Peltola's Team Told a Judge It Couldn't Say Why 'Other Dan' Ran. DOJ Says They Recruited Him

A week ago, Mary Peltola's campaign walked into federal court in Alaska and said it couldn't say why the other Dan Sullivan is on the ballot. Five days later, The New York Times reported that Peltola's own team helped put him there. Now the Justice Department is telling the judge that the campaign and Senate Democrats "appear to have turned to misleading this Court."

That charge is the sharpest new line in DOJ's first amended complaint, filed Thursday, Oct. 29, in *United States v. State of Alaska* and signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Assistant U.S. Attorney E. Bryan Wilson. DOJ wants a federal court to stop Alaska from certifying the Senate race if Democrat Peltola edges out Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan and the votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired Petersburg teacher on the same ballot, could have made the difference.

What the campaign told the court

When DOJ first sued on Oct. 22, it quoted Alaska's own election chief. In June, Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher found that Daniel J. Sullivan's declaration of candidacy was "not filed in order to declare an actual good-faith candidacy" but "with a purpose to confuse or mislead." State courts later overruled her and put him back on the ballot.

On Oct. 23, Alaskans for Mary, Peltola's campaign committee, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee asked to join the case. Their proposed answer, a filing lawyers must certify under Rule 11 of the federal rules, responded to that exact paragraph. "Proposed Intervenors lack knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief about the truth or falsity of the allegation concerning the purposes of Daniel J. Sullivan's candidacy and therefore deny any allegation about those purposes," it said.

The lawyers who signed it work for the Elias Law Group, the Democrats' top election law firm.

What came out five days later

On Oct. 28, the Times published reporter Kellen Browning's account of what Peltola aides internally called the "ballot composition project," built on interviews with 12 people and text messages. DOJ's new complaint quotes it at length. The Times reported that the effort "involved the Peltola campaign's lawyers, as well as senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee," that "officials with the D.S.C.C. and the Peltola campaign" texted about it "for months," and that the scheme "involved the party's Senate committee and its top law firm." That firm, DOJ points out, is Elias, the same firm representing the campaign and the DSCC in this case.

The detail that hits the campaign's court filing hardest is about motive. The Times reported that a recruiter told the Peltola campaign that Daniel J. Sullivan was "amenable to running if it would help Ms. Peltola," and that he "said he hated Trump, and if it was going to help Mary, he liked Mary." When a state court put him on the ballot in June, a DSCC staffer posted "Other Dan won, will be on ballot" in an internal chat, and two Peltola aides and a DSCC staffer reacted with heart emojis.

So DOJ's argument is simple: the people who reportedly heard his reasons firsthand told a federal judge they couldn't say what his reasons were. "They orchestrated his sham campaign for the purpose of misleading Alaskan voters and getting Peltola elected," the complaint says.

Their answer

The campaign and the DSCC hit back within hours in a new motion to dismiss. "Nonsense," they wrote. They argue they were only asked about Daniel J. Sullivan's "mental state," and "the only one who could possibly know Daniel J. Sullivan's true reasons for filing as a candidate is Daniel J. Sullivan." They call the new allegations "a distraction," accuse DOJ of trying to interfere with "a potential loss by the President's favored U.S. Senate candidate," and say the court "should consider sanctions" against the government.

That defense has a hole. Lawyers can't swear to what is inside a man's head, true. But the federal rules let a party plead lack of knowledge only when that is actually so, and Rule 11 makes the lawyers vouch for it. If the Times is right, the campaign had his reasons in writing from its own recruiter: he would run "if it would help Ms. Peltola." It's like a matchmaker telling a judge she has no idea why the couple got married.

What DOJ added, and what it wants

The amended complaint keeps DOJ's first claim, that the National Voter Registration Act requires states to "protect the integrity of the electoral process," and adds a second: that certifying a result tainted by a sham candidacy would be an obstacle to federal law and is barred by the Supremacy Clause. It cites the Aug. 28 primary, where Peltola took 49.5%, Sen. Sullivan 41.4%, Daniel J. Sullivan 2.5% and Republican Gerald Heikes 1.1%, and says polls put the November race within one or two points.

In Alaska's ranked-choice general election, DOJ warns, some Sullivan voters will mark the wrong Dan, and others won't rank the real one at all, so their ballots flow to Peltola once Daniel J. Sullivan is eliminated. It asks the court to block certification of any result that confusion could have swung, "pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan."

The complaint also cites Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who posted on X Thursday that he is directing the Department of Public Safety to investigate "whether this scheme violated Alaska's laws and whether criminal charges or civil action are warranted."

What happens next

The clock is brutal. Alaska's Division of Elections, which is defending the state in the case, filed a renewed motion to dismiss Thursday, calling the amended complaint "identically meritless" and accusing DOJ of "gamesmanship" for amending instead of answering. It asked U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason to rule by Monday, Nov. 2. The campaign, the DSCC and the League of Women Voters joined that request. The state wanted DOJ's response by 10 a.m. Friday; DOJ asked for 1 p.m.

Notice the irony. The same Division whose director found Daniel J. Sullivan ran to "confuse or mislead" is now asking the court to throw out the lawsuit built on her finding. Its argument is legal, not factual: the NVRA, it says, is a voter registration law and has nothing to do with this.

Whatever Gleason decides, the question DOJ just put on the record won't go away after Tuesday: when a campaign tells a federal court it doesn't know something its own texts reportedly show, who answers for that? Our earlier reports covered the lawsuit itself and the Times' findings.