Revenge is a dish best served cold, they say.

When it comes to Rep. Lance Pruitt, the campaign finance revenge complaints against him are very cold indeed.

The Alaska Public Offices Commission staff is seeking a large fine against Pruitt for various minor violations of campaign finance rules accrued in 2016 and 2018.

A handful of administrative errors and omissions on Pruitt’s reports were not discovered when APOC performed a routine audit of his campaign in 2016. The methodology he used in 2016, he continued in 2018, thinking all was well, since neither he nor APOC found anything amiss in his books.

But a treasurer who works on Democrat campaigns, Paula DeLaiarro, weaponized the APOC rules to hurt Pruitt politically at the end of the 2020 campaign. She found errors and omissions that, although minor, are now thousands of days old. That is going to hurt Pruitt financially.

Pruitt may not be the only candidate in DeLaiarro’s crosshairs. As one who makes a living defeating Republicans, she may be after other candidates, but she has up to five years to lodge a complaint and it’s to her war-room advantage to wait for as long as possible in order to rack up the most impactful fines against her company’s political foes.

DeLaiarro sent the complaint that stretches back four years to APOC in October, one month from the end of the election, forcing Pruitt to focus his attention on it, rather than his tight campaign against Liz Snyder, who ultimately won by 11 votes. The tactic was meant to embarrass Pruitt and distract him from campaigning.

Small administrative issues on a campaign report can bring fines that can add up to, in this case, over $1 million. Typically these fines are greatly reduced in the final accounting, as this one has been.

Because of the time that had lapsed — 1,500 days times $50 to $500 a day — the fine looks more serious than the offenses would appear to ordinary Alaskans. The Democrat operatives at Ship Creek Group, where DeLaiarro works, know that, and are taking advantage of it.

Pruitt will no doubt argue to the commission that most of the complaints brought forward by DeLaiarro were matters that were reported in good faith and that were remedied, where necessary.

‘This is the kind of thing that will discourage people from running because of the heavy hammer they can come down on you with,” Pruitt said. “It doesn’t do anything that APOC is supposed to do — which is to protect the public trust. Every dollar is accounted for. Everything is listed. There’s nothing to these but administrative. They audited it, they didn’t find anything,” he said. If they had found something in 2016, he would not have operated the same way in 2018.

The errors listed by APOC include

• Pruitt accepted more than $500 from one donor in 2016. The excess amount has already been returned when the error was discovered by Pruitt.
• Pruitt received a $250 contribution from an unregistered political group in 2018. Pruitt says he didn’t know the group was unregistered, but the group evidently failed to finish its own APOC paperwork.
• Pruitt failed to provide details of advertising purchased in 2016 and 2018. He says he provided details as soon as they were known.
• Pruitt improperly reimbursed himself for campaign expenses. He has corrected that.

“Staff recommends that the Commission find that Pruitt’s 2016 and 2018 campaign for House District 27 violated provisions of AS 15.13 by failing to accurately report incurred expenditures as debt, failing to provide information detailing media advertising placement and consulting services rendered, failing to timely reimburse personal funds or report the use of personal funds as contributions, and failing to return two prohibited contributions,” according to APOC.

Pruitt will take his case to the commission itself at its Jan. 13 meeting, but he will be forced to defend himself over the computer, which puts him at a disadvantage in front of a commission that will be on the other end of the Zoom lens.

Presumed winner of the House District 27 race Democrat Liz Snyder has asked the court to eliminate some of her neighbors from a lawsuit they filed that is challenging the outcome of the election, where she is the apparent winner by 11 votes.

In a court filing, Snyder said Jeff Garness, Lisa Garness, Shannon Carte, Donald Crafts, Susan M. Kent-Crafts, and Carolyn “Care” Clift do not have standing to file an election contest.

Snyder said that there needs to be 10 people filing the challenge to the election, and that the lawsuit only has six.

Snyder wants Rep. Lance Pruitt, her opponent, to be the only one named on the challenge the group of six constituents is making.

It’s unclear why Snyder plans to spend money to remove constituents from the lawsuit. But it may make it easier for her legal team to personalize the lawsuit to Pruitt, making it more political in nature before the court. Alaska courts are generally more sympathetic to Democrats in political disputes.

At the same time, Snyder has filed a separate motion in the case to dismiss it entirely.

 Oral argument in the case are scheduled for Jan. 8.

A report by an economist at the School of Energy Resources at the University of Wyoming says President-elect Joe Biden’s promised ban on oil and gas development on public lands would severely harm the economies of eight western states.

Timothy Considine released his findings in “The Fiscal and Economic Impacts of Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Lease Moratorium and Drilling Ban Policies,” on Monday, providing a depressing economic forecast for the states the states that have significant energy production from federal lands.

