Anchorage police arrested two 26-year-old men in connection with a shooting at 12th and Hyder Street in Anchorage, where a toddler was shot by a bullet while inside her home on 11th Avenue in May.
David M. Freeman faces charges of Assault I, Assault III, Misconduct Involving a Weapon I, Misconduct Involving a Weapon II, Misconduct Involving a Weapon IV, and Reckless Endangerment.
Argenis Guzman faces charges of Assault I, Assault III, Misconduct Involving a Weapon I, Misconduct Involving a Weapon II, Misconduct Involving a Weapon IV, Reckless Endangerment, and Tampering with Physical Evidence.
One man is still on the lam and is believed to have fled the country.
At 4 pm on May 21, police took several calls about people shooting at each other from vehicles. The two suspect vehicles were a red 2002 Dodge Ram pickup and a silver 2012 Toyota Camry.
The investigation found that it was a case of road rage between two men, which escalated into gunfire exchanged during a high-speed chase.
A bullet entered the nearby home of a family and struck the child, who ended up hospitalized for a week.
Later, an officer conducted a traffic stop on a red Dodge Ram. In plain view in the truck’s center console was a box of 9mm ammunition.
The driver was transported to APD Headquarters for questioning.
After obtaining a search warrant, officers searched the vehicle and found a 9mm spent shell casing in the front cab area along with handgun magazines and ammunition.
Less than three hours after the shooting on May 21st, the driver of the Toyota Camry ditched his vehicle and reported it as stolen.
On May 29, police got a call from North Eagle River Loop Road and found the vehicle there, with extensive damage.
A month earlier, Troopers responded to Bogard Road in Wasilla, for a report about a driver pulled off the side of the road, and asleep at the wheel.
Troopers found David Freeman in a 2016 Chevy pickup. While he was not under the influence, he failed to disclose to officers that he was carrying a concealed firearm on him, even after being questioned by Troopers about whether he was armed. Freeman was issued a mandatory court citation for Misconduct Weapons in the 5th degree and released, and his firearm was seized.
Among his other minor scrapes with the law was a 2013 case where he challenged someone to a fight and was arrested for disorderly conduct. The conviction was eventually set aside.
The Anchorage Daily News on Friday posted a plea written by Gov. Bill Walker, “Why I reduced the Permanent Fund dividend.”
The governor was writing in his official capacity as the highest elected state official, but directing people to watch a campaign video before they make up their mind about his official policy actions in reducing their Permanent Fund dividends by one half.
His piece never explicitly asked for people’s votes. But the link in his op-ed is to the same campaign video he has promoted on his campaign Facebook page for the past three days.
Must Read Alaska finds it unprecedented to allow a sitting governor to publish an official op-ed that is a plea for support for his re-election during the campaign season, and then link it to an actual campaign video.
It’s illegal for a governor to use both his official capacity and his campaign capacity in one opinion piece. State officials must step outside of the actual state-owned property to work on campaigns, and Walker is clearly speaking in his official role in this op-ed. If he used State employees to write the op-ed, then he has used State employees for campaigning.
Complaints about this illegal behavior would have to be brought to Attorney General Jahna Lindemuth , a close ally of the governor, for prosecution.
The Anchorage Daily News is the newspaper that brought Bill Walker to office in the first place, with its biased coverage during the 2014 campaign cycle, when the paper operated as the Alaska Dispatch News under the ownership of Alice Rogoff.
After the Must Read Alaska News Flash (an email newsletter) went out to 11,123 readers today, with details about the governor’s op-ed, the entire opinion piece was removed from the Anchorage Daily News web site, and this item is now in its place:
TWO VIOLATIONS
From the campaign violation side of things, this was an illegal donation from the ADN and the Alaska Journal of Commerce, both owned by the Binkley Company.
To its credit, the company took down the ADN version of the op-ed, although the Journal of Commerce version remains up as of this publication time. Must Read believes it is unlikely the Binkley Company will face sanctions by APOC, due in part to its timely removal of the piece.
From the government ethics side, this is very likely a misuse of State resources. The “People’s lawyer” can be reached at: [email protected], but it seems unlikely that she would launch an investigation of her boss’s actions.
Complaints to the Alaska Public Offices Commission about the corporate contribution should go to Tom Lucas, at [email protected]. Be sure to mention that there was no “Paid for” disclosure in the governor’s opinion piece.
