Republicans are launching investigations into Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola’s campaign amid allegations that she and other Democrats colluded to recruit spoiler candidates in her highly competitive race against Sen. Dan Sullivan.
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) said late Wednesday he would order an investigation into whether Peltola should face criminal charges or civil action, and the House Oversight Committee sought testimony from two staffers reportedly involved in the alleged recruitment scheme.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department issued a new wave of subpoenas as part of an ongoing grand jury investigation it has launched into the matter, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing probe.
“Alaskans have a fundamental right to vote for the candidate they actually intend to support,” Dunleavy wrote on X. “Deliberately tricking voters into casting their ballots for someone else strikes at the integrity of our elections.”
His announcement followed a New York Times report that said Peltola’s campaign was involved in recruiting Dan J. Sullivan, an independent candidate with a name similar to the Republican incumbent, Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, in an effort to dilute support for him. Both appear on the general-election ballot, along with Peltola and Republican candidate Gerald Heikes.
Peltola’s challenge against the incumbent Sullivan is key to Democrats’ bid to take control of the Senate. Peltola was a prized recruit for the party, given her past electoral successes in securing the state’s at-large U.S. House seat and crossover appeal to Republican voters.
The state had already received nearly 62,000 early ballots, including mail-in and in-person, of the 93,000 issued by the time Dunleavy announced his investigation.
Republicans have for months claimed Dan J. Sullivan was a plant intended to confuse voters. The retired teacher initially ran as a Republican and requested to be listed as Dan S. Sullivan, matching the middle initial of the sitting senator. Dan J. Sullivan shot down claims that he was part of a ploy by the Democrats, saying over the summer that he was running for the Senate because he was genuinely frustrated with the incumbent’s performance.
Sen. Sullivan told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the allegation against Peltola’s campaign was “a scandal at the highest order.”
He said Peltola, her campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) “spent over a year scheming in a secret operation to trick Alaskans to get them to throw away their vote.”
“The Democrats will do anything to gain power,” he added.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee sent letters Thursday requesting testimony from former Peltola campaign manager Elisa Rios and Democratic consultant Jerid Kurtz. Rios was cited in the Times story as a source, alleging Kurtz helped recruit spoiler candidates. Rios and Kurtz did not respond to requests for comment Thursday afternoon.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday at Joint Base Andrews, ahead of Dunleavy’s announcement, that Peltola should leave the race. “I think she should be prosecuted criminally,” Trump said.
The Justice Department has moved in recent months to try to prosecute several people Trump has called out as political foes.
It’s unclear what crime state investigators in Alaska could pursue, said Scott Kendall, an Alaska attorney who was chief of staff to then-Gov. Bill Walker and legal counsel to Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s 2010 campaign. Kendall called the reported attempts to trick the electorate “gross” and “really distasteful” but said he couldn’t see any apparent criminal misconduct.
Alaska’s Supreme Court ruled in June that candidates do not need to be acting in good faith to run for office so long as they are otherwise eligible.
“It seems a bit bizarre to say ‘I’m opening a criminal and civil investigation’ without pointing at … the law or at least principle of law that I think was violated in this case,” Kendall said.
Kendall also noted the state’s ranked-choice voting in the general election would mitigate any confusion by having two candidates with the same name. (Sen. Sullivan’s campaign posted a jingle advising voters to rank both.)
In response to the Times story, a spokesperson for the Peltola campaign said that the organization had no involvement with the campaign of either Dan Sullivan. In response to Trump’s legal threats, the Peltola campaign added: “Mary got in this race because Alaskans deserve a champion who is fighting to lower their costs and put Alaska first, and no tweet or threat from any DC politician will keep her away from that fight.”
The DSCC also denied involvement with Dan J. Sullivan’s campaign. The organization added Wednesday that Republicans have “long history of recruiting and propping up candidates in an attempt to boost their own campaigns.”
The Alaska Senate race has become one of the most closely watched nationwide. A Washington Post analysis of recent polls showed Peltola was leading by an average of five points in the state, which Trump won by 13 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election.
Republicans have for months attempted to boot Dan J. Sullivan from the ballot. In June, election officials in Alaska moved to remove him from the primary but were thwarted by the state Supreme Court ruling.
Dan J. Sullivan then advanced to the general election in the state’s August primary after receiving 2.5 percent of the vote.
He has since done practically no substantive campaigning. He has raised $30,555.62 as of mid-October, $10,400 of which he loaned from his own pocket. His only campaign expenses this year are $300 to make a candidate brochure and $10,000 in legal fees to stay on the ballot, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
In comparison, the incumbent senator has raised more than $14 million in that time frame.
Last week, the Justice Department filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block certification of the results if Sen. Sullivan loses by a margin of votes smaller than the number of ballots cast for the other Dan Sullivan on the ballot.
While the Justice Department initially opposed allowing Peltola’s campaign to intervene in the case before a judge makes their ruling, it changed its position in a filing Wednesday after the Times story published, saying circumstances had changed.
Department lawyers say they now hope to seek more information through the litigation about the Peltola campaign’s role in the allegations central to the Times’s report.
“They are cheating,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a Fox News interview Wednesday. “Let’s just call it what it is: They are cheating.”
Blanche sidestepped questions on whether any prosecutable crimes had been committed.
“We’re not talking about ongoing criminal investigations, but what we do have now is a civil investigation and a civil suit that is hoping and asking a federal court to stop this,” he said, referring to the lawsuit the department filed last week.
Since the summer, a federal grand jury in Alaska has also been examining whether any crimes had been committed as part of Dan J. Sullivan’s campaign. Following the Times’s report this week, prosecutors issued new subpoenas seeking documents and potential communications referenced in the story, a person familiar with the matter said.
Derek T. Muller, University of Notre Dame law professor, said the department’s argument put forward in the suit was “absurdly thin” and “one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen.”
He said in a blog post last week that an investigation to determine whether name confusion affected the results “is essentially impossible.”
Peltola’s campaign, meanwhile, condemned that lawsuit in a statement as a “despicable political threat” and promised to “fight to ensure every single eligible voter in Alaska can make their voice heard.”
Name confusion is not new in Alaska. During Sen. Sullivan’s first race, in 2014, another Dan Sullivan, the then-mayor of Anchorage, was running for lieutenant governor as a Republican.
“Most voters in that Republican primary thought they were voting for the former mayor of Anchorage,” James Lottsfeldt, an Alaska strategist who is working with pro-Peltola super PACs, said in a September interview.
Lottsfeldt said at the time that he had searched in 2014 for other people named Dan Sullivan who could be run as spoiler candidates, though he denied ever executing on the plans or any involvement in Dan J. Sullivan’s campaign.
The Times reported, based on an interview with Rios, Peltola’s former campaign manager, that Lottsfeldt was, in fact, involved in financially boosting spoiler candidates, including Heikes. Rios was fired in August. She has not responded to messages for comment since the Times story published.
Lottsfeldt has continued to deny involvement, casting Rios as a disgruntled former employee.
The Alaska Republican Party also fought to include a candidate whom Democrats accused of being a spoiler in the 2024 House race when Peltola was running for reelection.
Eric Hafner, who is serving time in a federal prison in New York, ran as a Democrat that year, prompting the state’s Democratic Party to sue to have him removed from the ballot. Alaska Republicans intervened in the suit to support Hafner’s candidacy. Republican Nick Begich defeated Peltola in that year’s election.
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