Alaska
Alaska Judge’s Sex Scandal Brings Scrutiny to US Attorney Tucker
The sexual misconduct findings that toppled a federal judge in Alaska will prompt fresh scrutiny of the Biden-appointed US attorney there, according to two of her predecessors in the post and lawyers experienced in similar inquiries.
S. Lane Tucker, the Anchorage-based US attorney since 2022, wasn’t mentioned by name in a judicial panel’s July report that concluded Judge Joshua Kindred had inappropriately sexualized relationships with two Alaska prosecutors, forcing him to resign.
But defense lawyers are preparing to challenge dozens of cases involving Kindred and those prosecutors. Tucker also faces separate complaints to investigative agencies that raise questions about how the office leadership responded to the allegations.
In one, to the independent US Office of Special Counsel, Kindred’s former law clerk claims Tucker and other top managers retaliated against her after she reported the judge’s behavior to them. In the other, public defenders asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to investigate alleged ethical breaches at the prosecutors’ office.
The IG has referred that complaint to Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which reviews attorney misconduct allegations, according to an Aug. 2 letter obtained by Bloomberg Law.
Robert Bundy and Karen Loeffler, Alaska’s US attorneys during the last two Democratic administrations, expect OPR to probe the office, which they said would inevitably include an examination of what Tucker knew, when she knew it, and how she responded.
“It goes to what the US attorney was doing to ensure that her office was following the appropriate rules of professional responsibility and the obligations in the Justice Manual,” Bundy said.
Spokespersons from both investigative agencies declined to comment or acknowledge their inquiries.
A spokeswoman for the Alaska US attorney’s office declined a request to interview Tucker and declined to comment in response to a detailed list of questions.
Xochitl Hinojosa, the Justice Department’s chief spokesperson, also declined to comment for this story.
Kindred’s resignation capped an 18-month inquiry in which the Ninth Circuit judicial panel found he created a hostile work environment, sexually harassed his clerk, and received nude photos from a senior Alaska federal prosecutor.
Both the US attorney’s office and federal public defenders launched internal reviews after he stepped down to identify cases where the judge or the prosecutors failed to disclose or act on obvious conflicts. Prosecutors disclosed at least 43 cases so far, and defense lawyers, poring over past cases, say they’re preparing to seek relief in many more.
That raises the prospect that leadership in the US attorney’s office missed or ignored red flags and now could be forced to reopen dozens of closed cases.
“There obviously was nobody steering the ship,” said Rich Curtner, the longtime former chief federal defender in Alaska, who retired in 2020.
‘Prompt Response’
In a staff-wide July 12 email obtained by Bloomberg Law, Tucker touted her office’s “prompt response” after the former law clerk, whom she had hired as a line prosecutor, first reported in fall 2022 that Kindred had sexually harassed her.
Tucker and her top deputy, Kathryn Vogel, quickly referred the allegations—including the claim about the other prosecutor’s nude photos—to the Ninth Circuit and OPR, according to internal administrative proceeding records viewed by Bloomberg Law.
The office has never publicly said it undertook its own internal review after learning of Kindred’s claim that the senior prosecutor, Karen Vandergaw, sent him nude photos. Tucker later promoted Vandergaw to an advisory role in September 2023.
The judicial panel substantiated that Vandergaw sent the photos and had a “flirtatious rapport” with Kindred in its July report. She was effectively demoted shortly after the report’s publication.
Tucker also initially declined to approve the former clerk’s request to be reassigned out of the district, according to the clerk’s whistleblower complaint with OSC. In a separate filing in the internal administrative proceeding, Tucker said that she viewed the former law clerk as spreading gossip by discussing the nude photos allegedly sent to the judge.
Three legal ethics professors told Bloomberg Law that such a serious allegation should’ve compelled Tucker to initiate her own review within her office, while waiting for OPR to complete its process.
“This is not a situation in which the US attorney should be taking a hands-off attitude,” said John Strait, a professor emeritus at Seattle University School of Law who has run ethics training for the Alaska US attorney’s office.
Of particular concern, given the potential conflicts of interest, was Tucker’s decision to elevate Vandergaw into a role with oversight of more cases during the pendency of the Ninth Circuit probe.
In response to a convicted cyberstalker’s motion for a new trial due to Kindred’s failure to recuse, prosecutors Sept. 3 argued the guilty verdict must stand because Vandergaw “played only a minor advisory role.”
Bloomberg Law’s analysis of the 43 potentially conflicted Kindred matters flagged by the US attorney’s office shows Vandergaw was involved in nearly three dozen of them. Neither Kindred nor Vandergaw have commented publicly since the judicial panel released its findings.
