Dunleavy removes Brett Huber as deputy campaign treasurer after learning on Twitter it was illegal

Last July, Gov. Mike Dunleavy hired back his 2018 campaign manager, Brett Huber, and created a brand-new $140,000-a-year job titled “Governor’s Senior Policy Advisor for Statehood Defense.”

Huber had no job duties other than to direct the chorus of complaints about federal overreach and promote Dunleavy.

It was a campaign job, paid for with public funds.

Huber first came to state government from the realm of Dunleavy financier Bob Penney, having run the Kenai River Sport Fishing Association for Penney.

In 2014, Huber worked for Dunleavy in the Legislature and became Dunleavy’s 2018 campaign manager before Dunleavy hired him for a state job in the governor’s office.

By 2019, he displayed such a mastery of the talking points for the Pebble Mine that the project chief of staff called him a “rock star.”

He left his job in the governor’s office in the summer of 2020 to run the campaign against the ranked choice voting measure. He testified under oath in 2020 that he was a volunteer for that campaign.

The following month, however, the campaign paid his company $45,000 for “campaign management.” That disclosure did not become public until Feb. 15, 2021.

Dunleavy put Huber back on the state payroll on July 6, 2021 for the Statehood Defense make-work job.

This spring Huber disappeared from the state payroll with no public announcement by the Dunleavy administration.

On April 3, the Alaska Landmine quoted unnamed sources as saying that Huber would run the Dunleavy “independent expenditure” group bankrolled with $3 million from the Republican Governors’ Association.

That money had been quietly deposited into an account on Feb. 25, 2021.

The timing was no accident. Had the Republican group waited three more days, the election reform measure approved by Alaska voters would have kicked in. And that measure would have required identification of the real donors of the money—those who laundered it through the RGA.

There is a chance that some of that $3 million is from Dunleavy’s brother Francis and from Penney, who spent hundreds of thousands to elect Dunleavy in 2018.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that after Huber left his state job on April 2 of this year, the governor’s office gave him a no-bid $50,000 contract to perform the same work he had been doing as a state employee.

This is political favoritism at work.

Meanwhile, Huber also went on the payroll of the independent Dunleavy campaign group backed by the $3 million from the GOP governors. He got an $80,500 consulting contract on April 29 from the “independent” group, which is supposed to have no connections to the official Dunleavy campaign.

As a state employee, he was in no position to run this campaign group to promote Dunleavy, so Dunleavy gave him a state contract, which went into effect April 25, the AP said.

The contract should never have been signed. It should be canceled immediately.

Huber told the AP it “made more sense for me personally and for the state” for him to become a state contractor.

Sure. It made a lot of sense for him. He gets $50,000 for doing nothing.

The claim by the state that no one on the state payroll has the skills to do whatever it was that Huber was doing is laughable. It’s an insult to every state employee with a real job.

One more point in this mess concerns the improper role of Huber in the Dunleavy reelection campaign.

Huber has been a deputy treasurer of the Dunleavy campaign since last fall.

He remained a deputy treasurer of the Dunleavy campaign even after he quit his state job and signed a contract with the allegedly “independent” group bankrolled with the $3 million.

The presence of Huber on the “independent” group and his role inside the Dunleavy campaign shows that the two are not separate, but joined at the hip. Huber was and is the top political aide to Dunleavy. Under state rules, the two entities are supposed to have no connection.

No one in the Dunleavy campaign seemed to be aware of the legal problem they have created for themselves.

That is, until Tuesday at 12:28 p.m. when Scott Kendall, the former chief of staff for Bill Walker, tweeted about it.

It appears someone on Dunleavy’s campaign saw the tweet and filed a new document with the APOC before 2 p.m., removing Huber from the list of Dunleavy campaign deputy treasurers.

But the damage has been done.

This deserves a state ethics complaint about the absurd no-bid $50,000 contract and an APOC complaint about the independent group that isn’t at all independent.

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