LA Times: Why Did the FBI Have an Informant in Joe Miller Campaign?
The Los Angeles Times reported today that, “Now that the mole who helped bring down the leadership of the Alaska Peacemaker Militia has talked publicly, the big question on some minds in Alaska is: Why was federal FBI informant William Fulton involved in political campaigns?”
The LA Times interviewed not only Fulton, but also Joe Miller and 2010 Lieutenant Governor Candidate Eddie Burke who hired Fulton as his campaign manager. Fulton’s FBI handler also commented for the article.
During Joe Miller’s interview, he was asked about the impact of the handcuffing and what he thought about an FBI informant working in Alaska politics:
The widely reported arrest of a journalist at a town hall meeting “absolutely” was detrimental to his campaign, Miller said Monday in an interview with The Times.
“I’m a strong supporter of the 1st Amendment, and I had close friends that had been supporters of my campaign question, ‘Why would Joe Miller handcuff a journalist?’ For crying out loud, I wasn’t even in the building,” Miller said. “It was utilized as a political weapon against us in the state.”
Miller said he is now troubled that Fulton, whose personal politics turn out to be not at all aligned with the far right, was injecting controversy into his campaign and was also working on the campaign of Burke, another right-wing candidate who lost — all during 2010, when he was a paid informant for the FBI.
Miller recalled the well-publicized election of 2008, when longtime U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens lost his bid for reelection after being convicted of failing to report gifts from an oil industry lobbyist at the end of a long investigation waged by the FBI in Anchorage. The charges were dismissed in 2009 on the U.S. Justice Department’s own motion when it was learned that potentially exculpatory evidence had not been turned over to the defense. But by then, Democrat Mark Begich had won Stevens’ seat.
“This is the second U.S. Senate race in Alaska that the FBI has had some involvement in,” Miller said. “I’m certainly not expressing any type of conspiracy theory about the FBI causing any kind of trouble to my campaign, but it’s conceptually troubling to me that you have a paid informant working on multiple campaigns answering to the FBI, being debriefed by the FBI, and I really think it’s incumbent on that agency to come clean about the scope of this individual’s employment and the level of involvement the FBI had in that.”
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