INDIANAPOLIS (NETWORK INDIANA) — The two candidates running for Indiana Attorney General debated for the first time on Fox 59 on Sunday. The half-hour-long debate was short of time to merit any deep discussion of some of the issues but shed some light on where the two candidates stand on some of the key aspects pertaining to the office of Attorney General in Indiana. Incumbent Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) kicked off the debate by saying the role of his office is the “role of protector.” His challenger, Destiny Wells (D), said that “better leadership and integrity need to be brought back to the office.” Wells used that platform to jab Rokita about his ethics complaints, of which he has faced (or faces) three, with a fourth having been filed recently. “Our current attorney general, he’s so aggressive, that he can’t keep himself within the rules or our professional conduct,” Wells said. One of these complaints has to do with Rokita’s handling of a case in which a doctor in Indiana performed an abortion on a ten-year-old girl in Ohio who was raped and became pregnant. Rokita pursued legal action against the doctor for her outing the victim to the press. The Indiana Supreme Court ruled that Rokita was out of line in going on Fox News lambasting the doctor as an “abortion activist” while the case was being litigated. Rokita stood by what he said while admitting the timing of his comments was wrong. “It was ill-timed. I agree with the Supreme Court, but nothing I said was untrue,” he said. “That’s the reputation I have with the people of Indiana. I’m always direct. I always tell them the truth.” Rokita then went on to accuse Wells, a current lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, of being “an officer of the Democratic Party.” The subject of information transparency brought on a lot of direct banter between Rokita and Wells. Rokita spoke over Wells many times while Wells attempted to deliver her answers to questions. “We did a 34-page report on the misrepresentation of COVID data from the Holocomb Administration,” Rokita said of his record with transparency. “145,000 or so death records we looked at and we found misrepresented causes of death in many of them. It’s important to have an independent attorney general.” Wells said Rokita has been anything but transparent. “Just this past week Mr Rokita, he repeated misinformation about FEMA and he did so in a public way. He’s part of the problem,” Wells said. The misinformation Rokita shared was a false claim made on X that FEMA does not have enough funding to help Americans through the rest of the 2024 hurricane season after the agency allocated funding to immigration. It was a notion pushed by former President Trump’s campaign. “It’s called free speech, especially when it’s accurate and it needs to be protected,” Rokita responded. “The fella who runs FEMA said it himself. I said it’s a misapplication of priority.” Rokita stood by his claim saying that FEMA is “putting illegal aliens in hotels, giving them cell phones, and giving them meals.” He again called Wells a “foot soldier in the Kamala Harris left-wing army.” On the subject of immigration, Wells criticized Rokita for going to the southern border while using Indiana taxpayer dollars to do so. She also bashed him for stopping at a political rally on the way back to the state. Rokita responded that his trip to the border was a fact-finding trip for litigation Indiana was joining against the Biden Administration over enforcement of immigration laws at the southern border. Finally, Rokita’s lawsuit against TikTiok came up. Rokita said his lawsuit against TikTok is just. “Get rid of TikTok,” Rokita said. “They are data mining you and they are corrupting your kids. Within 30-seconds of a child signing up for TikTok, they will learn how to pole dance, they’ll be subjected to ads for alcohol and drugs. In China, TikTok is illegal for kids.” Wells said she would “re-evaluate” Rokita’s lawsuit against TikTok. “I would say it drains our resources,” she said. “It doesn’t drain his resources, because when we look at this litigation, we see that out-of-state plaintiffs’ attorneys are representing the state of Indiana, not Hoosier attorneys. In fact, they’ve paid over $100,000 to the campaign fund of Todd Rokita.” Rokita responded by saying that sometimes “Indiana attorneys have conflicts” and that there are attorneys across the nation who specialize in this subject matter. Wells took that as Rokita saying that Indiana attorneys are “not good enough.” In the end, both candidates were asked to say something nice about the other. Rokita called Wells “a fighter”, while Wells said that Rokita “stays in it for the long haul.”