The last person in the world who should have had anything to do with deciding whether Attorney General Kevin Clarkson did something wrong in his pursuit of a young state employee was Kevin Clarkson.

But Gov. Mike Dunleavy allowed that to happen.

Dunleavy should have appointed an independent counsel to look into the allegations regarding the 61-year-old Clarkson. But Dunleavy failed to take that step, allowing Clarkson himself to control the process as news organizations asked for state records about his behavior.

When the Anchorage Daily News filed a public records request June 5 seeking communications between Clarkson and a state employee half his age, it was Clarkson who told others in the Department of Law that he did not have them.

This week Dunleavy did not hold his regular COVID-19 show, opting instead for a Facebook Live event at which there was no chance for any reporter to ask him about Clarkson.

Dunleavy does not want to talk about Clarkson, claiming the law is on his side, but the attorney general is exempt from the privacy provisions of the state personnel act.

At some point during the summer, the governor became directly involved and Clarkson was secretly suspended without pay during August. He was to return to work Sept. 1, but as soon as the public learned of his 558 text messages, Clarkson was gone.

In the text messages, only a small number of which the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica published, Clarkson asked the young woman to come to his residence at least 18 times and flirted with her. The report led to Clarkson’s immediate resignation Aug. 25.

In a story Thursday, Alaska Public Media reported that the request by the news organizations for the text messages and other communications went directly to Clarkson.

“The public information request was passed directly to Clarkson, who was asked whether he had any relevant public records on his personal or state-issued phones. He said he did not, and the request was closed two weeks later with a terse response to the newspaper: ‘The Department has no records,’” Alaska Public Media reported.

The Daily News had obtained the text messages from another source, but sought confirmation by trying to get them released by the state. It is debatable about whether the messages are "public records” under the law.

What is not debatable is that Clarkson should have recused himself and Dunleavy should have conducted an investigation.

The state attorney general’s office told reporter Kyle Hopkins that he would have to “provide screenshots of specific examples—not hypotheticals—of public records that Attorney General Clarkson may have inadvertently missed in responding to your public records request. . .”

“We will ask him to review his text messages again for responsive public records,” the department said.

Clarkson “inadvertently missed” all 558 text messages. He would claim, no doubt, that he didn’t miss them at all and they were not public documents subject to release to the public.

The Dunleavy administration doesn’t want to deal with the larger questions of Clarkson’s misbehavior. The governor is stalling, hoping it will all go away. The governor wanted all of this to be kept secret and he wanted Clarkson to remain as attorney general.

On Aug. 26, Dunleavy publicity man Dave Stieren appeared on KINY in Juneau and said the information about Clarkson should have never become public—meaning that Clarkson would have remained on the job.

“There are statutes that this information being public is in violation of,” Stierien claimed.

“The investigation is confidential. The texts are confidential. How were they made public?” said Stierien.

Those claims are a distraction from the Clarkson coverup.

Here are the four most important questions: Why did the governor allow Clarkson to decide that his text messages were private? What did the governor know and when? Why did Dunleavy decide that a secret suspension was enough?

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