Sullivan misuses Senate letterhead for unsolicited campaign emails
It is improper to use the Senate letterhead for partisan correspondence and for "any campaign or campaign-related correspondence," according to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics.
But Sen. Dan Sullivan, who is running for a third six-year term and must know the rule, decided to violate it last week.
Sullivan unloaded a trove of unsolicited campaign fluff on thousands of Alaskans, using Senate letterhead from his office.
He’s going to complain that he didn’t violate the rule and he was just informing folks of the facts, but anyone who reads the bragsheet about how much money he has gotten for this and that will see this as electioneering.
He should have used campaign money for this advertising, not government resources.
The emails were targeted to specific towns and regions of Alaska.
The emails had the words “Delivering for insert name here in the subject line.
And all of them began, “I am contacting you to share an update on some of the important work I’ve been doing on behalf of insert name here here in Washington, D.C.”
The emails are all part of the same campaign pitch—that Sullivan has done great things for Alaskans in every town and secured billions of dollars for Alaska.
He didn’t mention the war in Iran, $5 gasoline in the major Alaska cities and much higher in small towns, $6.20 diesel fuel, the cost of electricity, the deficit or why he has done nothing about the unprecedented level of federal corruption in the Trump administration.
Readers have already sent me copies of separate campaign emails that brag about what he has done for Fairbanks, Anchorage, Bethel, Nome, Mat-Su Valley, Kenai, Juneau, Haines, Wrangell, Ketchikan, Kodiak, Homer, Prince of Wales Island, Sitka, Soldotna, North Pole, Utqiagvik, Delta Juncion and Petersburg.
Every version concludes with a paragraph that starts by saying "The insert name here community is so important to Alaska.”
Sullivan will claim that because he didn’t use the words, “Vote for me,” these are not campaign documents, which makes perfect sense to people who have been in Washington, D.C. too long.
Sullivan's email went out just before the 60-day pre-election blackout period that Congress has created on mass mailings by members. The existence of this blackout period is proof enough that material sent before the deadline is often electioneering, even without the magic “Vote for me” disclosure.
Several recipients of the Begich “survey” said he has refused for two years to reply to messages, but now that he is running again he claims he wants to hear from people.
“It was enraging because he urged us to contact his office if we had any needs, etc. Maybe he doesn’t know that a group of us have been going to the office to deliver POMs and ever since the state coordinator changed, the office has had the door shut. We could leave the POM but no personal contact,” one reader said.
Here are some of Sullivan’s declaration about places in Alaska that are “so important to Alaska.”
Someone in Begich’s office must have worked overtime to design this brilliant “survey.”
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