Dunleavy's secret suspension of Clarkson deserves legislative review

It wasn’t until this week that we knew that Attorney General Kevin Clarkson had been suspended without pay by the Dunleavy administration, perhaps as a damage control measure.

The governor and his staff knew about Clarkson’s behavior toward a young woman in the spring, but only took action—punishing Clarkson with a secret one-month suspension—after it was clear that an investigation by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica would eventually become public.

Even before the June 5 letter requesting text message details from the state, the governor and his chief of staff, Ben Stevens, must have been clued into the controversy. Clarkson, one of the most powerful officials in the state, was hitting on a low-level state employee half his age.

On Tuesday, after the publication of the Daily News story regarding Clarkson’s 558 text messages to a young and low-level state employee, the governor made it sound as if he had just learned of the issue.

“This administration has and always will expect the highest level of professional conduct in the workplace,” the Dunleavy statement said.

“Kevin Clarkson has admitted to conduct in the workplace that did not live up to our high expectations, and this is deeply disappointing. This morning he took responsibility for the unintentional consequences of his actions and tendered his resignation to me,” Dunleavy said.

The timeline needs to be corrected.

The governor knew of Clarkson’s conduct early in the summer and secretly suspended the chief law enforcement official, but did not think it was necessary for Clarkson to call it quits. Public exposure of Clarkson’s actions, not “high expectations,” led to the resignation.

The behavior of the attorney general, the involvement of the Department of Law—which has had its reputation damaged—and the governor’s handling of this mess deserve a legislative review.

It appears the newspaper made a final attempt Monday to get Clarkson to talk about what he had done and when he discovered the story would come out Tuesday, he got Suzanne Downing, Dunleavy’s minister of misinformation, to portray him as the real victim.

In his apology/not apology, Clarkson claimed to Downing that someone “broke the law” in exposing his behavior. Clarkson did not include that claim in his resignation letter to Dunleavy.

He claims that political operatives and the reporter are villains, while he has made a mistake for which he is sorry. About his August suspension, he said he was “completing a period of unpaid leave as a consequence for my error in judgment.”

It was not a single “error in judgment.” It was a pattern of harassment by one of the top officials in the Dunleavy administration.

Clarkson claimed he wanted the woman to visit him with her children, but in some of the messages published by the Daily News, he clearly did not have kids in mind: “I might need protection tonight as I sip a glass of wine haha. Come on over. I’ll sip. You stand guard at the door.”

For weeks, the Daily News reported, the Dunleavy administration had kept Clarkson’s job status a secret. The plan was for Clarkson to return to work Sept. 1, which might have happened had the Daily News and ProPublica not published the investigation.

The former general would have Alaskans believe that his real concern was not with preserving his carcass, but in protecting the identity of the young woman on the receiving end of his text messages.

That’s as hard to believe as the lame arguments he has made in losing one court case after another as attorney general.

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