Vince Beltrami shows off his July 21 letter qualifying him for the Nov. 8 ballot, as signed by Josie Bahnke, Director of the Division of Elections. Photo from his campaign web site.
BELTRAMI DIDN’T TURN IN HALF THE SIGNATURES REQUIRED
When Vince Beltrami filed signatures to run as an independent candidate, he came up short. He had 70 verified signatures. He needed 170.
But the Division of Elections certified Beltrami anyway, ignoring state law:
AS 15.25.170. Required Number of Signatures For District-Wide Office.
“Petitions for the nomination of candidates for the office of state senator or state representative shall be signed by qualified voters of the house or senate district in which the proposed nominee desires to be a candidate (equal in number to at least one percent of the number of voters who cast ballots in the proposed nominee’s respective house or senate district in the preceding general election.) A nominating petition may not contain less than 50 signatures for any district.”
The 2014 election for Senate District N had approximately 17,000 votes cast. The 1 percent needed is 170 qualified signatures, not 70 and certainly not 50.
Beltrami is running against Sen. Cathy Giessel, who was deep in her work as a lawmaker when Beltrami filed for office. She may not have noticed that her challenger came up with too few signatures, and because the Legislature was in session, she couldn’t work on campaign matters. She cannot check his filings nor have her staff check them while in session.
No one else thought to look into the matter until David Nees, a retired math teacher who is an parttime aide to Rep. Liz Vazquez, started poking around.
The Division of Elections has had a bad year for performance. It had to have one of the legislative races, District 40, decided by the Alaska Supreme Court, and numerous election irregularities have cast doubt on the Division’s competency or commitment to fairness.
Division of Elections will not release a copy of the signatures on Beltrami’s petition, but the photo above shows that the division sent Beltrami a letter on July 21 confirming his spot on the General Election ballot.
Bob Sivertsen just blew through the door, covered in rain.
And by “blew,” the writer means there were 60-mile-knot winds behind him, and rain battering sideways in waves. Ketchikan style.
It’s a classic November gale in Southern Southeast Alaska, but that didn’t stop Sivertsen and a band of merry volunteers from going out and waving signs on a street corner.
They also waved at an Alaska Airlines jet passing over — a jet that simply couldn’t land in the weather.
“I love these November storms. I like to sleep with the rain pounding on the roof,” Sivertsen said.
Born in Territorial days in Ketchikan, Sivertsen was raised in what was a strong timber and fishing economy. That’s why when he got out of high school he went to work in a spruce mill, sawing up timber. His mom was half Aleut, having been relocated from the Aleutian chain down to Southeast during World War II. She attended the Wrangell Institute. His dad’s side of the family came over from Norway.
And like his father, Sivertsen spent 38 years working for the City of Ketchikan. He started riding on the back of a garbage truck. In those days, the garbage truck crew had keys to nearly every gate in town, as there was no real curbside service.
As Solid Waste Supervisor, Bob Sivertsen was featured in a “Tougher in Alaska” series on the History Channel.
“We’d even go up into the homes of the elderly and get the garbage cans from under their sinks,” he recalled. “We’d also carry groceries up the stairs for people.”
That job led to a 38-year career with the city that included the Street Department.
Sivertsen remembers driving a flatbed through town on snow and ice days and shoveling sand onto the roadways, stopping for snowball fights with the neighborhood kids, or pushing cars that were stuck in a berm.
The sidewalks were shoveled by hand by city workers like him back when it was common for Ketchikan to have two to three feet of snow for weeks at a time.
Bob met his wife Terry while she was working at a pizza restaurant. Married for 43 years, they have three children and eight grandchildren. Family has always been important, so much so that when the building of the Trans Alaska Pipeline came along in the 1970s, Bob chose to stay in Ketchikan.
“I just couldn’t see being away from my family, even for a high-paying job,” he said.
Instead, he coached his children through soccer and basketball, relishing the role of father and husband. He would not change a thing.
After 38 years, he retired from the city, and filled a vacant spot on the Ketchikan City Council, where he currently serves as vice mayor.
Through all of it, what he has enjoyed most is meeting people all over Southeast Alaska. Sivertsen is a quiet extrovert: He love people, but he’s not out to be the center of attention in any room.
That’s Bob Sivertsen driving the forklift as he moves a totem pole to a new location, circa 1970s.
