The Alaska Republican Party is attacking U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller in a series of hard-hitting mailers. This is the same Joe Miller who was the Republican Party’s own nominee six years ago, when he beat the incumbent Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski. Now the party is accepting money from Murkowski’s campaign and using it against Miller. Miller calls that money laundering, but the party says it’s perfectly legal.
Shannon Connelly has received three of the anti-Miller mailers so far, and she’s upset the Republican Party, her party, is sending them.
“It almost feels like there’s a war going on right now with our base,” says Connelly, a former Republican District chairman for greater Palmer.
Connelly stepped down from her party positions in September so she could openly support
Miller, a conservative running this time as a Libertarian. Connelly says he better represents Republican principles.
The first two mailers the Republican party sent re-hashed a story about how Miller had to resign from his Fairbanks North Star Borough job in 2009 after misusing his co-workers’ computers. (Miller, though a spokesman, declined to be interviewed for this story, but after it aired disputed any connection between the computer incident and his resignation some 18 months later. As Alaska Dispatch reported, a series of events preceded Miller’s departure.) The third flyer tells how he deleted thousands of borough emails, and it compares Miller to, of all people, Hillary Clinton.
“To Republican people who follow the platform, that is quite the insult,” Connelly said.
Republican State Party Chair Tuckerman Babcock acknowledges a certain dissonance, especially since he’s working to elect Murkowski and presidential nominee Donald Trump, but Murkowski has denounced Trump.
“It’s a strange place for me to be, as Tuckerman Babcock, certainly,” he said. “As far as the Republican Party, our mission is clear: We defer to the Republican Primary voters. They’re the people who tell us these are our candidates, and then we are obligated to support the election of every Republican candidate who is nominated.”
Murkowski won the Republican nomination this year, and Miller didn’t run in the Primary, so Babcock says he’s doing what’s right for the GOP.
“It’s important for the Republican Party to make a statement to anyone who is thinking about running as a third party and wants to skip the Republican Primary, that they will face a full-throated opposition from the Republican Party,” he said.
Babcock is paying for that full-throated attack primarily with money Murkowski last month transferred from her campaign to the state party coffers, more than $150,000. Miller says the transfer is legally suspect.
“Well, we don’t know for sure, but the implications, if all of this money was spent on her behalf, the implications are that essentially the Murkowski campaign is laundering money,” said Miller campaign aide Matt Johnson, at a press conference this week.
Murkowski’s campaign attorney, Tim McKeever, says the transfer of money was entirely legal.
“There’s no limit on the amount of the transfer of excess campaign funds that can be made by a candidate’s committee to their state party,” McKeever said. “Sen. Portman of Ohio just made a transfer of a million dollars to the Ohio state party.”
McKeever says federal law doesn’t limit when such transfers can take place or what the party can do with the money.
Babcock says it’s not laundering because he, as party chairman, was free to ignore any of the campaign’s recommendations and says he spent the money as he saw fit. For prove of that, he says, wait until the fourth anti-Miller flyer hits mailboxes on Monday. It’s the first in the series to promote Murkowski by name, and Babcock included something you won’t see in Murkowski’s campaign leaflets: a plug for Donald Trump.
This story was amended to include the Miller campaign’s refutation of the GOP claim that Miller was “forced to resign” due to his misuse of computers.
Liz Ruskin is the Washington, D.C., correspondent at Alaska Public Media. Reach her at lruskin@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Liz here.