The question that APOC should ask is “Who penned this op-ed? Was it official staff or campaign staff?” That will get to the root of the problem.
The governor’s article also ran in The Frontiersman and the Kenai Peninsula Clarion, but those newspapers removed the offending link.
Here’s the text of the top of the governor’s opinion piece as it ran in the ADN, with the link to his campaign ad:
Why I reduced the Permanent Fund dividend
By Gov. Bill Walker
Why did I reduce the Permanent Fund dividend in 2016?
Before you make up your mind on the decisions about the budget and the fiscal plan, please take a moment to watch this video.
The decision to reduce the PFD in 2016 in response to Alaska’s fiscal crisis will be one of the defining issues of this election. Our opponents on both the left and the right have criticized this decision.
Some Alaskans believe that it was a terrible decision that we never should have considered, that this decision was unnecessary, that if we had cut more out of state government, we could have avoided making any changes to the way we manage the Alaska Permanent Fund….
“Alaskans Against Dunleavy” opened up an Alaska post office box late last month and registered with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, but it’s not quite an Alaska group.
And it may have forgotten one key component of a campaign: Buy your URL — your online address — right away.
Since it was still available, the group that actually supports Mike Dunleavy for governor purchased the name and set up a site spoofing Alaskans Against Dunleavy, its founder, Seattleite, Justin Matheson, and the candidate Matheson supports: Mead Treadwell.
Such are the hijinks that happen in independent expenditure groups — those ad hoc groups that form up to support or oppose a candidate.
In this case, we’ll let the site do the talking. It’s all in good humor …. (until, of course, it isn’t):
After a meeting in his D.C. offices today, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan says he will support Judge Brett Kavanaugh to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
His endorsement was made following an hour-long chat between Sullivan and Kavanaugh, which highlighted a number of national and Alaska-focused legal issues. Here’s what Sullivan said about the meeting:
“Today, I met with Judge Kavanaugh to discuss at length and great depth his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court and his viewpoint on a variety of national and Alaska-focused legal issues. The meeting was extremely constructive and an important opportunity for Judge Kavanaugh to reaffirm what I’ve known about him for some time. He is someone who will interpret the law and Constitution as written, he holds a healthy skepticism regarding the expansive power of federal agencies, he is a strong protector of the Second Amendment, and he has the values, temperament and humility I believe Alaskans will value on the Supreme Court. I also took the opportunity to familiarize Judge Kavanaugh on a number of critical Alaska-focused federal laws, such as ANILCA, ANCSA and the new ANWR law. I think Judge Kavanaugh meets the qualifications we should be looking for and I plan on supporting him as the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.”
Congressman Don Young also issued a statement today. He will not be part of the confirmation process, as that is a Senate function, but urged a speedy process:
“While I am a Member of the U.S. House and Constitutionally do not have the authority to vote on Supreme Court Justices, the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy presents our judicial system with a critical vacancy. An empty seat on the Supreme Court needs to be filled expediently particularly as the Court will be considering important cases, like that of Alaskan John Sturgeon.”
State Medicaid officials might have gotten suspicious when the Tundra Suites in Bethel went from billing Medicaid $4,000 a month in 2016 for the Medicaid patients coming into town, to billing $56,604 a month in December of 2017.
But evidently they didn’t. The tens of thousands of dollars being billed to the State by a 13-room hotel each month wasn’t what tipped the State Department of Health and Social Services off to the fraud. The State just kept paying the exponentially increasing bills, no questions asked.
What got the State’s attention was that other hotels in Bethel complained they were not being paid by the State of Alaska for housing patients. Their bills to the State were being refused.
As it turns out, they were being refused because the Medicaid housing vouchers they were submitting had already been paid to Chin Kim, the 100 percent owner of the Tundra Suites, a 13-room hotel that is a registered Medicaid provider, and which has a sketchy past, including being involved in some illegal whiskey sales a couple of years ago.
Medicaid dollars don’t only pay for doctors and hospital services. They also pay for transportation and other costs to and from medical hubs like Bethel and Anchorage. The State has aggressively enrolled people in villages, already covered by Indian Health Services, into the Medicaid program under the Medicaid expansion that came with Obamacare.