“Over the years I’ve met a lot of wonderful people, and whether they are supporting me or not, Southeast Alaska is just a very resilient region, with strong people. We’ve been able to work through downturns in the economy and fishing slumps. This is a great community,”
Only four days remain before voters make up their minds for Republican Bob Sivertsen or Democrat-Independent, Rep. Daniel Ortiz. Will Ketchikan return to conservative values or stay with Ortiz, who recently was given a D grade by the NRA?
The race for House District 36 is on, and Sivertsen is heading back out into the gale to knock on doors and ask people to put their confidence in a guy who has made commitment to family and community the hallmarks of his life.
Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line, by Heather Hendershot
There has been no conservative in modern times more erudite than William F. Buckley.
When he began his decades-long talk television show, Firing Line, the anti-war sentiment was growing quickly and the Left was stealing an entire generation. It was 1966, and the Vietnam War was losing the hearts and minds of America’s youth.
Buckley was the voice of the loyal opposition to the Left, and remains unparalleled in American political discourse today. The founder of National Review, he showed America that conservatism could be intellectual and principled.
Open to Debate is a behind-the-set portrait of Buckley that reveals him as the champion of conservative ideas, the finger in the dike against the liberal media. He took on the smartest people on the Left, but with respect.
Buckley is revered by thinking conservatives even today. He was no Andrew Brietbart or Rush Limbaugh. He is the gold standard of what it means to be an ideological warrior, and has lessons to teach the shouters and verbal bomb-throwers of today’s media.
As we head into the gift-giving season, this is book worthy of the thinking conservative in your life.
Alaska Senate candidate Kevin Kastner says if elected to office, he’ll introduce a bill to ban all elected state officials from participating or forming political action committees or independent expenditure groups.
Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux formed Gabby’s Tuesday PAC, which she uses to support her chosen candidates. She took large donations from a dozen well-known Juneau lobbyists, including Ashley Reed, John Harris, Jim Lottsfeldt (MidnightSunAk blog), Ray Gillespie, Kris Knauss, Paul Fuhs, Kim Hutchinson, Frank Bickford, and more, with a sum totaling $17,000 by Oct. 30.
Kastner says this is a pay-to-play scheme that is unhealthy for a democracy.
“Like many Alaskans, I am frustrated with career politicians and special interest lobbyists who seek to manipulate the system in their own favor at the expense of everyday citizens. The recent findings by the Alaska Public Offices Commission demonstrates the need to clarify the intent of the law to keep lobbyists out of Alaska elections,” Kastner said in a press release.
A complaint was filed in August over the Gabby’s Tuesday PAC, but the Alaska Public Offices Commission said the law permits it.
Enough is enough, Kastner said: “We must put a stop to this breach in Alaska’s campaign finance laws or risk a lifelong reign of politicians who use lobbyist loopholes to broker power and position. I’ve spoken with several other legislators and candidates who share my belief that those running for election shouldn’t be engaged in managing PAC activities. Just because it may be technically legal, doesn’t mean it’s ethical.”
Lobbyists who spoke to MustReadAlaska.com say they are concerned that every lawmaker could set up multiple political action committees or independent expenditure groups and force companies to pay those groups — or risk having their legislation sidelined.
Kastner is running for Senate seat H, which encompasses East Anchorage and JBER, a seat now occupied by Sen. Bill Wielechowski, a Democrat.
Word is that if Kastner doesn’t win, a group of citizens is preparing to launch a petition campaign to put the anti-corruption measure on the ballot and prevent legislators from starting their own political action committees and independent expenditure groups. A separate measure has been suggested that would prevent legislators from accepting state per diem when the Legislature is meeting in their home community.
First came the flier in the mailbox that says Bill Wielechowski, the most diehard Democrat in the Senate, defends Libertarian values.
Now, it appears that he is sharing campaign office space with the Democrat-turned-independent Vince Beltrami.
Beltrami, according to Alaska Public Offices Commission, is using the Alaska Democratic Party to file his reports.
BILL WIELECHOWSKI LITIGATING HIS WAY THROUGH ELECTION
In a local advertising mailer, Democrat Sen. Bill Wielechowski placed this ad during the campaign 30-day window ostensibly to give people an update on the lawsuit he has filed against the Permanent Fund Corp. over the governor’s taking of half of Alaskans’ Permanent Fund dividends. Problem? No “Paid for by” disclosure on it, and it’s clearly intended to help him win next week. Will the Alaska Public Offices Commission punish him? Not likely.
