Anthony Gregory Brown (born November 21, 1961) is an American politician and lawyer serving as the attorney general of Maryland since 2023. He previously served as the U.S. representative for Maryland's 4th congressional district from 2017 to 2023 and as the eighth lieutenant governor of Maryland from 2007 to 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, he was its nominee for governor in the 2014 election, losing to Republican Larry Hogan in a close race.
Brown served two four-year terms in the Maryland House of Delegates, representing Prince George's County from 1999 to 2007."Anthony G. Brown, Lt. Governor ". Political biography. Maryland State Archives . Retrieved February 14, 2007."O'Malley/Brown in Maryland gubernatorial race". The Baltimore Sun. Retrieved January 10, 2007. Not available online as of January 13, 2007. He was elected to the lieutenant governorship in 2006 on the Democratic ticket with Governor Martin O'Malley; both were re-elected in 2010. He is a retired colonel in the United States Army Reserve, having served in the U.S. Army for over thirty years. While lieutenant governor, Brown was the highest-ranking elected official in the nation to have served a tour of duty in Iraq. In 2014, Brown ran unsuccessfully for the governorship, losing to Republican nominee Larry Hogan. In 2016, Brown was elected to the U.S. House. His district covered most of the majority-black precincts in Prince George's County, as well as a sliver of Anne Arundel County.
In October 2021, Brown announced that he would not seek reelection to the U.S. House in 2022 and would instead run for attorney general of Maryland. He won the Democratic primary on July 19, 2022. He defeated Republican lawyer Michael Peroutka in the general election on November 8, 2022, becoming Maryland's first Black attorney general.
Early life and education Brown was born in 1961 in Huntington, New York, to immigrant parents. His father, Roy Hershel Brown, a physician, was born in Cayo Mambi, Cuba; was raised in Kingston, Jamaica; and later came to the U.S. to attend Fordham University. Roy received his medical degree in Zürich, Switzerland, where he also met his future wife, Lilly I. Berlinger. The couple married and Lilly moved with Brown to New York, where they had Anthony, his sister, and three brothers.
The family lived in Huntington, New York, in Suffolk County on Long Island, where Anthony attended public schools, graduating from Huntington High School in 1979. In his senior year, Brown became the first African American to be elected president of Huntington High School's student council. After high school, Brown started at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he had an appointment. He quickly switched to Harvard College, where he majored in government and resided in Quincy House. At Harvard, Brown served on the Student Advisory Committee at Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics. Since Harvard did not offer ROTC at the time, in his second year, Brown enrolled in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps program at MIT and earned a two-year scholarship. In 1984, Brown graduated with an A.B. cum laude, and as a Distinguished Military Graduate.
Military career Upon graduation, Brown received a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He served on active duty for five years. He graduated first in his flight class at Fort Rucker, Alabama, and received his aeronautical rating as an Army aviator. He also completed airborne training, receiving both the Basic Parachutist Badge and the Air Assault Badge. During his time on active duty, Brown served as a helicopter pilot with the Aviation Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division in Europe.This is the official formatting of the brigade and division names, per During that period of active duty, Brown held positions as platoon leader for a target acquisition, reconnaissance and surveillance platoon, executive officer of a general support aviation company, a battalion logistics officer, and the flight operations officer for Task Force 23.
Law school and legal career After completing his active duty service, Brown returned to graduate school, entering Harvard Law School in 1989 and earning his JD degree. He attended Harvard Law School at the same time as future President Barack Obama, Artur Davis and actor Hill Harper. Brown was a member of the Board of Student Advisers. His third-year paper, written under the supervision of Professor Charles Ogletree, analyzed the scope of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable search and seizure in the military. Brown was chair of the Membership Committee of the Black Law Students Association. Brown graduated from Harvard Law, with a Juris Doctor in 1992.
After graduating from law school, Brown completed a two-year clerkship for Chief Judge Eugene Sullivan of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. In 1994, he joined the Washington, D.C. office of the international law firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering (now WilmerHale). Brown practiced law with the late John Payton, a renowned civil rights attorney and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Stephen H. Sachs, who was the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland from 1967 to 1970 and was the 40th Attorney General of Maryland. In 1998, Brown received Wilmer's Pro Bono Publico Award for his work in representing indigent clients. In 1999, Brown worked for Merrill Lynch for five months. Brown joined the Prince George's County land use and zoning law firm Gibbs & Haller in 2000, after having been elected to the Maryland General Assembly.
