The biggest threat to democracy in Alaska isn’t named Dan Sullivan

On the list of U.S. towns that are easy to get to, Petersburg, Alaska would rank really low. A fishing village of just 3,000 people midway between the capital of Juneau and the southern Alaska panhandle’s border with Canada, largely settled by Norwegian immigrants, Petersburg is only accessible by boat or a small airplane.

This made it all the more surprising when an FBI agent from Anchorage showed up in town and headed for the boat dealership run by a local man named Charles Flint. The boat dealer was away, so the agent left his card with Flint’s son and said he was there to investigate why his dad had donated $500 to Alaska Senate candidate Dan J. Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher from Petersburg running as a long shot independent.

If you’re a politics buff, you already know that the Republican incumbent U.S. senator in the race is named Dan S. Sullivan.

The senior Flint later told The Associated Press that had he been there, he would have told the FBI agent — who asked his son whether his dad was somehow “misled” into donating to the wrong Sullivan — that he had totally intended for the money to go to the independent Dan J. Sullivan.

“I don’t feel like I’ve been misled at all,” Flint told the AP, saying he’s known the not-senator Sullivan for a long time and that he respected his friend’s decision “to throw his hat into the ring.”

This FBI probe of campaign donors — unprecedented in that it’s occurring less than a week before Alaska voters go to the polls in a highly watched, ranked-choice Senate election where former Democratic House member Mary Peltola is given an excellent shot of ousting the incumbent Sullivan — isn’t confined to only Alaska.

Nearly 3,000 miles east, FBI agents were in Groton, Mass. knocking on the door of a Dan J. Sullivan donor named Pat Campbell and speaking with her husband. “They said they were from the FBI and investigating fraud in election contributions,” Campbell wrote in a text message to AP. “No, we had not been defrauded. We knew to whom we had contributed.”

What’s this all about? A push by a politically cornered Trump regime to prove the existence of two Dan Sullivans on the Alaska ballot isn’t just fishy (pun slightly intended) but somehow a crime shifted into fifth gear last week, lubricated by some over-caffeinated investigative reporting by the New York Times. Those articles established links between the Peltola campaign and the spoiler candidate who could siphon votes away from Sen. Dan Sullivan for a few confused voters.

Never mind that this type of political stunt is probably older than the Code of Hammurabi, or that in the year 2026 A.D. variations of this ploy (for example, conservatives propping up a third-party leftist candidate who’ll undermine a more centrist Democrat) are coming from both parties — including Republicans in Alaska!

And never mind the flat-out denials of fraud from Dan J. Sullivan donors such as Craig and Campbell

Nothing will deter the Trump regime from its never-seen-before goal of canceling a major U.S. election before the votes are even counted, which has already included this Stasi-like FBI inquisition of political donors, a public declaration by Alaska’s Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney of a “sprawling conspiracy” linking Peltola and the outsider Sullivan, and a stunning lawsuit filed by the Justice Department aiming to pre-block certification of the Democrat if she wins.

If Trump’s candidate wins, however, the election was perfectly fine in the eyes of the Justice Department.

This effort is, appallingly, led by the man who after Sullivan, the senator, has the most to lose in Alaska: Donald Trump. The president — who, in obliterating the modern post-Watergate norms around an independent Justice Department, has done more to tear down a wall than Ronald Reagan ever did — has even bragged that, yes, he ordered the Code Red to attack the vote in the state known as The Last Frontier.

At a preelection rally in Daytona Beach on Friday, Trump said that Peltola “should be removed from the ballot and prosecuted!” Then, the president looked over at Attorney General Todd Blanche, who in yet another gobsmacking violation of precedent and arguably the Hatch Act, had traveled with him. ”But [Blanche] is going to make his own decision. Todd, please make your own — OK, he said yes.”

Let’s do what the New York Times seems incapable of doing here, and put this in some perspective. The president of the United States is putting his vulgar short fingers on the scales of justice to nullify the will of Alaska voters, in the hope that keeping this seat in GOP hands will preserve a Senate majority that will continue to confirm extremist judges and thwart investigations into his family’s corruption.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is intervening in what it calls a “frivolous” Alaska lawsuit by the Trump regime, offered some additional context in its court filing.

ACLU lawyers wrote that “imagine if the government were right. Imagine if the federal executive could pluck a few words like ‘election integrity’ from some statutory preamble and, on that basis alone, bend the machinery of state elections to his will, preemptively blocking certification of a U.S. Senate election to protect his preferred candidate from defeat and then subjecting voters to a law-enforcement-led inquest about who they ‘really’ supported.

“Imagine that world and ask whether it is what the Framers wanted or precisely what they feared most.”

Bingo.

This is the story out of Alaska that really matters. Exactly as happened in 2016 with the matter of Hillary Clinton’s email server — which, like the case of the two Dan Sullivans in Alaska, was a story, but not worthy of Watergate-level surge journalism (the Times has so far published a dozen news articles, and counting) — the mainstream media’s “both sides” obsession has obscured the real threat here.

It’s given MAGA World the inch that it will now take a mile in its efforts to end democracy as we know it.

Because it’s based on something that’s real — if banal and almost certainly legal — the Trump-led push to nullify the Alaska election has become the leading edge of an election-interference crusade that is unlike anything that has come before it. But it is mostly built upon a bed of lies.

This includes the sweeping and wildly inaccurate claims that thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote in California and other states, as well as threatened legal action against state or county officials who don’t obey the Trump regime’s demands to scrub them. As with Peltola, we’ve also seen moves against a likely Democratic winner in a House race, as Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is also targeted in an equally ridiculous federal investigation into her decades-ago immigration here as a Somali-born refugee.

Aside from the most glaring problem — that these maneuvers go against the foundations of the democratic republic launched here in Philadelphia 250 years ago — there are two other issues with Trump’s schemes of dictatorially preventing a Democratic majority in Congress from taking office and investigating his crimes.

For starters, disqualifying Peltola is only a coup (literally!) for Trump if the Democrats win just 51 seats including Alaska. It won’t keep a GOP majority if Dems rise up to 52 or more seats, which looks increasingly likely. That’s even more true with the drive to possibly even deport Omar, since every poll and pundit suggests that Democrats will blow well past the 218 seats needed for a House majority?

Are their other dark scenarios? Sure, including one way-out-there plot to block the maybe dozen or so incoming House or Senate members with ties to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as somehow un-American — a return to full-blown McCarthyism that would almost surely be thrown out in the courts, if attempted.

» READ MORE: Are the secrets to a Trump postelection coup locked in a White House safe? | Will Bunch

Indeed, that’s the looming second problem for Trump’s dictatorial dreams — almost none of this will pass judicial muster. Already, a federal judge in California has ordered the regime to stop its intimidation efforts of local election officials, in a preview of a coming courtroom bloodbath for White House election interference.

But is that good news or bad news? It seems certain from Trump’s recent history that he cares everything about preserving his family’s wealth and staying out of prison and nothing about preserving the American Experiment in democracy. That’s a stance that leads to disobeying judges and ruling by emergency order: a coup.

The responsibility for American voters on Tuesday — if they’re not among the 52 million-plus who’ve already cast ballots — is clear. A resounding rejection of authoritarianism at the ballot box means that — short of a coup, which would also fail — Trump couldn’t flip Congress in the wildly unlikely event he actually could disqualify a senator from Alaska or deport a House member from Minnesota.

And if and when you do vote, imagine the FBI knocking on your doorbell and demanding to know why you supported a particular candidate. Ask yourself whether that’s the America you want to keep, or whether it’s time to start demanding a lot better.

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