EARLY VOTING, ABSENTEES BY THE NUMBERS
As of Wednesday, early voting totals 22,281, and absentee ballots voted total 23, 702. There were 43,526 absentee ballots requested. Highly unusual is that more Republicans than Democrats are participating in early voting. Since 2008, Democrats have tended to carry the early vote, but this year, Republicans outnumber Democrats in the early voting.
Sen. Cathy and Rich Giessel and their grandchildren.
It was two years ago when Sen. Cathy Giessel was stretching her legs in a hotel lobby during a break at an Arctic conference in downtown Anchorage.
She was approached by a nice-looking young man wearing a suit and tie. His hair was trim and he looked like an up-and-coming professional. He was interested in the conference, it was obvious, but he looked her straight in the eyes and spoke:
“You’re Cathy Giessel, aren’t you?” he started. “You saved my life.”
She was taken aback.
The man looked nothing like she remembered him from 18 months earlier, when he had arrived at a homeless shelter and described his symptoms to a social worker, who said, “There’s a nurse in the clinic. You need to see her.”
If she had not seen him that night, he would surely have died. But she won’t divulge more, because as a consummate professional, she is protective of his privacy.
Cathy spends every Monday at this same homeless shelter, where she nurses the sick, the hopeless, the drug-addicted, and the down-and-out.
Often, she finds it emotionally hard to pull into the parking lot, knowing how much tragedy awaits and wondering if she can make a difference in just one broken life. But that night she did, and it sticks in her mind as a credo: “Never get discouraged. Never give up.”
Stories of people who have turned their lives around abound in Cathy’s life, as she has volunteered at pregnancy crisis centers and provided life-giving health care to children in rural Alaska. She was also a critical care nurse for many years in Anchorage.
Born in Fairbanks to a Wien Air pilot and stay-home mom, Cathy grew up tagging along behind her dad as he went to “the office,” which means he was flying people and freight between rural villages and Fairbanks.
Cathy Giessel with her father, hunting near Fairbanks before Statehood.
Her love for the people in rural Alaska was imprinted on her by her dad, who had tremendous respect for Native Alaskans – and they returned the love and respect he showed them.
“They loved him so much, and he loved them. It was a cool experience to see all the little communities that make up Alaska, and what great friendships he had all over,” she said. Those were the days – before Statehood — when trapped fur and ivory carvings were commonly bartered and gifted items.
“My dad bought lots of furs from trappers,” she recalled of the lifestyle that has all but disappeared in the 57 years since Alaska became a state.
Sen. Cathy and her mother, Ruth.
Cathy attended Catholic schools and Lathrop High School in Fairbanks, taking advanced placement classes. She wasn’t a school jock, but more of the “geek that took four years of Latin.”
She went to the University of Michigan, because she was not able to study nursing in Alaska and because it had a great football team. Between high school and college, however, she worked as an intern for U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens. She and other interns were able to live at the Stevens’ Bethesda, Maryland home that summer, a time she cherishes.
She remembers of Stevens: “He really had a heart for rural Alaskans. He cared about their health, about sanitation, communicable diseases, vaccinations — all of it.” As a nursing-bound student, that stuck with her.
Cathy Giessel, second from left, campaigning for Sen. Ted Stevens during his first run for office in 1970.
Cathy always wanted to study political science, but her mother had convinced her that nursing was a steadier option, that there would always be work.
Her mom was right. As a nurse practitioner, she worked in the North Slope School District for years, providing health care to people whose families she had first met as a child, going with her father from village to village. After he passed, she felt she was following in his footsteps in many ways, to help rural communities.
The experience helped form who she is today as a senator, one who not only knows the map of Alaska, but has been intimately involved with so many people who live in places few can find on that map.
“We are such a big and diverse state, and I think we forget that sometimes, living here in Anchorage. We get into that big-city thinking.”
But walking door-to-door in her district, which stretches from Portage north into the hillsides of Anchorage, she also is reminded that we’re still a small state.
