Secret suspension of A.G. Clarkson deserves review by AK legislature

Alaskans didn’t know that Attorney General Kevin Clarkson had been suspended without pay by the Dunleavy administration, perhaps as a damage control measure, until he resigned.

The governor and his staff knew about Clarkson’s behavior toward a young woman in the spring, but only took action—punishing Clarkson with a secret one-month suspension—after it was clear that an investigation by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica would eventually become public.

Even before the June 5 letter from the news organizations seeking details from the state on the text messages, the governor and his chief of staff, Ben Stevens, must have been clued into the controversy. Clarkson, one of the most powerful officials in the state, was hitting on a low-level state employee half his age.

On Tuesday, Gov. Mike Dunleavy ducked a simple question about what he knew and when did he know it at his COVID-19 show, with his PR man lecturing reporters on how it was the wrong place and wrong time to ask that question. The state also banned Anchorage Daily News reporter Kyle Hopkins from asking a question because he refused to tell PR man Jeff Turner what he wanted to ask Dunleavy. It’s none of Turner’s business what Hopkins wanted to ask.

A reporter from KTUU asked the right question anyhow and Dunleavy mumbled how he addressed that last week and the attorney general’s office would have to tell him what he could legally say. Dunleavy is hiding behind state lawyers.

After the publication of the Daily News story revealed Clarkson’s 558 text messages to a young and low-level state employee, the governor made it sound as if he had just learned of the issue.

“This administration has and always will expect the highest level of professional conduct in the workplace,” the Dunleavy statement said.

“Kevin Clarkson has admitted to conduct in the workplace that did not live up to our high expectations, and this is deeply disappointing. This morning he took responsibility for the unintentional consequences of his actions and tendered his resignation to me,” Dunleavy said.

The timeline needs to be corrected.

The governor knew of Clarkson’s conduct early in the summer and secretly suspended the chief law enforcement official, but did not think it was necessary for Clarkson to call it quits. Public exposure of Clarkson’s actions, not “high expectations,” led to the resignation.

The behavior of the attorney general, the involvement of the Department of Law—which has had its reputation damaged—and the governor’s handling of this mess deserve a legislative review.

It appears the newspaper made a final attempt before publication to get Clarkson to talk about what he had done. When Clarkson discovered the story would come out the next day, he apparently got Suzanne Downing, Dunleavy’s minister of misinformation, to portray him as the real victim.

In his apology/not apology, Clarkson claimed to Downing that someone “broke the law” in exposing his behavior. Clarkson did not include that claim in his resignation letter to Dunleavy.

He claims that political operatives and the reporter are villains, while he has made a mistake for which he is sorry. About his August suspension, he said he was “completing a period of unpaid leave as a consequence for my error in judgment.”

It was not a single “error in judgment.” It was a pattern of harassment by one of the top officials in the Dunleavy administration.

Clarkson claimed he wanted the woman to visit him with her children, but in some of the messages published by the Daily News, he clearly did not have kids in mind: “I might need protection tonight as I sip a glass of wine haha. Come on over. I’ll sip. You stand guard at the door.”

For weeks, the Daily News reported, the Dunleavy administration had kept Clarkson’s job status a secret. The plan was for Clarkson to return to work Sept. 1, which might have happened had the Daily News and ProPublica not published the investigation.

The former general would have Alaskans believe that his real concern was not with preserving his carcass, but in protecting the identity of the young woman on the receiving end of his text messages.

That’s as hard to believe as the lame arguments he has made in losing one court case after another as attorney general.

Dermot Cole can be reached at dermotmcole@gmail.com