiveness against business (the social-media and Meta cases, the oil-company climate suit) and the political calculus of an AG who will need to be governor someday. ## See Also - [[Democratic AGs Boycott Fraud Roundtable]] · [[Task Force to Eliminate Fraud]] · [[JD Vance]] · [[Gavin Newsom]] - [[Trump v. Barbara]] · [[Learning Resources v. Trump]] · [[Trump v. Illinois]] · [[Antitrust Division]] · [[Paramount Skydance - Warner Bros. Discovery Deal]] - [[Resistance Hub]] · [[US Governors Hub]]