Incumbent Attorney General Clark defending seat against challenger, Kemon

September 28, 2026  |  Keith Whitcomb Jr.  |  The Times Argus

Attorney General Charity Clark, of Williston, is defending her seat against Ed Kemon, of Vergennes. Kemon is a systems engineer running under the Republican banner. Clark is a Democrat and an attorney.

Incumbent Attorney General Charity Clark (D). Courtesy photo

Charity Clark

Clark has served as attorney general since 2023. She joined the office in 2014 under Attorney General William Sorrell, was chief of staff under Attorney General T.J. Donovan, and resigned in 2022 so she could run for his job after he announced he wouldn’t be seeking reelection.

It’s been an honor to serve as attorney general, said Clark. She said she is a 10th generation Vermonter on both sides of her family.

“In terms of what voters can expect from me, is a continuation of the work that I have done, particularly protecting Vermonters, especially children, and democracy, and our constitution,” she said.

Clark said that her office has been involved in numerous lawsuits against the Trump administration, often joining coalitions of other states to challenge the federal government on what the plaintiffs believe are blatant violations of the law and the Constitution.

She said her office has been involved in at least 70 lawsuits against the Trump Administration, and that’s only in the first two years of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. She said that the lawsuits have either prevailed or been granted injunctions the majority of the time.

“And in so doing, we have allowed literally tens of millions of dollars to flow back to the state of Vermont that was being illegally withheld by the Trump administration,” she said.

She said she plans to continue doing this so long as the federal government continues to overstep itself.

Clark touted Vermont’s role in a large settlement against Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram. Vermont will see $92.7 million from that settlement, the most ever received from a single company.

According to Clark, Vermont saw more from that settlement than it otherwise would have had it not participated. She said Vermont filed its own lawsuit against the company, which Meta sought to have thrown out because Vermont had no interest in the matter. The Vermont Supreme Court ruled otherwise; the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to take it up, meaning the lower court ruling stood, and applied to other cases filed across the country.

Clark said her office has also sued pharmacy benefit managers (PBM) over their business practices.

“We have a healthcare cost crisis in this country made worse by the dishonesty of the PBMs,” she said. “We have sued them and will continue, wherever we can, protecting consumers from dishonest corporations.”

She said fighting scams is also important to her office. Scams, she said, have been an issue for a long time and will likely be made more difficult as “artificial intelligence” technology progresses.

Reproductive rights are also something she said she will continue to see protected in Vermont.

Ed Kemon, Republican candidate for Vermont Attorney General Courtesy photo

Ed Kemon

Kemon said he grew up around Washington, D.C., and went to school to become a systems engineer at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. He said his family has roots in the Rutland area, having come from French Canada.

Kemon said he read Vermont Life as a child and always wanted to live in the state, which he’d visit frequently while traveling around New England for work. He finally moved to Vermont in 2015, settling in Vergennes.

“I am a systems engineer. I am not an attorney. I think there’s a lot of attorneys that are in the Vermont Attorney General’s office with very good specialties, and I would be more of a manager and set the direction on what we were to look at,” he said. “Vermont doesn’t need another attorney. They’ve got enough.”

Kemon said he does have experience with the legal system through his work with the U.S. Department of Defense and getting the necessary permissions for a Canadian company that specialized in equipment for the U.S. Marine Corps.

“My big thing, I would say, is being able to do investigations. Because one of the jobs of the attorney general is to pursue potential malfeasance or corruption or other things that might be occurring,” he said.

He noted the EB-5 scandal from several years ago.

“That’s a good example of something that was not pursued when the red flags came up back in 2014,” he said. “That would be one of the big differences between me and other people; it doesn’t matter who you are, what party you’re in, as the attorney general I would sue any corruption or any malfeasance and if the investigation turned up wrongdoing, prosecute. It doesn’t matter who it is.”

He said he would like to see some investigations into things like the Public Utility Commission’s decisions on solar panels and communication towers.

“I’m sure they’re all nice people and everything but they may have a certain mindset which is we’re going to put in solar panels and wind turbines and everything else because we want to go all electric,” said Kemon. “That’s not really using a systems engineering approach because you need lots of different types of fuel sources, including fossil fuels. So, the propane, the natural gas, even the oil, if you don’t have that there’s going to be a lot of people that are struggling during the winter time because their electrical bills are going to be so high.”

He said many people can’t afford to switch to using electric vehicles and similar products.

“I’m wondering how they make their decisions, because it always seems to turn out the same way. I could be wrong about that, but they have lots of lawyers. They have layers from the Vermont attorney general’s office that are detailed to them,” he said. We need to investigate it and make sure it doesn’t keep happening, and find out what is the problem with the system that they can’t resist outside forces from other states or even other countries in dividing up Vermont.”

He said that on his first day as attorney general, he’d have to see which attorneys come into the office for work. He said he would also speak to each one and find out what they like about what they’re doing and what they’d like to be doing differently.

He said Democrats have been all about suing Trump lately.

“You can sue anybody for anything, it doesn’t mean you’re going to win. And the federal government, the current administration, has ways of getting around different legal issues, as we know,” he said. “I would look more to get rid of a lot of those lawsuits that deal with things like popular-type stuff such as DEI, gender transitioning … a lot of them are like partisan signaling and dividing people in Vermont. I would like that to stop right away and just maybe negotiate with the current administration and say, ‘OK, we’re going to drop our lawsuit in these three to five cases and say, OK, what can we do to get Vermont money that’s being held up because boys are participating in girl’s sports in violation of Title IX?’”

He said this would be an easy decision to make.

“Some people would say, ‘Oh, no, you can’t do that,’ but so what? It’s keeping money from the school system, and that’s one of our hard problems right now besides housing and affordability and all the other things that politicians love to talk about,” he said.

He said he’s never voted for Trump, but is a supporter of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the current Secretary of Health and Human Services — and isn’t a fan of the military actions the U.S. has undertaken, saying they’ve made the economy worse.

Kemon said the attorney general’s office has a role to play in places where state’s attorneys have struggled, and can offer some clarity on the law regarding immigration enforcement.

The general election is Nov. 3.