The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) Medicaid expansion increased revenues to IHS and tribe-owned facilities. Before the expansion, IHS and tribe facilities depended on congressional appropriation. In FY 2017, Congress appropriated $4.8 billion for IHS. Third party payers include Medicaid, and with Medicaid expansion, many more costs are covered, without a congressional appropriation. There is no spending limit — i.e., no budgets capping expenditures — which makes it an attractive line of business.
Bethel is a hub community for 48 predominantly Native villages from Akiachak to Upper Kalskag. Patients from those villages have been signed up for the state’s Medicaid program under the Obamacare Medicaid expansion and the Walker Administration, which signed onto expansion in August of 2015.
Patients in the Bethel region frequently visit the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation, the biggest health provider in the region. With uncapped dollars from Medicaid, this means a lot more trips to town, more hotels, taxis and restaurants that are eligible to receive the patient vouchers.
It was only a matter of time before those vouchers became a form of fungible currency in the community.
IT UNFOLDED IN JANUARY
In January 2018, the Alaska Department of Law’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit was tipped off by the Department of Health and Social Service which said Tundra Suites was billing for housing Medicaid recipients who were not actually staying at Tundra Suites. They were staying at other hotels in the area, staying with relatives, or weren’t even in Bethel at all.
The vouchers, which come in paper packets, contain an original and three copies for a total of four Medicaid vouchers per packet. Each packet has the same authorization number, which appears on all four vouchers for flights, taxis, meals, and hotels with pre-approved “Medicaid providers.” The providers (hotels, taxi companies, etc.) then submit the vouchers to the State of Alaska for reimbursement.
Tundra Suites was one of those Medicaid providers.
Once the investigation started, other irregularities emerged. Tundra Suites was housing people together in rooms, when the guests were clearly not related to each other. Normally, vouchers would cover the cost of an escort for a family member, but in this case, investigators found that people were sharing rooms when they were from different communities altogether, with no known connection.
In one example from Dec. 18, 2017, Tundra Suites submitted a voucher stating that a 69-year old man stayed in Room 5 on that night, and submitted another voucher stating that a 20-year old female recipient from a different community stayed in the same room on the same night. Tundra Suites billed Medicaid for each recipient separately.
When investigators looked into it, the escort that was supposed to stay in that room was in Anchorage, not Bethel, during the medical travel.
Kim was also billing Medicaid recipients more than he charged other travelers. If two recipients and each of their escorts were put in the same room, he’d charge $356 a night for that room, when normally he’d charge $320.
Medicaid recipients do not have to pay any of the room charge, so there is no financial incentive for recipients to share a hotel room, and there was also no shortage of rooms in Bethel, investigators said, so there was no reason to pile people up in rooms.
There were other ways the hotel was scamming the State, including nights when Tundra Suites billed Medicaid for more recipients than the hotel even has rooms to house people, and instances where more than four vouchers were submitted by the various providers with the same voucher number. In other words, someone was altering the voucher numbers.
While investigating the Tundra Suites, investigators found that Mi Ae Young, who had previously scammed Medicaid when she operated a Bethel taxi company, was now assisting Tundra Suites and doing billing to Medicaid for the hotel. She lost her Medicaid provider status as a cab owner, and was thus prohibited from participating in any activity related to Medicaid. The work she was doing was apparently under the table.
The plot thickened.
According to the State’s case against Kim and Young:
“During the investigators’ recorded interview with Young in March 2018, she made several phone calls in Korean while in the presence of the investigators. During one of the calls, she spoke to an individual later discovered to be Yeong Jin, an enrolled Medicaid taxi cab provider. The audio recording of Young’s side of these phone calls was later translated and transcribed. The translation revealed that while the investigators were with Young, she made a call to Jin and instructed him to contact Tundra Suites and tell them that investigators were with her and would be going to Tundra Suites. Young told Jin to pass on the message that Tundra Suites should get the papers ready for the investigators, except for the ones that they had altered; Young told Jin that they should hide those forged vouchers. Unbeknownst to Young, other investigators were already at Tundra Suites collecting documents at the time of this phone call.”
As it turns out, Mi Ae Young was also submitting claims for cab driver Jin.
Kim testified under oath that in April or May of 2017, a person from “the government agency” told him to stop billing separately for recipients an escorts that shared the same room.
But those practices continued and it doesn’t appear any sanctions were likely to be imposed until other hotels complained and the entire billing scheme blew up in January, 2018.
