Ruedrich says complaints are easily explained

ANCHORAGE -- Much ado about nothing is what Republican Party Chairman and former Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commissioner Randy Ruedrich is calling the state's ethics complaint, investigation and the resulting media furor.

"The overwhelming majority of material is absolutely not even partisan," Ruedrich said during a brief cell-phone call Friday.

Ruedrich said some of the documents that were part of the complaint were items he had either printed out at his home computer and brought to the office to recycle through his office printer or vice versa. Both in his written response to the state's ethics complaints and on the phone Friday, Ruedrich said many of the remaining examples in the complaint are as easily explained -- typing in the wrong e-mail address or saving to his AOGCC computer hard drive political surveys that included questions about coal-bed methane drilling, for example.

"The remainder of the discussed items, I think, are very, very simplistic," Ruedrich said.