Loeffler, the US attorney in Alaska from 2009 to 2017, said the public attention on Kindred’s misconduct should have turned the ethics problems into a “a nonstop daily issue” for that office’s leadership. “You have to be there every day dealing with the fallout,” she said.
Tucker waited nearly a month after Kindred’s resignation to call an in-person, all-staff meeting to discuss it, said current and former staffers who requested anonymity to discuss internal operations.
A detached leadership style and out-of-state absences have become hallmarks of her two-year tenure, according to interviews with nine current and former employees of the office and three lawyers and law enforcement officials who have business there.
Tucker left Alaska for roughly a third of weekdays in her first year on the job, according to an analysis of travel documents obtained by Bloomberg Law.
“That’s just unheard of,” Loeffler said.
On July 12, four days after the public release of the judicial report about Kindred, Tucker sent a staff-wide email. “It is important for you all to know how proud I am of the ethical compass of our office and the work we do on behalf of our community,” she wrote.
Nine days later, Tucker left the state to attend the Ninth Circuit’s judicial conference in Sacramento. She had initially scheduled to spend an extra eight days of personal time in Palm Springs after the conference, the documents show. It’s unclear if she kept those plans.
Warning Letter
Tucker grew up in Sarasota, Florida, and graduated from law school at the University of Utah. She moved to Alaska in 2002 after working as a government attorney in Washington. She served as an assistant US attorney and then civil chief in the office before moving to private practice at two prominent law firms in Alaska—Perkins Coie and Stoel Rives.
Both firms declined to comment for this article.
Cecy Graf, the former chief financial officer at Stoel Rives, said Tucker was a “force to be reckoned with” and was considered whenever there was a “major decision to be made.”
When she was under consideration for the US attorney’s job, two former prosecutors in the office shared a letter they’d drafted for the Biden transition team with Tucker. The letter urged Alaska’s next top federal prosecutor to prioritize addressing what they characterized as the office’s pattern of discrimination complaints from women attorneys.
They also highlighted a November 2020 decision from DOJ’s internal complaint adjudication office, reviewed by Bloomberg Law, which found “there is evidence that a discriminatory and retaliatory culture existed within the” Alaska US attorney’s office.
One of the letter’s authors, former Alaska federal prosecutor Kimberly Sayers-Fay, said Tucker never responded to her message.
Tucker was confirmed by the Senate in May 2022 to lead the office, a staff of around 50 to 60 tucked inside a tight-knit legal community. Her resume lists 15 years of Justice Department experience—all as a civil attorney, without referencing criminal cases. She discussed her inexperience in criminal law openly with staff after taking over as US attorney, employees said.
Faced with multiple veteran departures, Tucker turned to James Klugman, who had four years of federal prosecution experience, to helm the criminal division at the start of 2023.
Tucker delegated wide-ranging authority to him, while rarely attending criminal meetings herself, said multiple people with direct knowledge of the office’s operations. Klugman was reassigned back to regular line attorney around a year later.
“It sounds like a perfect storm,” said Mark Yancey, a former US attorney who later ran DOJ’s national training academy for prosecutors. “You really need strong leadership in your criminal division.”
Yancey added that his former division, DOJ’s Executive Office for United States Attorneys, could also look into leadership’s response to the Kindred scandal.
Judicial Application
Tucker has already set her sights on her next career move: one of the district’s open judgeships.
In a 2023 letter to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) expressing interest in the vacancy, Tucker wrote: “I have developed a balanced perspective that allows me to recognize the validity of disparate viewpoints and arguments, treat all with dignity and respect, and resolve problems with fairness and efficiency.”
The Alaska Bar Association rated Tucker as one of the four most qualified applicants for the judgeship.
Murkowski, who had previously praised President Joe Biden’s choice of Tucker for US attorney, declined to say if she also recommended Tucker as a finalist for the previous court vacancy—which is still awaiting a White House nomination.
Both she and the state’s other Republican senator, Dan Sullivan, have called on the Justice Department to investigate the US attorney’s office in light of the scandal.
Alaska
Man with same name as Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan can appear on GOP primary ballot, state’s Supreme Court rules
The battle of the Dan Sullivans is on.
The Alaska Supreme Court ruled Monday that a man with the same name as Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan can challenge the sitting lawmaker in the state’s GOP Senate primary in August. The high court upheld a ruling from a lower court judge that cleared the way for Daniel J. Sullivan to appear on the primary ballot, reversing a decision by state officials earlier this month that he was ineligible because he was allegedly trying to confuse voters.
