Federal prosecutors ordered Gerald Heikes, a long-shot Republican candidate in Alaska’s Senate race, to appear before a grand jury days before the midterm elections and bring any records he has on political groups and other candidates in the race, CNN reported Friday, citing documents it reviewed.
The subpoena is part of an accelerating criminal investigation into whether operatives aligned with Democratic candidate Mary Peltola tried to recruit spoiler candidates into the race, including one who shares a name with the incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. Peltola has denied any knowledge of attempts to recruit other candidates.
Dated one day after The New York Times reported that Peltola’s campaign was linked to that effort, the subpoena seeks communications related to Peltola’s campaign and to several political action committees and the operatives tied to them.
Notably, a senior official in the Justice Department’s civil rights division in Washington signed the subpoena, not a prosecutor in Alaska.
“They want me to appear and tell them what I know and how I was recruited, but I wasn’t recruited. I just took a chance,” Heikes told CNN on Friday. The Justice Department declined to comment.
As of Friday morning, Peltola led the initial count by roughly 600 ballots with 48.2% of the vote. Because of Alaska’s ranked-choice system, if no one gets more than 50% of the vote, the winner cannot be confirmed until November 18, when election officials tabulate voters’ second-choice preferences.
What is going on in the Alaska Senate race?
Heikes, a conservative drywall contractor from Palmer, Alaska, who is running third in the still-undecided race, told CNN that earlier this year an operative whose name he doesn’t know pitched him on a Senate run. He said he had already been planning to seek office, and settled on the Senate race after that meeting.
“I did it out of fascination… I wanted to see what would happen,” he said. “If they think I’m an operative, they’re wrong.”
Heikes indicated that he supports Sullivan over Peltola, and said his aim was never to draw votes away from any candidate. He said he first felt called by God to run for office about two decades ago, when he sought the governorship.
Newly formed PACs linked to an out-of-state operative have spent millions of dollars attacking Sullivan and backing Heikes, CNN previously reported.
Heikes said he knows nothing about who is behind the spending. He has won about 2% of the vote so far, with an estimated quarter of ballots still uncounted.
Heikes previously ran in the state’s Republican Senate primary in 2008, winning 599 votes, or 0.57%, and in the 2016 Republican primary for Alaska’s House seat, where he took 2,817 votes, or 5.2%. He was also among the candidates in the 2018 race for governor.