Alaska: Gov’s Aide Pleads Guilty And The Finger Points… Where?

As David noted over at TPM last night, James Clark, the former chief of staff to ex-Gov. Frank Murkowski (father of current senator, Lisa Murkowski) will plead guilty today to a conspiracy charge related to the sprawling Veco investigation.

The main thrust is this: in the 2006 election, Murkowski was Veco’s man. That’s because he supported the construction of a trans-Alaska gas pipeline that would be a major boon to Veco, an oilfield contractor. Never ungrateful, Veco set up a deal with Clark to pay $68,550 for two polls and a political consultant. The arrangement was kept secret, breaking campaign finance laws and raising the question of whether the money amounted to a bribe.

One of the pollsters involved has been identified: Anchorage pollster David Dittman confirmed to The Anchorage Daily News that he’s “polling company A” in the plea documents. The others involved, a pollster and consultant who are both based outside Alaska, have not been identified yet. And it’s quite possible that this was not a one-time deal, since funding polls was something of a habit for Veco.

Clark’s plea deal makes it clear that he will be at prosecutors’ beck and call for the next several months — wherever they want him to testify, whoever they want him to testify against, he’ll be there and required to tell them everything.

But who, exactly, he might implicate is unclear. Will it be Clark’s former boss Frank Murkowski? Clark, in a statement released to the press, indicates that it will not — well, at least for the Veco-funded polls. He apologized to Murkowski for breaking the law under his nose and regretted that “some people will unfairly attribute what I have done to him.”

Clark himself was something of a force in Alaskan state politics and apparently acted with autonomy. Not for nothing was his nickname “Governor Clark” among state lawmakers.

Given that role, it’s likely that he’ll prove another asset to prosecutors as they continue their probe of state lawmakers. All told, that probe has already collected eight convictions, four of them former lawmakers. But the biggest fish remain Ben Stevens, former president of the state senate, and his father Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), both of whom are under investigation for their ties to Veco.