Considine produced the report under contract with the Wyoming Energy Authority, which is funded by the State of Wyoming.

Over the next four years, the human cost of fulfilling Biden’s campaign pledge would be:

• An average of 72,818 fewer jobs annually.
• Lost wages would total $19.6 billion
• Economic activity would decline $43.8 billion
• Tax revenues would drop $10.8 billion by the end of Biden’s first term in Alaska, California, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.
• By 2040, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would decline by $670.5 billion and average annual job losses would exceed 351,000 across the West.

The study says that Alaska, which ranks eighth in both oil and natural gas production on America’s public lands, would lose $226.4 billion in GDP over the next 20 years.

Between 2021 and 2024, a drilling ban would eliminate in Alaska:

• 3,334 jobs on average each year
• $1.4 billion in oil and natural gas investments 
• production valued at $1.5 billion
• $383 million in tax revenue to the state
• $2.1 billion in GDP
• $964 million in wages.

The eight states provide over 97 percent of federal onshore production. If Biden closes off public lands to oil and gas, as he has promised, over the next 20 years the nation would experience:

• Average annual job losses reaching 351,555 by years 2036 through 2040
• GDP dropping by $670.5 billion
• Oil and natural gas investment plummeting $389 billion, leading to a loss of $502.6 billion worth of production
• The elimination of $159 billion in state tax revenues and $300 billion in lost wages.

The Municipality of Anchorage has officially taken the Golden Lion Hotel off the tax rolls, by purchasing it for $9.3 million.

The hotel, located at 36th Avenue and New Seward Highway, will become the Alaska Center for Treatment, focusing on services for alcoholics, according to the acting mayor.

The Acting Mayor’s Office said the repairs on the buildings will be funded using $15 million from the sale of ML&P to Church Electric, making the overall capital investment as much as $24 million. A request for proposal will be issued for someone to run the center.

The hotel is part of three properties the city is purchasing to provide a suite of services to homeless, vagrants, and substance addicted persons in Anchorage, a plan that started under Mayor Ethan Berkowitz and that is continuing under Acting Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson. Other buildings to be purchased are America’s Best Value Inn & Suites in Spenard, which has 100 rooms that are to be used to house homeless, and also has office space for an expanding workforce of social service employees.

The municipality doesn’t seem to have a plan for how to pay for the operations and maintenance of the new Alaska center for Treatment, which has been the subject of extensive protests by citizens throughout the summer and fall.

The State Security Office has been notified by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that some versions of a system monitoring software the state uses is being exploited by “malicious actors.”

Those malicious actors are believed to be Russian spies, or foreign intelligence workers, as they are being called. SolarWinds Orion products have been attacked by Russian hackers all over the United States.

On Monday, all State of Alaska departments that have SolarWinds Orion products, versions 2019.4 through 2020.2.1 HF1, on their network were instructed to immediately disconnect or power down the products from their networks.

The State Security Office said that until it gets the Windows operating system rebuilt and reinstalls the patched SolarWinds software, departments are prohibited from rejoining the Windows host operating system to the “enterprise domain.”

Additionally, information technology officers in the State of Alaska have been instructed to block all traffic to and from hosts, external to the enterprise, where any version of the SolarWinds Orion software has been installed.

On Sunday, CISA issued Emergency Directive 21-01 that calls on all federal civilian agencies to review their networks for signs of compromise and disconnect or power down SolarWinds Orion products immediately.  

“The compromise of SolarWinds’ Orion Network Management Products poses unacceptable risks to the security of federal networks,” said CISA Acting Director Brandon Wales. “Tonight’s directive is intended to mitigate potential compromises within federal civilian networks, and we urge all our partners—in the public and private sectors—to assess their exposure to this compromise and to secure their networks against any exploitation.”  

Since at least March, Russian hackers have inserted malicious updates into IT management platforms, hitting the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and Homeland Security, as well as a security firm called FireEye.

SolarWinds has hundreds of thousands of clients. On Monday, the company told the Security and Exchange Commission that at least 18,000 were potentially attacked.

Both FireEye and Microsoft have accounts of what the threat entails. It appears that is so vast that no one really knows the extent of it.

Attackers used Orion software as a door into computer systems, where they were able to steal administrative tokens, and then go in and out of the system with data.

The attacks were first reported by Reuters on Sunday.

SolarWinds said in a statement that hackers had managed to alter the versions Orion, a network monitoring tool, that were released in March and June.

“We have been advised this attack was likely conducted by an outside nation state and intended to be a narrow, extremely targeted, and manually executed attack, as opposed to a broad, system-wide attack,” SolarWinds wrote.