JAG Corps
Brown continued his military service transferring from the Army's Aviation Branch to the Judge Advocate General's Corps as a Judge Advocate General (JAG) in the United States Army Reserve. Brown began his service as a JAG with attending the JAG School at the University of Virginia and then the 10th LSO in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, where he held numerous assignments, including in the areas of international law and claims law. Brown ultimately attained the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve before reaching the point of mandatory retirement for a colonel with 30 years of commissioned service in July 2014.
His assignments included commander of the 153rd Legal Support Organization in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where, in addition to supporting deploying service members and their families with legal services, he mobilized eighteen soldiers to Fort Hood, Texas, in support of the III Corps' Operation New Dawn mission to Iraq. Prior to his tenure with the 153rd LSO, Brown was the staff judge advocate for the 353rd Civil Affairs Command headquartered at Fort Wadsworth, New York.
In 2004, Brown, then a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, was deployed to Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Brown served in Baghdad, Fallujah, Kirkuk, and Basra with the 353rd Civil Affairs Command as senior consultant to the Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration. Brown received the Bronze Star for his distinguished service in Iraq.
Maryland House of Delegates Brown's political career began in 1998, when he was elected to serve in the Maryland House of Delegates, representing the 25th district in Prince George's County. Brown ran on a Democratic Party ticket with Senator Ulysses Currie, Delegate Dereck Davis, and Delegate Melony Griffith. He served two terms in the Maryland House of Delegates and rose to several positions of leadership. During his first term, Brown served on the House Economic Matters Committee. He was appointed vice chair of the Judiciary Committee in 2003. In 2004, Speaker of the House Michael E. Busch appointed Brown to the position of majority whip, the fourth-ranking position in the House.
Lieutenant governor of Maryland
In 2006, Brown was elected lieutenant governor on a ticket with Martin O'Malley, the former mayor of Baltimore.Cook, Dave. "O'Malley Picks Anthony Brown as Running Mate ". Baltimore Times. December 16, 2005. from Martin O'Malley political website. Retrieved February 14, 2007. The pair were the only challenging candidates to defeat an incumbent gubernatorial ticket in the 2006 election cycle. On January 17, 2007, Brown was sworn in as Maryland's 8th lieutenant governor. Both Brown and O'Malley were reelected by a 56% to 42% margin on November 2, 2010. Brown was the first person elected lieutenant governor directly from the Maryland House of Delegates.
Governor O'Malley tasked Brown to lead the O'Malley-Brown administration's efforts on several policy fronts, including efforts to expand and improve health care, support economic development, help victims of domestic violence, increase access to higher education, and provide veterans with better services and resources.
In July 2010, Brown was elected chair of the National Lieutenant Governors Association, a position he served in for a term of one year.
Health care
As co-chair of the Maryland Health Care Reform Coordinating Council and Maryland's Health Quality and Cost Council, Lt. Governor Brown led the O'Malley-Brown administration's efforts to reduce costs, expand access, and improve the quality of care for all residents of the state. In June 2012, Brown was named "Maryland's Public Health Hero" by the Maryland Health Care for All! Coalition. He assisted in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which according to a "non-partisan" 2012 study using Obama administration numbers and various state agency projections, would save Maryland $672 million by 2020. In both 2011 and 2012, Brown led legislation through the Maryland General Assembly to create a health insurance exchange.Press Release. "O'Malley-Brown Administration's Health Care Reform Package Signed Into Law ". Office of Lt. Governor. April 12, 2011. From Lt. Governor Brown's official website. Retrieved October 16, 2011.
Brown was severely criticized for his leadership of the development of the health insurance exchange. As of April 14, 2014, it had enrolled only 66,203 individuals (including family members on shared plans). The O'Malley administration apologized for the "botched" launch of the web site and had to seek emergency funding legislation to make stopgap changes to the site. The state paid a contractor $125.5 million to develop and operate the failed site. Due to the failed rollout, the state incurred an estimated $30.5 million in unnecessary Medicaid spending. The web site failure was the subject of a federal investigation into the costs associated with developing the exchange and the site's performance failures. The state announced that it was considering scrapping its failed online health exchange altogether and hiring a new contractor to build a new online exchange using technology employed by the state of Connecticut, at an expected cost of tens of millions of dollars. The Obama administration relaxed rules for residents of states like Maryland with dysfunctional online health care exchanges, allowing consumers to bypass the exchanges altogether to buy health insurance.
Brown led efforts to address health disparities among racial and ethnic groups in Maryland. In 2012, he developed created Health Enterprise Zones, which would use incentives to increase the number of primary care providers and other essential health care services in underserved communities. The goal is to reduce preventable diseases, such as asthma and diabetes.
Economic development