“I met a young man in my district who asked me how long I’d been in the state. And when I told him about growing up with Wien Airlines, he said he was part of the Wien “family,” too. And it was like a family, growing up with Wien.”
That man is now a constituent of hers and is involved in Arctic policy issues in Alaska.
Cathy also worked as a critical care nurse, leaving that stressful vocation in 1980 as her second child arrived. She and her husband Richard had decided that day care, nannies and babysitters were not how they wanted to raise their children. So Cathy raised and homeschooled their three children up until their high school years.
She ran a 24-hour crisis hotline, volunteered, and for a while was a dressmaker, making wedding, bridesmaid and career suits for women at home, with her sewing machine.
Richard, who was an engineer, had gone into teaching at a Christian school, and the dressmaking helped ends meet during those years.
But there were times, during the economic crash of the ‘80s, when the pocketbook was empty.
“In the summer of 1986, we ran out of grocery money, and we just had to eek by until school started and Rich was getting a paycheck again,” she recalled. The experience gives her not just sympathy, but greater empathy for people going through tough times. She’s been there.
Cathy got involved in politics by taking part in her Republican local district meetings, and eventually working on campaigns. Finally, when Sen. Con Bunde was getting ready to retire, she threw her hat in the ring, walking her sprawling district from December of 2009 until October of 2010.
Redistricting changed her boundaries and she had to run in 2012, and 2014. Now she faces the biggest bank account in Alaska, the Big Labor one bankrolling her fiercest opponent yet, AFL-CIO President Vince Beltrami.
But she goes back to her faith, her family and her core principles time and again, to simply do the right thing every day, “Never get discouraged. Never give up.” She’s faced tough opponents before, and she has dug deep into her faith to shield herself from the character assaults and the lies.
“They are saying so many things that just aren’t true. They’re saying I voted against Erin’s Law, when I voted for it. They’re saying I voted against the law enforcement survivor’s bill, when we didn’t even get to vote on it due to procedural questions.” The House had already adjourned, so legal fixes to that bill could not be made, she said.
Although she is being outspent by Big Labor dollars, she won’t be outworked — either in her efforts to meet with every constituent at his or her door, or the work that she’ll do for them in Juneau.
But she’s also proud of being a grandmother, and always introduces herself as one in every public forum — as “a wife, a mother, and a grandmother.”
It is said that if you want to see Sen. Giessel really smile, just ask her about her grandchildren. She’ll be grinning from ear to ear.
BELTRAMI: NOT SAFE FOR WORK…FOR KIDS…OR DISTRICT N
AFL-CIO Union boss Vince Beltrami has a habit of belittling regular people on social media and in person. But in this audio captured by a concerned senior citizen, Beltrami goes on an unfriendly tirade. R rated for language. You’ve been warned:
Beltrami is trying to unseat Sen. Cathy Giessel in Senate District N. He’s aligned with Democrats, although he has recently registered non-aligned, leading a herd of Democrats-turned-Independents who are running this year in Alaska.
And Beltrami one of the founders of Together for Alaska, a Democrat-funded independent expenditure group that is now supporting his candidacy.
Paul Kendall, the man who recorded the audio, is a known political gadfly, but legislators have to deal with people like Kendall on a daily basis. Constituents call; they are not always rational, and in fact are usually unhappy. Dealing with cranky people and garden variety cranks is daily business for a legislator.
CATHY GIESSEL TALKS ABOUT FOSTER CARE, FAMILIES
At a chili and cornbread dinner in Anchorage, Sen. Cathy Giessel also showed her true colors. As she heads into her final week of door-to-door campaigning, she spoke about foster care and how one of her proudest moments has been sponsoring SB 180, to support greater access for children to loving homes while their parents take some time to get their acts together. The law she sponsored ensures that parents don’t simply lose their children to the state just because they’ve hit a crisis in their lives.
At one point, she started to get emotional, thinking about the stories of the families that she’s met in her journey who have been impacted by SB 180, sometimes .
And then she caught herself, and continued to press the importance of healthy families.
Here’s the Cathy Giessel the public doesn’t often see, talking about how faith, family, and love of Alaska motivates her to work hard for her community every day:
Nasty things are bound to happen during the week leading up to the election, and we’ve found some doozies arriving in mailboxes:
BILL WIELECHOWSKI SAYS HE’S LIBERTARIAN? In this flier, hard Democrat Sen. Bill Wielechowski tries to pass himself off as a Libertarian. Democrats are running so quickly away from their brand that it’s come to this?