Sen. Dan Sullivan is among the first people who will have a private sit-down meeting with Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump announced Kavanaugh’s appointment on Monday night.
Yesterday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski told the media it might be “several weeks” before Kavanaugh would meet with the Alaska delegation, and it’s not until then would she have the opportunity ask him questions. Murkowski said she has not yet met him but had already started to go through his record as a jurist.
But Sullivan has a previous relationship with Kavanaugh. The two of them served in the administration of George W. Bush.
Kavanaugh, 53, served as a judge on the the D.C. Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals since 2006. Before that he spent five years working for the Bush administration. He taught at Yale Law School, Harvard and Georgetown. Kavanaugh graduated from Yale University and Yale Law School. Sullivan is a graduate of Harvard University and Georgetown Law School.
Sullivan’s meeting with Kavanaugh is expected to be on Thursday.
Earlier this week the two senators from Alaska sent initial statements to the media about the Kavanaugh appointment. Those are linked in the story below.
THE PRESSURE IS BUILDING FOR BEGICH OR WALKER TO DROP
In an interview with KTOO-FM,the head of Alaska’s AFL-CIO says that Gov. Bill Walker deserves another term.
By their own poll, the AFL-CIO said this week that Walker and former Sen. Mark Begich are tied at 28 percent in the contest for governor.
But union President Vince Beltrami stopped short of endorsing Walker, because he wants one of the men to drop. He said a three-way race just won’t work for the goals of the union. He also has to wait for his membership to vote.
Beltrami said the governor deserves re-election but the AFL-CIO will make its official endorsement on Aug. 24 – if two-thirds of its unions can agree.
“If I had to make a bet, I would say that, if we can get an endorsement, if we can get two-thirds, that it would be more for Gov. Walker at this point, because folks believe that he’s earned re-election in our eyes,” Beltrami told the public broadcasting station.
In 2014, Beltrami told Walker and Byron Mallott that the union would sit on its hands — and its campaign money — until the two came up with a combination ticket, which they did by ditching their respective running mates.
With the agreement of the Alaska Democratic Party, they put former Republican (now undeclared) Walker at the top of their ticket, and the man whom Democrats had elected as their nominee, Democrat Byron Mallott, as lieutenant governor.
That combination won against sitting Gov. Sean Parnell, but they had to disenfranchise their primary voters to do so, reorganizing a more powerful ticket and ignoring what the primary voters had decided. The running mates who were ditched to make it possible? Craig Fleener and Hollis French. They received plum jobs from Walker, byt the way.
Beltrami is hoping to pull the same kind of power play again to reduce the likelihood of handing a victory to Republican Mike Dunleavy, the current Republican frontrunner.
The polling numbers that Beltrami released Monday tell him that either Walker or Begich has to yield the field.
Harstad Strategic Research, which conducted the poll, is a Colorado company that works for Democrats, most notably with Barack Obama. Harstad worked on behalf of the former president since 2002 and takes credit for a much of his electoral success. The company has also helped the fortunes of former Sens. Ken Salazar of Colorado, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Mark Udall of Colorado, and Gov. Tom Vilsack of Ohio. Here’s the company’s analysis of the Alaska governor’s race, based on its polling:
Under Walker’s administration, and under the union presidency of Beltrami, the AFL-CIO has lost much of its private sector workforce, while the state workforce remains mostly intact. State workers are now Beltrami’s base.
But with the recent Janus decision, which Gov. Walker decried publicly, the union no longer can take money from government workers’ and retirees’ pockets without their permission.
Whether Beltrami has the political testosterone he had in 2014 remains to be seen in this post-Janus era.
Yet others are now involved in the full-court press to advance just one gubernatorial team from the Left.
Rep. Les Gara penned an appeal in the Anchorage Daily News to turn up the heat, and columnist Charles Wohlforth has opined that a three-way race hands the governorship to the Republicans, and that either Begich or Walker need to step off.
Walker said he’s sure the campaigns are talking to each other: “I anticipate there will be communications to a certain degree going forward and I think that’s probably a necessary piece to somewhat simplify the race to a two-way rather than a three-way,” he told KTOO.
That is far less than a resounding “No way am I dropping,” from Walker. But he already yielded the Democrats’ primary ballot to Begich, knowing he wasn’t strong enough to beat him in a two-way. Walker decided to go the petition route to the General Election, rather than face Begich in the primary.
