After coming up short in his bid for governor, Attorney General Adam Laxalt says his top priority in his remaining weeks in office is ensuring a smooth transition for his successor, Democratic state Senate Majority Leader Aaron Ford.

In a roughly 20-minute question and answer session with reporters in Laxalt’s office on Monday, the two men struck a conciliatory and friendly tone with a strong focus on continuing several of Laxalt’s initiatives and downplaying any partisan differences or approaches to the office.

The tone was a striking departure from the rhetoric of the campaign trail; Laxalt endorsed and campaigned for his former top deputy and Ford’s general election opponent, Wes Duncan, and Ford slammed the outgoing attorney general as having “become too focused on partisan politics and advancing an extreme, ideologically driven agenda that is far outside the mainstream.”

Ford called Laxalt his friend and thanked him for helping make the transition as smooth as possible, pledging to continue several of Laxalt’s initiatives in the office including a 10-person elder fraud unit and the Office of Military and Legal Assistance, which offers free legal advice to veterans and active duty military.

Laxalt said that his predecessor, former Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, had worked closely with him after the 2014 election, and he wanted to pay the favor forward for Ford.

“We do so many different things for the state, and so I wanted to make sure Senator Ford has a real running start,” he said. “We’ve been doing some walk-throughs of the office, as well as meeting with senior leadership so he’s got as quick as feel as possible over the office he’s inheriting.”

Here’s what the two said about the transition period, a stalled gun background check ballot question and Laxalt’s political future.

Role of office

Although Laxalt faced criticism from Democrats for what they called his partisan approach to the office — including signing the state onto lawsuits challenging immigration executive orders and multiple legal challenges to abortion access in other states — the Republican attorney general said that the vast majority of the office’s work was non-political.

“With 400 employees, and all the divisions we have, everything we do, we’re doing 500 things a week,” Laxalt said. “Over four years, and you can do the math, 99 percent of what we do is nonpartisan, and it’s upholding rule of law, in many cases it’s defending your state agencies.”

Ford acknowledged that there would be a “shift in focus” once he takes office in January. Already, he and Sisolak have pledged to involve the state in a coalition of Democratic states defending a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act. But he said outside of leadership changes, the vast majority of the office was apolitical and would likely stay in place in his administration.

“You have a lot of career people who are here already who are doing the job of representing Nevadans,” Ford said. “They’re less concerned about party politics is the impression I’ve received over the course of time that I’ve interacted with them, even before my run for attorney general.”

Gun Background checks

Laxalt’s role in the stalled implementation of the 2016 ballot question prohibiting most private-party gun sales or transfers without a background check provided plenty of fodder for Democrats on the 2018 ticket, including Ford, who blamed Laxalt in at least one campaign email for “rolling out excuse after excuse to delay closing the background check loophole.”

The measure, Question 1, has been stuck in limbo after Laxalt’s office issued an opinion in December 2016 ruling the measure efficelty unenforceable, given the FBI’s refusal to conduct the background checks on behalf of the state. Laxalt campaigned against the ballot question in 2016 and more recently lauded a Clark County District Court judge’s denial of a lawsuit that sought to force the state to implement the measure.

On Monday, Ford said he wanted to ensure that he, legislative leaders and Gov.-elect Steve Sisolak were on the same page and that he expected incoming Senate Majority Leader Kelvin Atkinson to do the “yeoman’s work” of introducing and pushing for legislation addressing the issue.

He also declined to say whether he would take any steps to reverse or deal with the earlier opinion from the attorney general’s office declaring the ballot question unenforceable.

“As with everything, we’re going to be looking at things from an analytical perspective,” he said. “And until I am attorney general, I’m not privy to legal analysis that went into particular opinions, for example. Once I’m sworn in on Jan. 7, we’re going to begin the arduous and diligent tasks of reviewing those particular issues and items and ascertain how we want to proceed on a going forward basis.”

Rape test kits

Laxalt also echoed his announcement from last month that nearly 100 percent of backlogged sexual assault testing kits had been sent for testing — nearly 8,000 kits that had not been tested when he took office in 2015. His office announced that 7,384 of the 7,645 kits had been sent for testing, with nearly 6,000 completed, 636 DNA matches made and 17 arrests statewide.

He credited Ford and legislative leaders for approving a bill in 2017 that allocated more funding to testing and processing the kits, but said the next challenge would be in finding permanent funding from local governments beyond settlement funds and Department of Justice grants.

“We are funding that and we will continue funding that through this next year, so it gives some good cushion for the whole ecosystem to figure out who’s going to provide the additional resources to go after these cases,” he said. “It’s why we did it, because when other states did this they knew there’s some really bad people floating around out there. The bad news is that we’re going to need more resources to go after all these.”

Ford, who noted that he served on an interim committee overseeing the sexual assault test kit backlog process, said he knew the Legislature was committed to securing any funding needed to get the kits checked and investigated.

Laxalt’s future

Although his name has been linked to various openings in the Trump administration, including the soon-to-be open spot atop the Interior Department after Ryan Zinke's resignation last week, Laxalt was mum about his political future and declined to get into any specifics.

“We’re obviously focusing on the transition and making sure we’ve got everything wrapped up in a tight bow that we’re handing over,” he said. “That’s my priority and I’m looking forward to having Christmas and New Year’s a little slower hopefully.”

Asked to reflect on his time in office, Laxalt said he hoped his four years as attorney general helped show that future office-holders could tackle bigger issues and use the “bully pulpit” of the office, as opposed to merely following the duties laid out in state law or the constitution.

“I hope that is one of our legacies, is just finding a way to do more than just the bread and butter of representing government agencies to take on the big issues when it comes to your constituents,” he said.