Trump is lying about the gas pipeline; Alaska Republicans can't handle the truth

Everyone in Alaska needs to understand that there is no $54 billion investment approved by South Korea to pay for the Alaska LNG project.

Donald Trump lied about this from the Oval Office.

He was seated on his throne while Sen. Dan Sullivan, Rep. Nick Begich the Third, Gov. Mike Dunleavy and and assorted other Trump Yes Men stood behind him in a display of subservience.

Trump’s $54 billion lie in the White House was an election stunt to prop up Sullivan’s campaign. Sullivan tried to capitalize on it by saying the gasline is now across the “finish line” because of Trump.

Trump will repeat some version of his gasline lie Tuesday at his Wasilla airing of grievances. It’s always possible that he will claim the pipeline portion of the project has become a national security priority and announce a pre-election scheme to divert billions from the Pentagon. Branding it as a high-cost public works project would be a reach, but this is all about appearances, not substance, for the next few weeks.

Alaska Republicans have refused to admit that Trump was lying with the South Korean gambit to influence the U.S. Senate and U.S. House races in Alaska. They suggest South Korea is not telling the truth about its investment plan, which is laughable.

To its credit, the Anchorage Daily News had a clear-headed editorial this weekend on the gasline fraud.

“An announcement five weeks before an election, with an incumbent senator locked in a tight race against Mary Peltola standing at the president’s elbow, isn’t economic development. It’s campaign theater,” the Daily News editorial said.

This followed a clear-headed column by Larry Persily: “The Oval Office announcement was a political publicity stunt to help keep Republicans in Alaska’s congressional races.”

The chief gasbags for Sullivan, Begich the Third, Dunleavy and the Alaska Republican Party, however, are desperately trying to con Alaskans into believing that Trump is truthful.

They say we can count on South Korea to hand over the $54 billion or something close to it because Trump said so. The Trump name and the Trump trade deal are powerful enough to compel South Korea to put $54 billion toward the project.

This is not the moment in our history, the gasbags say, for anyone to point out that the $54 billion deal is a fraud.

It makes sense to trust the people with the $54 billion. Not the guy with his hand out asking for $54 billion.

Suzanne Downing, the supposed brains behind Bernadette Wilson’s campaign, wrote a muddle-headed piece claiming that if the Anchorage Daily News and columnist Larry Persily keep this up, they “will destroy the gasline if it means they can get the Democrats to take over.”

“I see an effort to discredit the people advancing Alaska LNG so thoroughly that the project itself becomes collateral damage,” the GOP fortune teller says.

Downing, who claims to have secret gasline information she can’t share with anyone, says that Koreans who read "negative nellie” Persily and the ADN may decide not to invest tens of billions in the gasline. Sure.

If a few opinion columns or a few thousand opinion columns are enough to destroy the finances of one of the world’s largest energy projects, then the South Koreans are right that it is not commercially viable.

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