It’s unheard of for a sitting governor to simply yield. Even Gov. Frank Murkowski stayed in the race, ending up with 18 percent of the primary vote against Sarah Palin and John Binkley. His prospects were poor, but he didn’t walk away. Governors (with the exception of a nationally-focused Sarah Palin) don’t just walk away.
But neither do Begiches, especially former sitting U.S. Sen. Begich, who is relatively young and intends to have a long political career.
Would either of these men take the back seat to the other?
The pressure is on, and although Republicans have a leading candidate for governor in Mike Dunleavy (with all polls showing him at the front of the pack), a lot of election shenanigans can happen between now and Sept. 2, when Democrats and Walker could craft another combo ticket to present to the voters.
BUT MARK BEGICH STICKS HIS CAMPAIGN SIGN ON THE FED’S PROPERTY
The Anchorage neon palm tree that pit an Anchorage businesswoman against the federal government has been auctioned — except no bidder met the required minimum bid by the U.S. Marshal’s Office.
Now what?
The Marshal’s Office set a price of $4,500 for the iconic 22-foot palm tree that stood in front of the disreputable Paradise Inn for years.
Now, what stands in its place is a “Mark Begich for Governor” sign, illegally placed on what has become federal property. The scene around it looks like a set from a dystopian movie, but it’s downtown Spenard.
The motel had been seized by the federal government last year due to illegal drug activity. The trash needed to be taken out so the property could go up for auction. Trash, the marshal said, included the palm tree sign.
Bernadette Wilson, owner of Denali Disposal, told the marshal in charge that the sign seemed like something more than garbage. It was a bit of a landmark for Anchorage. Could she keep it?
Bernadette Wilson spent thousands to preserve the sign, after the Feds told her it was trash and to take it to the landfill. Then they took the sign from her.
The marshal told her to keep it — the government had no sentimental attachment to the sign and considered it trash. So she brought in a flatbed truck and carefully hauled it away with the full support of the federal marshal. It would find a home somewhere, she thought, perhaps back in Spenard, where it had lived for 50 years. Somewhere near the Koot’s windmill, perhaps, where everyone could marvel at its kitchy endurance.
In April, Wilson forked over the palm tree to the Feds, but only after a judge told her she must.
Now, without meeting the minimum bid, what will the federal government do now? Accept the $2,700 that Anchorage resident Jay Stange raised on a GoFundMe page?
Wilson said, “Coming up with the money to purchase it is one thing. Then you have to have the money to restore it. Even if someone can come up with the minimum bid, who will foot the bill to make it operational?”
Wilson spent several thousands of dollars preserving the sign, only to have it taken from her once the federal government determined that if she wanted to save it, it must have some kind of value after all.
“So are they going to give it back?” asked Wilson, somewhat rhetorically. “I spent way more money than their minimum bid taking it down and preserving it.”
The national Women’s March organization accidentally showed its hand by releasing a statement with a “fill-in-the-blank” spot for whomever President Donald Trump nominated to the Supreme Court.
They may not have known who the pick would be, but they are definitely opposed, according to the Women’s March Twitter feed, which got too far over its skies yesterday. Some intern just got demoted for the mistake:
Meanwhile, the radical left was ready in Anchorage to oppose any nominee, with a pre-planned protest in front of Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s offices in downtown. They were rallying before the announcement was made because, according to Shoshanah Stone of Indivisible Anchorage, “all the nominees SUCKED.”
Sen. Dan Sullivan also has offices in that building, but the Left is continually targeting Murkowski, who is seen as more likely to be swayed by their efforts.
Indivisible Anchorage held signs that were professionally printed in advance, announcing, “WOMEN WILL DIE,” and their social media post was telling when it said they rallied “to Reject Trump’s Extremist Supreme Court ##SCOTUSpick Roe, Healthcare, and more are #WhatsAtStake We can’t let up Alaska! Call Murkowski to stop the #KavanaughSCOTUS 202-224-6665.”
All that may backfire on them, as Murkowski was quoted by the Anchorage Daily News saying, “I’m a little annoyed that some of my colleagues, even before the president laid down Judge Kavanaugh’s name, had already determined that they were going to vote against whomever.”
But the protestors were undaunted in social media. The group was using a pre-designed propaganda piece that it released the moment Brett Kavanaugh’s name was announced:
