Alaska Attorney General Talis Colberg is under pressure to appoint an independent investigator to probe whether operatives in Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign broke Alaska’s criminal witness-tampering laws after the state’s personnel board advised him earlier this week that it does not have the authority to take up criminal matters.

“The Attorney General should do the right thing,” Alaska Rep. Les Gara said Friday. “Even campaign staff for a Presidential ticket [Colberg] and Governor Palin support aren’t above the law.”

Two weeks ago, Gara sent a letter to Colberg alleging that McCain’s campaign staffers influenced witnesses close to Gov. Sarah Palin to get them to withhold cooperation from a legislative inquiry into whether Palin abused her authority in pursuing a vendetta against her ex-brother-in-law, a state trooper.

“Until Senator McCain sent campaign staff up here on August 29, everyone, including the Governor, agreed the Legislature’s investigation was proper,” Gara said. “After the McCain staffers arrived, people who were willing to testify starting violating their subpoenas. It’s not rocket science that someone worked to change their minds, and that’s a crime under Alaska law.”  

Colberg earlier spearheaded a failed effort by the Palin administration to get the state courts to quash subpoenas issued to members of Palin’s administration during the investigation and was criticized for not turning over e-mails to assist the probe.

Despite resistance to the subpoenas from Palin’s aides and from Colberg, the legislative inquiry on “Troopergate” was completed on Oct. 10 with a finding that Palin had abused her authority and violated the state ethics law that bars officials from using their positions to further personal aims.

The “Troopergate” scandal erupted in July when Palin fired Alaska’s Commissioner of Public Safety Walt Monegan, who then blamed his dismissal on his refusal to succumb to pressure from Palin, her husband and her associates to fire her ex-brother-in-law, State Trooper Mike Wooten.

Initially, Palin welcomed an investigation by the Republican-dominated Legislative Council. However, after her selection as John McCain’s running mate in late August, she and the McCain campaign attacked that inquiry as a Democratic witch-hunt led by Barack Obama’s supporters.

On Sept. 2, just a day before she accepted the GOP nomination, Palin took the unusual step of filing an ethics complaint with the state personnel board against herself regarding her firing of Monegan.

Colberg, a close Palin ally, responded to Gara’s letter by advising the Democratic lawmaker to bring his concerns before the state personnel board, which hired an independent investigator to probe whether Palin’s firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan was proper.

Gara began his push to have the witness-tampering issue addressed last month with a letter to Colonel Audie Holloway, director of the Alaska State Troopers.

“Something has caused, or in the words of the statute, may have ‘induced’ these witnesses to change their position,” Gara wrote. “It seems a witness would not risk possible jail time that comes with the violations of a subpoena without advice of others.”

Holloway responded in writing to Gara on Oct. 2, agreeing that the witness-tampering concerns were a “serious issue” but declining to pursue an investigation because of the unusual situation surrounding the possible crime.

Holloway noted that the underlying dispute involved his state troopers — and that Attorney General Colberg had been party to the Palin administration’s efforts to contest subpoenas served on Palin’s aides.

Given these concerns, Holloway concluded, “The short answer is that I cannot dedicate resources at this time.”

But he suggested that Gara might seek a directive from the legislature and the executive branch for the state troopers to hire an “unbiased investigator for this type of sensitive investigation.”

Colberg told Gara to take his complaints to the personnel board and ask the panel to further expand its probe of Palin by having the independent investigator look into his charges of witness tampering.

Last Wednesday, Timothy Petumenos, the independent investigator hired by the personnel board, wrote Gara to inform him that the probe he has been conducting “will not address the circumstances under which witnesses in the parallel legislative investigation came to testify or not testify.”

“I have explained this to the Attorney General who has authorized me to tell you that your concerns should be brought back to the State of Alaska Department of Law,” Petumenos wrote in an Oct. 28 letter to Gara.

On Friday, Gara sent Colberg a letter saying Petumenos “has placed the ball back in your court.”

“I will now request again that you follow up Colonel Holloway’s appropriate recommendation,” Gara wrote in a letter sent to Colberg Friday. “Your office and the State Troopers will be seen by some members will be seen by some members of the public as having a conflict in investigating whether witness tampering occurred by McCain staff or others. I agree…that the Troopers be provided funding [to] hire an independent investigator to look into this serious matter.”

Colberg’s office did not return calls for comment Friday.

In an interview Thursday, Gara said Colberg’s advice that he should take his witness tampering charges to the personnel board was a “stall tactic.”

“He’s not dumb. He’s just trying to avoid looking into it,” Gara said. “The personnel board has no jurisdiction over criminal conduct to stop a legislative investigation, which is what I believe the McCain campaign was trying to do.

“For the Attorney General, the state’s top law enforcement official, to say ‘why don’t we have someone who has no role looking into criminal activity’ investigate this shows that the torn allegiances the attorney general has to his job and the governor.”

Attorney General Colberg is “choosing party politics over the rule of law,” Gara told me. “He’s the state’s top criminal law officer. It’s going to have to be the court of public opinion that convinces him this is a serious matter. But I will keep pushing him to investigate.”