SHAWNEE — State Attorney General Gentner Drummond has been on the job now for 20 weeks, and in that time he has been working on a renewed focus on transparency and government accountability.

In his short time since taking office, he has made some big decisions that have sometimes put him at odds with some of state’s top elected leaders.

He told members of the Oklahoma Press Association during their annual convention Saturday that he believes himself to be an “accountability partner” with elected and appointed officials, and in that role, he has a symbiotic relationship with the press.

Drummond said his love of public service started with his grandfather, who told him when he was a youngster that he wanted him to serve in the military and then go into public service and try to make a difference on behalf of the state.”

“One of my primary objectives is to try to make a difference in the short time that I have so I can give my children and grandchildren a compelling reason to stay in Oklahoma,” he said. “I want to give a reason for all young people to do that.”

“There are times in life when you have to make hard decisions,” he said. “Steeled in my days as a combat pilot, we have this one brief time on earth, and we should do the right thing.”

In his first 100 days in office, Drummond focused on top priorities of cracking down on Oklahoma’s illegal marijuana grow operations, combating a culture of corruption and scandal, restoring relations with tribal governments and ensuring transparency and openness in government.

He also tackled a backlog of 66 open records requests that had languished in the Attorney General’s office, expediting the process of review for those records and staying on top of “at least five requests a week” for open records.

He brought up the number of requests he gets from the press regularly regarding records for the State Department of Education.

He appointed former state Sen. Anthony Sykes to serve as public access counselor for the AG’s office. As an assistant attorney general, Sykes works with state, county and municipal government agencies and commissions to ensure they strictly comply with the Open Meetings and Open Records Acts.

He said Sykes spends a lot of time at the State Department of Education and described the relationship with the department as “frictious.”

“Akin to transparency is this issue of corruption and scandal at the state level,” he said. “I don’t mean this derisively at any individual, but we do have a culture of bending to the point of breaking rules of protocol.”

He brought up his dismissal of the state’s lawsuit against Class Wallet, which his predecessor, John O’Connor, filed in the wake of an audit that questioned the handling of millions in federal COVID relief dollars.

“I dismissed the ... lawsuit, which I saw as fabulous political cover,” he said. “We will fully review how we spent that $39 million. Eight million went to the Department of Education under Joy Hofmeister, which passed its audit squeaky clean. The other $31 million, wild west.”

He also addressed problems with illegal marijuana grow operations in Oklahoma, saying that of the approximately 6,300 grow operations about 3,000 are illegal. He said the legislative session helped empower the attorney general’s office to “do what we need to do” to shut down illegal grow operations.

Lastly, he brought up the recent decision by the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board’s vote to approve the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school, saying the decision is unconstitutional and that legal action is likely after a contract for the school is signed.

“I don’t want to force my personal opinion on you, I just want to apply the law,” he said. He said the matter could work its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which he said is “blurring the line of establishment laws. We’ll see how that plays out.”

On the national level, he said he sees “our national voice sliding into something that most Americans don’t want.”

I don’t want to see what we have fought and shed blood and tears for 250 years in this experiment in American democracy slide toward fascism,” he said. “I used to think politics was linear. You were either left or right. I absolutely believe politics is circular. The further right you get at some point you become fascist. You fall off the other side, you (become) communist. It’s just a circle.”