The state Supreme Court directed Alaska’s Division of Elections to decide how Daniel J. Sullivan should be listed on the ballot “within the confines of existing Alaska ballot design law.”
The conflict is taking place in one of the country’s most closely watched Senate elections. The sitting Sen. Sullivan is running for a third term, but former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola is vying to challenge him, setting up what could be an unusually competitive race in a deep-red state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in almost 20 years.
The senator has called his same-name competitor a “sham candidate” and accused him of trying to trick voters and help Democrats flip the seat. Daniel J. Sullivan — a retired teacher and former U.S. Forest Service employee from Petersburg, Alaska — has denied those allegations and insisted he is both qualified and genuinely interested in running for Senate.
About two weeks ago, the Alaska Division of Elections determined that the challenger Sullivan could not appear on the ballot, arguing his paperwork “was not filed in order to declare an actual good-faith candidacy, but was instead filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead.”
In a letter to the candidate, Director Carol Beecher pointed to the fact that Daniel J. Sullivan had initially requested to appear on the ballot as “Dan Sullivan,” the same name format as the senator. She also wrote that he hadn’t previously been affiliated with the state Republican Party, had a website design that “appears to be deliberate[ly]” similar to the senator’s campaign site and had worked with a political consultant with links to Democratic candidates.
Daniel J. Sullivan asked a state court to reverse the decision. On Friday, Judge Thomas Matthews ruled in his favor, finding the non-senator Sullivan met the requirements to run for U.S. Senate and the state didn’t have the authority to exclude him based on “good faith.”
“The court does not minimize the Division’s concern that voters should not be misled,” the judge wrote. But he added that “Alaska election law gives the Division tools to address that concern,” including regulating how candidates appear on the ballot.
With ballots set to be printed this week, the issue was appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court on an expedited basis, with both sides filing court papers over the weekend.
The state Division of Elections asked the high court to overturn Matthews’ ruling, arguing it would “leave Alaska constitutionally required to permit bad-faith ballot access.” The agency said it reached its conclusion about Daniel J. Sullivan after it received a complaint from the National Republican Senatorial Committee “credibly alleging” he was seeking to “cause voter confusion” and made a “bewildering” request to appear on the ballot with the senator’s middle initial.
If Daniel J. Sullivan is permitted to remain on the ballot, the state asked the Alaska Supreme Court to allow it to print his full name and list his party affiliation as “nonpartisan” to “ensure voters are not forced to guess between two nearly identical names.”
The Alaska Republican Party and several GOP-led states filed amicus briefs siding with Alaska.
Daniel J. Sullivan’s lawyers, meanwhile, argued the state “lacked any basis in Alaska law to exclude Mr. Sullivan from the ballot” and didn’t have the power to look into his “private motivations.” They wrote that state law doesn’t give officials the power to keep qualified candidates off the ballot due to potential confusion.
“[All] that Mr. Sullivan asks here is to be listed on the ballot, and the Division is obviously empowered to do so in a non-confusing manner,” his lawyers wrote.
Following oral arguments, the high court sided with Daniel J. Sullivan in a two-page order late Monday, and said it would issue a fuller opinion at a later date.
Jeffrey Robinson, an attorney for Daniel J. Sullivan, told CBS News his legal team is “grateful” for the Alaska Supreme Court’s decision to “affirm Judge Matthews’ well-reasoned, thorough order vacating the Division’s unlawful decision to exclude Mr. Sullivan as a candidate.”
“We expect that the Division will act in full compliance with existing Alaska ballot design law in its preparation of the ballots,” Robinson said in an email.
The senator’s campaign spokesperson, Nate Adams, said: “We’re disappointed in the court’s decision because as the sham candidate Dan J. Sullivan’s lawyers made clear in their legal arguments, the only reason he is running is to deceive voters and manipulate Alaska’s election system.”
“However, we are encouraged by the fact that the Director of the Division of Elections will be able to use her expertise to differentiate between the Petersburg fraud and the incumbent — Senator Dan Sullivan — to the benefit of Alaska voters,” Adams said.
The first Jesuit missionaries in Alaska sailed up the Yukon River in 1887. By the turn of the 20th century, the religious order of the Catholic Church had as many as 50 Jesuits in the state.
Now, only two remain. And by the end of June, there will be none.
The Jesuits’ nearly 140 years in the state was honored at an event at Bethel’s Immaculate Conception Church on June 16. A procession of priests wearing long white gowns with red hems walked down the aisle to open the event. The Bishop of the Diocese of Fairbanks, Stephen Maekawa, thumped the ground with a shimmering silver staff known as a clozier as he approached the altar.
