By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
November 11, 2026
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita is many things.
But a quick study is not one of them.
Our relentlessly ambitious attorney general chided his fellow Republican, Indiana Gov. Mike Braun, for not disciplining 25 Hoosier educators Rokita identified in Kafkaesque fashion as having been unkind to the memory of the murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Rokita’s action was easy to discern as another exploratory jab at the governor. The attorney general has been not so subtly weighing a primary challenge to Braun in 2028.
The timing of Rokita’s criticism demonstrates that he is to politics what Yoko Ono is to music—tone-deaf to his very core.
In the just concluded 2026 election, Republicans lost not one but two statewide races for the first time in nearly 15 years—the big one being the secretary of state’s race in which Democrat Beau Bayh trounced Rokita’s handpicked candidate, Max Engling.
Republicans also lost 16 seats in the Indiana House of Representatives and five in the Indiana Senate.
Some Republicans, including Rokita, have tried to dismiss the GOP drubbing as little more than business as usual, a tiny little leak in the party’s impregnable dam.
The last time there was a leak like that one, Noah built himself a boat.
Because in two years, they’re likely to face in Bayh the best-funded, talented and most battle-tested Democratic gubernatorial candidate they’ve seen in a generation, most Hoosier Republicans are looking to bring the party back together again.
But not Rokita.
Like Yoko in her prime, he’s just looking for his chance to solo—even if his performance sends people streaming to the exits.
As ill-conceived as Rokita’s political strategy may be, his legal analysis may be even worse.
Ball State University not long ago had to settle with a staffer the school fired under pressure from Rokita. The staffer—like most of the other people on our attorney general’s list—had posted something on a private social media that was uncomplimentary to Kirk.
As Ball State moved closer to having to take its case to court, the university’s lawyers realized how weak their defense was—and the university coughed up nearly a million dollars as a settlement and legal fees package to make the staffer’s suit go away.
That was money that otherwise could have been used to educate Hoosier college students.
If Todd Rokita hadn’t gotten involved, that is.
Now, our slow-learning attorney general wants other schools to make the same mistake that Ball State did and, in the process, cost Hoosier taxpayers more money and Indiana students more educational opportunities.
For almost any other lawyer in the state, offering such advice would come close to being malpractice.
That brings us to the last bit of Rokita absurdity.
The reason that the former staffer at Ball State could make the university cave in the fashion that it did is that she had a First Amendment-protected right in her role as a citizen to say what she wished about any public figure.
Including Charlie Kirk.
Our attorney general, who racks up ethical disciplinary investigations as if they were rare paintings and he were a connoisseur, has asserted that his own First Amendment right to free expression trumps—yes, I’m using that verb deliberately—every other consideration.
Including any oath he took to become an attorney.
Any duty he might have to his clients, the citizens of Indiana.
Or any responsibility he might have to follow rules of conduct every other lawyer in the state must honor.
No, in Todd Rokita’s world, his First Amendment rights are so absolute that they amount to an unlimited and unchecked get-out-of-jail card.
But the First Amendment rights of the state’s educators—who, by the way, as citizens of the state are also his clients?
Not so much.
Some years ago, when Rokita was in the midst of one of his perpetual campaigns for political advancement—he runs for office with the same regularity that Burger King makes hamburgers—he offered up a whopper of a slogan.
“Defeat the elite,” the slogan read.
Given that he went to a tony private college and flies his own airplane, our attorney general isn’t exactly a member of the proletariat.
So, in a column from that time, I proposed another slogan for his campaign.
“Make democracy hypocrisy.”
I meant it as a joke.
Sadly, Todd Rokita took it as a challenge.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Also, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
