McConnell-linked super PAC takes aim at Trump-backed Republican trying to oust Murkowski | #alaska | #politics


A super PAC tied to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is alleging in a 30-second television ad that a Trump-backed Alaska Republican running for a Senate seat may have committed fraud while working for the federal government.

The ad, which is now blanketing the airwaves in Alaska, starts off by asking how much Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka has cost the state’s taxpayers.

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“She charged taxpayers $81,000 to move her family from D.C. to Anchorage, then quit without repaying a dime, yet Tshibaka got paid $190,000, over $36,000 more than her predecessors,” the ad, paid for by the Senate Leadership Fund, states. “And according to a government inspector general, Tshibaka likely committed fraud while working in Washington, charging taxpayers over $35,000 for work she didn’t do. Kelly Tshibaka makes government service pay for herself.”

Tshibaka had multiple jobs with the federal government, one of which involved being the chief data officer for the inspector general of the Postal Service under former Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama. She also had stints with the inspectors general of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Justice Department.

She is locked in a tight race against Republican incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski with about a month to go before the midterm elections. The race has turned into a proxy war between the Senate minority leader and Trump, whose acrimonious relationship has been aired out in public, most recently when Trump went after McConnell’s wife.

The Senate Leadership Fund has lined up behind Murkowski, a centrist Republican, while Trump supports Tshibaka.

When touting her record, Tshibaka has claimed she is not “one of those powerful political insiders.”

“Quite the opposite,” she said in a campaign video. “For years, I sought to expose waste and fraud in government. Those insiders didn’t like that very much.”

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Portraying herself as an outsider who saves taxpayers money is one of Tshibaka’s talking points, but in 2011, she was investigated over claims she submitted “false time and attendance records.” The claims stem from nearly 600 questionable hours recorded from March 2008 to February 2011. The hours in question included unexplained absences and shortages on days she claimed to have worked comp time.

Mary Ann Pruitt, a consultant to Tshibaka’s campaign, called the TV spot “a dark money ad full of lies.”

“Mitch McConnell has obviously decided he prefers a senator who is a more dependable vote for Joe Biden than anything else,” Pruitt told MustReadAlaska.com. “In doing that, he’s ignoring the official position of the Alaska Republican Party, which is that Lisa Murkowski has to go. These ads attacking Kelly Tshibaka are an attempt to override the views of tens of thousands of Alaska Republicans.”

Pruitt told the site that Tshibaka’s job was to “keep federal employees honest, and some of them filed complaints against her in retaliation. Following a full investigation, she was exonerated and was, in fact, subsequently promoted, proving how ridiculous this ad is.”

Murkowski’s camp has a different take.

“Independent expenditures are required to prove their allegations, or the ads don’t run,” Murkowski campaign manager Nate Adams told the Washington Examiner. “The fact that Kelly Tshibaka has not addressed the scandals outlined in the ads and that they are still on the air should tell Alaskans everything they need to know.”

Tshibaka was criticized earlier this week for skipping Monday night’s Kodiak fisheries debate, a staple of Alaska politics for three decades, to attend a fundraiser in Texas with Arizona Senate hopeful Blake Masters.

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November’s general election will determine which party controls Congress for the second half of Biden’s term. At the moment, the Democrats have the edge in the House and th Senate. Their odds of keeping control of both chambers seemed slim a few months ago, but in recent weeks, shifts in key swing states such as Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania have opened the door for Democrats to keep one, or in some extremely optimistic scenarios, both.

Emails to Tshibaka’s campaign seeking comment from the Washington Examiner were not returned.




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