As U. S. attorney for Montana, Kurt Alme fought passionately for Native American victims.
Kurt Alme helped build the federal government’s first national response to missing and murdered Indigenous women. I know because I was in the room. As U.S. attorneys, Kurt and I led the Attorney General’s Native American Issues Subcommittee, and when the Department of Justice launched the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Person (MMIP) initiative, Kurt was among the first prosecutors to push it from idea to practice. He advocated tirelessly for designated MMIP coordinators in offices with tribal populations, response protocols built in partnership with tribal communities, and a standing commitment that the disappearance of a Native American would be treated as the emergency it is.
Kurt later served as U.S. attorney a second time. This time, his passionate advocacy helped bring an FBI field office to Montana with additional agents to investigate crimes on underserved Native American reservations. Critically, a field office also brings a Child Abduction Response Team – to quickly find missing children.
Recently, I have seen misleading political attack ads aimed at Kurt substantially understate sexual assault prosecutions on Montana’s Native American reservations.
Here is what Kurt’s opponents don’t want you to know: Kurt’s office built strong partnerships with tribal prosecutors and sent cases to tribal prosecutors to prosecute in their own courts, at their request. That is not a declination to prosecute. It is the partnership with sovereign tribal nations that federal law contemplates and that Kurt practiced deliberately. To not count those referrals is to say that a tribe’s prosecution does not count. Montana’s tribal nations and the prosecutors who serve them deserve better than that from anyone asking for their votes.
They also don’t want you to know that sexual assault cases are often the hardest to prove. It is a reality every prosecutor confronts and none of us accepts easily. Nationally, fewer than one in five reported sexual assaults results in criminal charges, a figure the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network has documented for years. Kurt’s office and tribal prosecutors prosecuted more.
Good prosecutors try hard cases. I did, and so did Kurt. But the question is never whether a case is difficult. It is whether the evidence can carry the burden the Constitution demands.
When I was U. S. attorney, I ensured my office prosecuted every viable sexual assault case to the fullest extent of the law. Kurt did the same.
Kurt cares deeply for the Native American communities in Montana. He treated tribal communities as partners rather than as jurisdictional complications. He went to the reservations. He listened to tribal leaders, victim advocates, and police chiefs who had been telling Washington for decades that violence against Native women was being overlooked, and Kurt did something about it. The MMIP coordinator working for Montana, the tribal community response protocols to quickly find missing persons, and the FBI Child Abduction Response Team are all part of Kurt’s record. So are the cases that never became statistics because the systems he built helped find a missing person right away.
Campaigns are entitled to argue about a record. They are not entitled to invent one. A statistic stripped of what it measures is not evidence. It is a trick, and this one tries to mislead Montanans away from the fact that Kurt spent years strengthening the federal response to violence against Native American women and cares genuinely about victims. The people he worked alongside know better, and the tribal communities he served know better.
I do not vote in Montana. But I have seen the work, and I have seen the man, and I will not stay quiet while either is misrepresented.
Trent Shores is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation. He served as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Oklahoma from 2017 to 2021 and co-led the Attorney General’s Native American Issues Subcommittee with Kurt Alme.