State AG gave chronic complainer an official forum to spread baseless blanket corruption claims

Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor agreed to a secret grand jury in 2022 to hear the personal complaints of David Haeg against state officials. Taylor decided that prosecutors would allow the grand jury to call the shots if that’s what they wanted.

Haeg’s group had been protesting for months outside the Kenai courthouse for a grand jury investigation and Haeg had enlisted the aid of Rep. Ben Carpenter, who helped make the case to Taylor.

“I expect that a grand jury will be convened by mid-May to consider your case,” Carpenter wrote to Haeg on April 14, 2022 after meeting with Taylor. Carpenter said he knew that Haeg had “many reasons to distrust the process and the players . . .”

Taylor’s negligence in giving Haeg most of what he wanted created a state-sanctioned forum for Haeg to promote conspiracy theories and spread baseless blanket corruption claims.

The flood of accusations has become a standard part of Haeg’s repertoire in the two decades since he was convicted of illegally shooting wolves from an airplane.

The perjury indictment from the grand jury against one of Haeg’s targets, retired District Judge Margaret Murphy, will eventually be tossed by the courts because of its flaws. I’m certain of that.

But the injustice set in motion by the attorney general’s pandering deserves a complete investigation.

The Dunleavy proposed budget asks for $500,000 a year for more “investigative grand juries.”

Grand jury proceedings are secret, but we know some of what happened with the Haeg grand jury because of information in court filings and other documents. Less reliable, but noteworthy nonetheless, are documents and claims on Haeg’s website.

The Haeg proceedings promised by Taylor began on July 8, 2022, according to the document filed by Murphy’s attorneys seeking to dismiss the perjury charge.

Chief Assistant Attorney General Jenna Gruenstein served as the first prosecutor, working under State Criminal Division Director Angie Kemp and AG Taylor.

Gruenstein told the grand jurors that Haeg claimed criminal conduct by many people, including: Marla Greenstein, executive director of the Alaska Commission on Judicial Conduct; District Judge Murphy; former Alaska State Trooper Brett Gibbens; Kenai District Attorney Scott Leaders; Deputy Attorney General John Skidmore; Assistant Attorney General Paul Miovas; as well as various other judges, attorneys and troopers.

She handed out three binders of materials from Haeg, containing “multiple levels of hearsay, mostly involving Mr. Haeg’s baseless conjecture and self-serving recitations of fact, his own unchecked, unsophisticated and unsupported legal legal conclusions, and hundreds of pages from Mr. Haeg’s previous cases and related grievances wherein he raised dozens of sweeping accusations of corruption and other malfeasance,” according to Murphy’s lawyers.

“David Haeg is the one who is filing a complaint against that list of people you gave us?”
one grand juror asked Gruenstein.

“Yes,” she said.

The prosecutor said the grand jurors should do a “deep dive of the materials” to understand Haeg’s allegations.

Murphy’s attorneys say while the attorney general’s office had concluded there were no grounds for an investigation based on Haeg’s claims, the prosecutor told the grand jury that it could do what it wanted to do. This was the hands-off approach that Taylor had promised to Carpenter.

“No longer are prosecuting attorneys to behave as gatekeepers for what grand juries may investigate,” Carpenter wrote.

The grand jury reconvened on July 21, 2022, with the prosecutor saying she would not be making a presentation on what to do about Haeg’s claims.

If the grand jury wanted “to be completely in the driver’s seat, that’s something you would all be able to do,” she said.

On August 2, 2022, the grand jury met to hear from Haeg, who went through a long list of unsupported accusations about corruption throughout state government.

He said the Alaska Court of Appeals judges are corrupt, as well as the members of the Alaska Supreme Court, and that corruption is rampant in the executive branch. In short, anyone who does not give him what he wants is corrupt.

He claimed that many attorneys in the attorney general’s office were corrupt and that “enormous pressure” would be placed on Gruenstein to mislead the grand jury.

Haeg said the grand jury did not have to listen to Gruenstein and “he instead provided his own instruction on the law to be applied in grand jury proceedings. This presentation included vast amounts of irrelevant law from other states,” Murphy’s attorneys said.

Haeg said there would be no indictments, just a report, and he quoted Carpenter as confirming that “you folks can basically do whatever you want.” Haeg also said that the grand jury could indict.

Haeg said the grand jury should get its own attorney and replace Gruenstein.

After he was finished, the grand jury asked for an “investigator outside the system,” a request that Gruenstein said she would pass along for judicial approval.

Haeg’s website claims that Gruenstein was fired by the grand jury that day and later replaced by Clinton Campion under a state contract with the AG’s office. Campion was also not acceptable to Haeg.

Why? Campion had once fielded a baseless Haeg complaint against Marla Greenstein and found in 2012 that there was nothing that warranted an investigation.

Campion continued the hands-off policy from Taylor that sent the grand jury off the rails and led to an unwarranted perjury indictment.

I’ll have more on that later.

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