PAT HIGGINS’ STOLEN VALOR: In his latest mailer, candidate Pat Higgins (the hard Democrat running against Charisse Millett, District 25) infers that his time spent as a personnel worker in the Marshall Islands for a company doing contract work with the military was the equivalent of keeping our nation safe as a member of said military. Millett called foul: Higgins was not an enlisted serviceman nor an officer, but just a contractor. He could quit at any time and he eventually did, so no hall pass for Higgins’ missing all those school board meetings while still drawing a school board salary.
HARRIET DRUMMOND’S SLEAZATHON: Incumbent Democrat Harriet Drummond goes after Mike Gordon in a new radio ad and mailer that all but calls him a drug pusher and child rapist. It gets the award for the sleaziest ad of the week, and that’s saying something. Former police officers are standing by to defend Gordon. This reminds us of when Drummond stood outside the Dena’ina Center upset that SB 21 was being signed into law. Her protest sign read: “Corrupt Bastards Club Third Floor,” which is the level of discourse her fellow lawmakers have come to expect from her. If she doesn’t get her way, she just goes for the gutter.
FORREST MACDONALD’S MONEY MISCHIEF: From the candidate’s filing in 2015, it appears he earned income in the range of $5,000 to $12,000 plus $8,800 in Permanent Fund dividends (including his wife and kids) plus $1,700 in GI Bill benefits. His children are enrolled in Denali KidCare, which is a subsidized health care program.
Yet this year he gave $11,250 to his campaign. The Democrat who wants to win Senate seat L against Natasha Von Imhof just doesn’t add up. Of course, if he won, he’d get the biggest pay increase in his life.
VINCE BELTRAMI WON’T COME CLEAN: Now the fake-independent running against Republican Cathy Giessel for Senate District N says he’ll take a leave of absence from his $185,000 job running the Alaska AFL-CIO. But what does that mean? Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO is one of the largest spenders in the 2016 election cycle, adding more than $11.5 million to the coffers of Democratic candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The top recipient is Hillary Clinton. (The union’s super PAC, “AFL-CIO Worker’s Voices PAC,” spent another $7.3 million.) But Beltrami? He says he’s an independent. Queue the laugh track.
HARRY CRAWFORD CAUGHT IN A LIE: Harry Crawford, running against Lance Pruitt, is taking credit for the “red stripe ID” law, although it wasn’t his idea at all. A manager at a liquor store came up with the proposal years earlier, as reported in the Anchorage Daily News and other newspapers, and it was discussed widely at the time the idea came out, four years before the accident involving Crawford’s wife. The statement in his ad is a blatant lie.
WHO IS THIS PERSON? She was observed ripping up Trump signs in Anchorage rights of way and delivering them in a rage to Trump headquarters on Old Seward Highway at Klatt Road, before storming away in her black Lexus, license plate JBA832. We asked the police to respond and identify her, but no call back yet from APD. Eagle-eyed readers say she’s a well-known lawyer in town.
BILL WELD ESCHEWS ENDORSING MILLER: The Libertarian candidate for vice president was in town last week and threw his support for the U.S. Senate race to Lisa Murkowski, saying Joe Miller is a phony Libertarian.
A mailer from Joe Miller, Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate, uses the Alaska Republican Party disclaimer and return address. The party’s bulk mail permit is blotted out, and a Joe Miller bulk mail permit has been printed, but the whole effort was rejected by the U.S. Postal Service.
Maybe it’s theft. Maybe it’s mail fraud. Maybe it’s just playing fast and loose with the law.
The Alaska Republican Party on Monday filed a police report to document what the party believes is theft of materials and/or attempted mail fraud by Citizens for Joe Miller.
On a Federal Election Commission report, the Libertarian-registered Miller campaign said it received boxes and boxes of postcard mailers from the Alaska Republican Party as a contribution worth $4,500.
It turns out, these were old postcards from 2010, when the party backed Miller as the nominee, and opposed Lisa Murkowski, who had lost the primary. The party did not give Miller the postcards, said Tuckerman Babcock, party chairman. The only record of possible transfer of the materials comes from an account offered by the former communications director for the Alaska Republican Party, who says he let someone take them off his hands after the 2010 General Election.
