Gov. Michael Dunleavy and former Chief of Staff Tuckerman Babcock have asked a judge to throw out the case brought against them by a former potty-mouth state attorney whose resignation was accepted at the beginning of the Dunleavy Administration in 2017.
In a court filing today, the attorney for the governor and his former chief of staff says Elizabeth Bakalar, the former assistant attorney general, was properly let go. Bakalar claims she was fired because of her blogging activity, in which she writes “about politics and puerility.”
Puerility is perhaps too kind a word.
According to the court filing on Friday, Bakalar wrote about things like her “personal strategy” for “weekday work pooping,” and explained the bravery it took for her to confront the “fetid slurry of wadded up toilet paper and piss and sh[**] in portable toilets.” She worried that the pharmacist might think she is a walking sexually transmitted disease. In her own words, she wrote, “I write about farts, nipples, Cheetos, and Donald Trump’s spray tan for tweets, shares and viral laughs.”
She didn’t just write about farts. She used her blog to urge the retention of Justices Joel Bolger and Peter Maassen, she described her affection for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, and she called Rep. Don Young “Alaska’s State Fossil and resident Balcony Muppet.”
She praised former Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott, who resigned in disgrace, for “always ha[ving] an inspiring word to share.”
The high-ranking attorney for the state had special ire for President Donald Trump, who she wrote made her sick to her stomach and “incredibly sad.” According to the court document, Bakalar obsessively posted Twitter comments about Trump on Election Day, 2016, and wrote “if this country makes Trump president, it deserves everything it gets, and the rest who repudiated him go into the abyss.”
As it became clear that Trump won, Bakalar posted that “America just texted the whole world a dick pic,” and “Sad! Unbelievable! Disaster! USA is BIGLY f[**ked!”
She wrote that, based on her expertise as a lawyer, no decent lawyer would represent Trump in Nevada.
And when Trump was declared the winner, Bakalar vote that she cried because she knew when she went into work that morning there were people there who had voted for Trump.
At that point Bakalar started writing about Trump all the time. In 301 of her posts on social media, she wrote of Trump, calling him names like “Cheeto Satan.”
“Before Trump I wrote a lot more about parenting. Now I feel compelled to write about Trump so that. … if the sh[**] hits the fan my kids will have a contemporaneous Handmaid’s Tale-style record of What the F**k You Did to Us.”
She wrote, “Our POTUS is a manifestly delusional likely senile, sociopathic, treasonous, semi-literate, lecherous oligarch who is scissoring the Constitution into red white and blue confetti like Edward Cheeto-Hands with the help of Congress, all at the direction of a repellent, rheumy-eyed alcoholic who legitimately wants to destroy democracy and perpetuate the master race.”
It should be noted here that Donald Trump is a well-known teetotaler and may be many things, but is not an alcoholic.
Bakalar was making herself into a Twitter celebrity in Alaska and around the country among those who thrive on hatred of Trump and Republicans in general.
Then something happened. A member of the public complained about Bakalar’s posts. The Department of Law declined to take action, and Bakalar declared the complainer was a “stalker wingnut [who] tried and failed to get me fired for criticizing Donald Trump as if Alaska were communist Russia with no First and Fourteenth Amendments, I’ve only been embolden to criticize him more, as often as possible.”
And so she did. The Juneau blogger was obsessed with Trump during his presidency.
She wrote about Trump’s “dick” and said Trump should “text Satan a dick pic at 1:00 am, and ask if [he]can come down to hell for a booty call.”
“Dick” was a favorite word, and appears in more than 160 of her writings. She also would call people Nazis routinely.
The governor’s case says that the separation from state service for Bakalar in 2017 rests on a question: Must the people of Alaska accept legal counsel “from a lawyer who publishes nearly daily about sex, excrement, and politics? The answer is no.”
As an at-will employee, Bakalar could be released at any moment. All of them can. Last month, the commissioner of Public Safety was forced out.
In a blanket memo to all similar employees at the beginning of the Dunleavy Administration, Tuckerman Babcock, then the chief of staff to Dunleavy, requested that people submit their letters of resignation or send a note stating they wanted to stay with the new administration. This has been characterized by the mainstream media as a loyalty oath.
Bakalar, who now serves as the city attorney for Bethel, had been hired by the State Department of Law in 2009, and two years later was assigned to represent elections issues for the Division of Elections, where she handled “initiative applications, ballot challenges, candidate and voter eligibility, and compliance with federal voting issues requirements.” She also provided advice, and drafted legislation and regulations. She was an Attorney 5 when she separated from state service.
Bakalar was the person who was calling balls and strikes for all things related to elections in Alaska, where 53 percent of the voters have voted for Trump, while her own statements show utter contempt for anyone who voted for Trump.
