An eastern Iowa attorney who served two terms in the Iowa House is running for attorney general.
Nate Willems, a Democrat from Mount Vernon, said his top priorities would be assisting county attorneys in gaining convictions for violent felonies and protecting Iowans from corporate crimes. “I’m running because I want the attorney general’s office to be focused on protecting regular Iowans,” Willems told Radio Iowa, “and not getting involved in Washington politics or political lawsuits.”
Willems is a practicing attorney in a Cedar Rapids law firm where he has pursued cases of alleged wage theft. “I’ve represented tens of thousands of Iowans and regained tens of millions of dollars in lost wages and other benefits, but what I do is just play whack-a-mole because there’s $900 million a year stolen out of Iowa workers’ paychecks,” Willems said. “…I’m running for attorney general because I want the attorney general’s office to investigate and prosecute corporations when they steal wages from Iowa workers.”
One of his biggest cases involved successfully challenging a University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics policy that delayed paying 11,000 current and former employees by as much as a month for their overtime work. “After four years of litigation we recovered $15 million for those workers and University Hospitals follows the law,” Willems said, referring to the state law that requires overtime pay to be paid within 12 business days of the pay period in which it was earned.
Willems said over the past few decades states’ attorneys general “have done important” work in winning legal settlements from the tobacco industry and opioid makers and distributors, settlements that yielded “real money” for the State of Iowa and Iowans who’d been harmed. Current Attorney General Brenna Bird, a Republican, based her 2022 campaign on the promise she’d sue the Biden Administration over its farm policies, student loan forgiveness and a variety of other issues. Willems questioned Bird’s approach.
“Bringing lawsuits or joining lawsuits that really are political fights in nature or maybe even come across as a way to just put out a press release,” Willems said, “and that’s not the right reason to sue the federal government.”
Bird has said she is considering whether to run for governor in 2026 rather than seek reelection as attorney general. Willems, who is 45, grew up in Anamosa, holds a bachelors degree from Georgetown University and earned his law degree from the University of Iowa. Willems served four years in the Iowa House, then lost a 2012 race for a seat in the Iowa Senate by a 1.8% margin.