That contentious election festers as a sore among Joe Miller supporters to this day. Murkowski went on to run a write-in campaign, as a Republican, in November of 2010, even after her candidacy was not supported by the Alaska Republican Party. She won. He lost. He cried foul. She essentially said “Where’s the beef, Joe?”
Murkowski had pulled off a miracle and Miller supporters have never forgot. To this day that chasm tears the guts apart in the Republican Party of Alaska, which has strong Libertarian leanings.
But last week, these old official party postcards, which should have been destroyed, surfaced when the Miller campaign tried to commit what the Alaska Republican Party considers mail fraud.
Miller, it appears, tried to post the items with a newly minted bulk mail permit, but with a “Paid for by the Alaska Republican Party” disclaimer, and with the Alaska Republican Party’s return address.
The Alaska Republican Party first learned that Miller possessed these old Republican Party campaign materials when Miller reported on his Federal Election Commission report that the party had donated the fliers to him this year. That was simply not the case, said Chairman Babcock.
What he said, actually, is this: “That’s a lie. The party made no such gift to the Joe Miller campaign in 2016.”
On Oct. 24, Miller changed his story, saying he had obtained the fliers from someone who dropped them off at his headquarters. Miller displayed the flier for the media and later posted it on social media.
To ensure that no fraud was in the works, Babcock paid a visit to Alejandro T. Tungul, supervisor of business mail at the main office of the U.S. Postal Service in Anchorage.
Babcock alerted Mr. Tungul to what he thought was a remote possibility that someone might attempt to mail the fraudulent flier with the party’s disclaimer or misuse the bulk permit of the party, both of which were printed upon the old 2010 fliers displayed by Joe Miller.
On Oct. 28, Mr. Tungul notified Babcock by e-mail, confirming that an attempt by the Miller campaign was made:
“Good afternoon. I tried calling you several times but no one answered. The attached mailing was presented for mailing but was not accepted. Thank you.”
The flier attached to Tungul’s e-mail was the same flier that Joe Miller had displayed publicly the previous Monday.
In addition, the flier Mr. Tungul attached did not include a disclaimer related to Citizens for Joe Miller, nor was the Alaska Republican Party’s bulk mail permit blackened out.
On Oct. 31, a party representative visited Mr. Tungul, who said the USPS had opened an investigation into the attempt to mail the flier.
Tungul could not share any other information except to confirm that those attempting to mail the items did not seek to use the bulk permit of the Alaska Republican Party. He was clamming up, however, because of the investigation under way.
Miller’s sworn FEC report says that he obtained the mailers from the Alaska Republican Party in September 2016.
But his Oct. 31 press release claims that his campaign actually acquired the old 2010 mailers from some an unnamed registered Republican individual — not the Alaska Republican Party itself.
If Joe Miller had been telling the truth when he claimed the fliers as a 2016 donation from the Alaska Republican Party, then the mailers were taken from the Alaska Republican Party without its consent, and the party considers that a theft.
However, if Miller himself somehow obtained the mailers and stored them until the present, then he appears to have committed a violation by knowingly and intentionally making a sworn falsehood on his FEC report.
Instead of correcting the old fliers with a new permit number, disclaimer and return address, Miller tried to leave the impression that the mailer was from the Alaska Republican Party.
If Miller had successfully sent the mailers, they would have gone out with a knowingly false “paid for by” notification saying the Alaska Republican Party had paid for the message.
Miller’s effort to correct that problem was to also print a new disclaimer, and leave both visible, with the public having no idea who paid for what.
Miller blotted out the Alaska Republican Party bulk mail permit, and printed his own, on the fliers. However, he left return address as the Alaska Republican Party. And, as shown here, he then put stamps on the mailer and sent them out across the state. Thousands of them.
It should be noted that the address on the old flier is now obsolete, as the Alaska Republican Party headquarters has moved.
WHO IS THIS PERSON? She was observed ripping up Trump signs in Anchorage rights of way and delivering them in a rage to Trump headquarters on Old Seward Highway at Klatt Road, before storming away in her black Lexus, license plate JBA832. We asked the police to respond and identify her, but no call back yet from APD. Eagle-eyed readers say she’s a well-known lawyer in town.
