INCREDIBLE: AK Gov. Walker Runs for Cover, Denies Broken Promises on PFD; UFL President Responds

On September 2, 2014 United For Liberty (“UFL”) was honored to have candidate Bill Walker address a group of United For Liberty members. He met with approximately 50 members from different political parties and associations affiliated with UFL.

In his presentation, candidate Walker made specific statements that he was not a career politician and that if he were elected he would have to go to Juneau and make hard decisions to cut the size and scope of government and this would not be popular. He said this was his first priority. He used the 16% reduction figure often as a benchmark. Additionally, he insisted that he would not raid the PFD or incorporate any sales taxes or income taxes. It is important to note that oil prices were already falling and in October of 2014, prior to the election, prices had dipped below $80.00 bbl. Certainly nobody could predict where oil would bottom out , but it was clear that the price of oil was on a serious downward trajectory at the time Bill Walker made these statements.

The first week of September 2014, candidate Walker was solicited by United For Liberty to submit an article for our October 2014 newsletter. The deadline was September 22 for final submission. A member of UFL accepted the editor’s task to put together the final product. This same member was also working with the Walker team to assist in assembling a narrative to be put in the newsletter. He worked diligently and put the entire newsletter together and submitted to me the entire PFD file to publish on United For Liberty’s website. Following is a letter I sent candidate Walker on October 9th thanking him for the submitted article and asking him to consider submitting one more for a possible additional newsletter before the election (he submitted an additional article on October 15, 2014, but I did not publish it as I did not have one from incumbent Governor Parnell and I wanted to give each candidate fair coverage):

HEADER——> UFL NEWSLETTER SUBMISSION

Dear Bill,

Thank you for submitting an article for our newsletter. I am writing you to solicit one more before the election is upon us. Please consider submitting another article by Friday, October 17th. I do believe it is in your campaign’s better interest to submit as we have a large circulation through our member groups. Governor Parnell has received a request as well.

my regards,
Michael

ps.
Thank you for meeting with us recently. I appreciate your participation and
wish you well.

Candidate Walker also met with a group comprised of the Conservatives Patriot Group (CPG) and the Alaska Republican Assembly, a meeting which he requested and I assembled for his benefit. This private meeting took place on October 5, 2014, and again candidate Walker spoke specifically to protecting the PFD and not incorporating income or sales taxes.

Over the past week, the governor’s wife has sent me a series of emails claiming that the article submitted to UFL in the October newsletter was not authorized by the candidate. These communications were apparently prompted because recent excerpts of Bill Walker’s quotes from this article in our newsletter have appeared in various publications online, including Joe Miller’s Restoring Liberty article: Governor Walker Steals $666 Million From Alaska’s Families, Time to Recall the Liar. She calls the article “bogus,” specifically complaining about the “mass distribution of the bogus article that has wrongly been attributed to Bill.”

It is clear in my letter to candidate Walker that I am thanking him for receipt of his article for the newsletter and asking him to submit a second article (which his team did). Not once did he or anyone on his team indicate to me or anyone at UFL that they did not authorize the article that UFL published to hundreds of Alaskans in 2014. While I respect that the governor has had to make difficult decisions since the price of oil dropped dramatically, the email record definitively shows that the Walker team was aware that his first article was submitted for publication.

Throughout candidate Walker’s campaign, he repeated the same narrative, echoing UFL’s October 2014 newsletter. For example, in an article published in the ADN on October 11, 2014, he stated his opposition to using the PFD to fund state government. He ran his campaign on the same promises described in UFL’s newsletter. There is no sunlight between his campaign’s public statements and his article in UFL’s October 2014 newsletter.