Pebble campaign against incumbent GOP lawmakers requires investigation

The former CEO of the Pebble Mine bragged about leading a group that helped defeat nine Republican incumbent legislators in the primary election.

“I’ve been a proponent in Alaska for getting the Republican party to be more focused and more disciplined on these elections,” Collier said.

“Disciplined” means doing the bidding of Gov. Mike Dunleavy. It also means being an all-out backer of the Pebble project.

Replacing the nine conservative legislators with Republicans from the anti-math movement helps Dunleavy. Whatever helps Dunleavy helps Pebble. That was the situation when Collier was secretly recorded after the primary,

“So I organized, I was one of a number of organizers of a business group, we got together, raised money, we put together a campaign and we defeated them all! We changed nine out of, there are let’s see 40 uh, 50 seats that were up for election and out of that 50 we threw out nine people that had not been supporting the governor and that had not been supporting Pebble,” Collier boasted.

“It’s gonna make for dramatic change in the Legislature here in Alaska and I was a leader in that effort for the Republican party so my Democratic politics is really not a problem,” Collier said on the secret tapes that led to his resignation last week.

What is really a problem is that because of the way that people in politics can hide money, we don’t know yet exactly who worked with Collier to raise money to oppose Republicans and who put together the campaign.

Alaska news organizations haven’t been aggressive in trying to put the pieces together.

My guess is that rich friends of the governor, led by Bob Penney, who has invested hundreds of thousands in Dunleavy, made sizable contributions to the Republican State Leadership Committee, which returned the money to Alaska with no names attached.

The money ended up with the Alaska Council on Good Government, which has a Facebook page and a logo.

This is best described as legal money laundering.

I can see why this option would be attractive. Penney’s investment in Dunleavy in 2018 became a campaign issue because his name was on all of the reports filed with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, as required by law. One way to keep his name out of the news and to help Dunleavy in 2020 is to use an indirect method with a separate group.

What we know is that for some reason the Republican State Leadership Committee at 1201 F St. NW, Washington, D.C. recently came up with nearly $200,000 to spend on Alaska legislative elections.

It gave most of that to something called the Alaska Council on Good Government, which had collected $209, 250, as of Sept. 14.

The biggest chunk of the so-called good government money went to PS Strategies, the company owned by Mary Ann Pruitt, former Dunleavy communications expert, and wife of Anchorage Rep. Lance Pruitt, a Dunleavy loyalist.

It’s a good bet that the good government money originated in Alaska and that this effort is what Collier mentioned to the pretend investors in Pebble.

Who else in Alaska was with Collier on the “business group” raising money to take out incumbents who objected to the fiscal fantasy promoted by Dunleavy?

Brett Huber, the Dunleavy point man on pushing Pebble, is a likely connection.

Huber, a former employee of Penney’s Kenai sport fishing lobbying group, has long-standing ties to Dunleavy, Penney and Collier. He’s now leading the effort to oppose Initiative No. 2, which would revise election laws in ways that entrenched political operatives oppose.

Huber’s group is renting space from Bob Penney’s son in Anchorage, 5 Cents LLC. Henry Penney has reported a contribution of $2,000.

The group spent $17,000 on polling from Dittman, now owned by Matt Larkin, who is Dunleavy’s preferred pollster and who coordinated the Dunleavy shadow campaign in 2018 mainly financed by Dunleavy’s brother Francis and Bob Penney.

The Republican State Leadership Committee has just put $50,000 into Huber’s group to fight the election initiative.

The best part of the initiative Huber’s group wants to kill is the section that takes aim at the legal laundering of money that we are seeing with the Republican State Leadership Committee.

While political groups would never stop trying to create workarounds, the initiative would require that groups like the so-called Alaska Council on Good Government disclose who actually provided the cash.

For that reason alone, the initiative is a good step.

One of the reasons I wrote this today is that Huber’s anti-initiative group made a big show Sunday of returning a campaign contribution made by Collier, claiming “we won’t tolerate unethical behavior from our donors.” Collier gave Huber’s group $2,500 Sept. 15.

That was the same day that John Shively, now interim Pebble CEO, gave $300. Last week, Abe Williams, a Pebble employee appointed by Dunleavy to the Board of Fish, gave $500.

Huber’s group didn’t mention anything about returning those donations or how Huber had worked so closely with Collier in the governor’s office that the Pebble Chief of Staff, Shalon Harrington, said he was a “rockstar” because he had mastered the company’s talking points.

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