“My brothers and sisters, we gather together to celebrate this wonderful and blessed occasion to acknowledge the love of God and the work of God through the 139 year mission of the Society of Jesus of the Jesuit fathers,” Maekawa said to open the event.
A traditional Catholic mass followed, with readings in both English and Yup’ik. During the sermon, Maekawa acknowledged the vastness of the Fairbanks diocese, and the tremendous amount of work done by the Jesuits to establish it.
“All of the 46 churches of the Diocese of Fairbanks that we currently have were established by either the Jesuit fathers or by direction of a Jesuit bishop,” Maekawa said. “We have a long history of the Society of Jesus’ presence and ministry here in all of Alaska.”
The Jesuits are an order within the Catholic Church, akin to the Dominicans or Franciscans. They have a reputation for taking on some of the Catholic Church’s most remote assignments.
That missionary spirit brought the Jesuits to the Yukon River in 1887, where they built churches, schools, and ministries. Without their work, Catholicism may not have taken root in huge swaths of Alaska, particularly among Alaska Native communities.
But the Jesuits leave a complicated legacy. Their methods of converting Native people to the religion, particularly in the first half of the 20th century, created generational traumas still felt to this day.
Fr. Sean Carroll is the provincial of the Jesuits West Province, which oversees Alaska and nine other states.
“Thank you for all that you have taught us about who Jesus is and how to love and serve Him wholeheartedly,” Carroll said. “I also thank you for your patience with us. For there have been times when we have sinned and when we have hurt you.”
Missionaries, including the Jesuits, forcefully converted and assimilated Alaska Native people into Western culture and religion. Students at Jesuit-run boarding schools were forced to abandon their Native languages and physically punished when caught speaking languages other than English. Native dancing and drumming were also banned.
The Jesuits West Province maintains a list of 150 Jesuits with credible claims of sexual abuse against minors or vulnerable adults. A quarter of the accused Jesuits served in Alaska at some point in time.
“I ask for your forgiveness for all that we have done that was not rooted in Christ and love for Him, and for when we did not value your culture nor recognize the presence of God in you,” Carroll said.
Carroll gave the order to withdraw from the state last spring. A big issue was the recruitment of Jesuits willing to travel and serve in remote villages. He told the congregation that the Jesuits’ work would continue, just without a permanent presence.
Fr. Rich Magner is one of the two remaining Jesuit priests in Alaska. His last day serving Chevak, Hooper Bay, and Scammon Bay is June 30.
“We all always knew coming in, or should have known, that we’re not going to be here forever. It’s going to be mission accomplished at some point,” Magner said. “And then we hand it off to the diocese that we’ve helped create, and so that’s a good feeling.”
Magner’s next stop is a Clinical Pastoral Education residency in Tacoma, Washington.
The other remaining priest, Fr. Tom Provinsal, first came to Alaska in 1968 to teach. A fond memory, he said, was meeting Elders that practiced traditional subsistence lifestyles.
“Some of the grandmothers, their fingers were just all bent with arthritis and stuff like that, you know, their whole lives they’ve been working out in the cold and the wet, doing food, sewing, all that kind of stuff,” Provinsal said. “I’d say I just feel very privileged to have come when I did come and to see that.”
Provinsal returned in 1975 as a priest and has served in the region ever since. After moving away, he plans to take a five month sabbatical. What happens next, he said, is in God’s hands.
Two lines formed in the aisle for communion at the end of the mass. After taking communion, Bethel’s Parish Administrator Susan Murphy gave a final thank you.
“It’s difficult to say goodbye to people who have been a part of our lives for so long,” Murphy said. “We know that you have done what was yours to do, and have taught us to do what is ours to do. We are grateful.”
Dominic Hunt, a Yup’ik deacon that flew in from Emmonak for the event, led the congregation through a final prayer.
“Bless them with your wisdom, that they may be a word of hope, a world in need. We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen,” Hunt said.
About 70 people posed for a photo on the altar – priests, deacons, parishioners, Elders and children — many of them smiling, some standing quietly.
The photo doesn’t tell the whole story. But it’s a moment when gratitude, grief, and memory all shared the same room.
JUNEAU, Alaska (KTUU) – The Supreme Court of Alaska will be taking up the case of the State of Alaska, Division of Elections v. Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr.
The oral arguments will be held Monday at 10 a.m. via Zoom, according to an order and opening notice.
The document also specifies that a decision is expected to be made before noon on Tuesday.
According to documents from the Division of Elections, the state must start printing ballots at noon on the same day.
This comes after an Anchorage Superior Court Judge ordered Dan J. Sullivan on to the ballot Friday.
See a spelling or grammar error? Report it to web@ktuu.com
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