Democrats keep insisting their decoy candidate stunt was dirty politics at worst, never a crime.
Their friends in the press keep shrugging off the whole uproar as a Republican tantrum.
And Jonathan Turley just warned the people who should be most nervous, and it isn’t who anyone expected.
Jonathan Turley Says the Lawyers Need Lawyers Now
Jonathan Turley doesn’t usually reach for the panic button on live television.
So it landed hard when the George Washington University law professor went on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom and predicted that the Democrat scheme to plant a second Dan Sullivan on Alaska’s Senate ballot will produce “quite significant criminal and civil liability issues for a remarkably large number of people.”
The mess traces back to a New York Times investigation by reporter Kellen Browning. According to the Times, aides to Democrat Senate nominee Mary Peltola spent months working with the campaign’s own lawyers and senior staffers at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to recruit candidates who shared a name with US Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK). The paper says it drew on a dozen sources, along with text messages and internal documents.
Browning later told CNN that Peltola “was aware of this effort,” though he said she wasn’t directly involved and top aides kept her posted.
One of the men who made it onto the ballot is Daniel J Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher from Petersburg. Peltola’s camp has denied any connection from the start. Back in June, campaign spokesman Harry Child said the campaign “has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and the DSCC have also denied any involvement.
Turley didn’t pretend the decoy itself automatically breaks the law. “It is not unlawful to assist the placement of a decoy candidate on a ballot per se, but this is quickly becoming a serious scandal for Peltola and her campaign, her lawyers, and others,” he said.
But he pointed straight at the paperwork. Campaigns file documents with state and federal authorities, and Turley noted those filings “have to be true and correct.” If somebody swore to one thing on an official form while doing something else behind closed doors, that’s where the trouble lives.
“And all of those people are going to have to lawyer up, including the lawyers,” Turley said.
The Lawyers Named in the Plot Have a Courtroom Problem
Here’s the part most coverage skated right past.
Turley said Peltola’s campaign lawyers, the ones who “allegedly played a role in this,” have to step aside. “They are now potential targets or witnesses,” he said.
And that matters right now, not after the election. Donald Trump sued to keep Alaska from certifying the race if Senator Sullivan loses by fewer votes than the other Dan Sullivan collects. Lawyers for Peltola’s campaign have asked the federal judge to throw that case out.
Now Trump wants Peltola pulled into the lawsuit so the government can fast-track discovery into the alleged plot before Judge Sharon Gleason.
Nobody has said publicly whether the attorneys handling that case are the same ones described in the Times report. But think about what discovery means. Texts. Emails. Planning documents. If a campaign lawyer sat in on the conversations a judge wants to see, that lawyer can’t very well argue the case and testify about it at the same time.
Some folks will say attorney-client privilege covers all of it. Not quite. Privilege isn’t a magic cloak. Courts recognize a crime-fraud exception, which strips protection from communications made to further a crime or fraud. Whether anything here ever clears that bar is a question for a judge, and nobody has been charged with anything. But every lawyer in Anchorage knows the exception exists, and so does every lawyer at the DSCC.
Even Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who has never been mistaken for a Trump cheerleader, wanted answers. “Alaskans deserve the honest truth from Mary and her campaign,” Murkowski said.
Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy has also ordered a state investigation into the campaign.
Musical Chairs With a Law License
Turley painted a picture anybody who’s ever been to a church picnic can understand.
“When you come into this as a lawyer, you don’t want your client to be the last one without a chair when the music stops,” he said. “There will be a lot of cooperation here and that’s going to worry a lot of attorneys that are advising these clients.”
That’s how these things tend to unravel. The first person to talk usually gets the softest landing.
And the music may have already started. Elisa Rios, Peltola’s former campaign manager, went on the record with the Times. She later tried to take it all back as the story neared publication. The paper ran it anyway.
But a fair-minded reader should pump the brakes a little. Cable legal analysts have predicted plenty of indictments that never showed up. Turley might be early here, or wrong. A grudge from a fired staffer doesn’t prove a conspiracy, either.
Still, Turley wasn’t guessing about whether the story will grow. He said it will “get very serious very fast.”
The Democrat fallback line has already formed. Even the Times noted that ballot-stacking is common and generally considered legal. Turley himself called it “the lowest form of dirty politics” on his blog while agreeing it isn’t a crime on its own.
But that defense dodges the real question. Nobody needs a law degree to see the problem with denying something for months if the denials weren’t true. Lying to voters is ugly. Lying on an official filing or in a courtroom is something else entirely.
And there’s a certain irony in the “everybody does it” shrug. Democrats spent years telling Americans that anyone who raised a question about how elections are run was a threat to democracy itself. Now a scheme built to fool voters at the ballot box gets waved off as hardball.
Democrats Have Let Their Lawyers Launder a Dirty Trick Before
This isn’t the first time a Democrat operation tried to bury political dirty work under a legal heading.
In March 2022, the Federal Election Commission fined the Democratic National Committee $105,000 and Hillary for America $8,000. The FEC found probable cause that they misreported payments to the law firm Perkins Coie as legal services, when the money actually funded Fusion GPS opposition research on Donald Trump. That research produced the infamous Steele dossier.
The Democrats didn’t admit wrongdoing. They just stopped fighting. A DNC spokesperson brushed the whole thing off as “aging and silly complaints.”
But the detail that should make Peltola’s lawyers sweat is buried in the paperwork.
The two agreements that closed the case were signed on the Democrats’ behalf by Graham Wilson, a partner at Perkins Coie. His firm was the one the money had passed through.
Sources: Mediaite, “Jonathan Turley Predicts ‘Quite Significant’ Criminal Liability for ‘Remarkably Large Number of People’ in Alaska Ruse”; Jonathan Turley, “‘Alaskan Voters Need to Know’: Times Alleges Peltola Campaign Conspired to Confuse Alaskan Voters With Decoy ‘Dan Sullivans’”; Poynter, “There are two Dan Sullivans running for Senate in Alaska. The New York Times found out why”; NewsNation, “Peltola denies report her campaign worked to recruit another ‘Dan Sullivan’”; Alaska Beacon, “Trump calls for Peltola to be criminally charged, removed from Alaska’s U.S. Senate race”; Anchorage Daily News, “US Senate and House races set with over 30 candidates and battle of the Dan Sullivans”; Alaska’s News Source, “NYT report: Peltola team accused of searching for Dan Sullivans to be on Senate ballot”; UPI and NBC News, coverage of the March 2022 FEC fines against the DNC and Hillary for America; Quorum Report/Politico, “Federal campaign watchdog fines DNC, Clinton campaign over dossier spending disclosure”