Today's guilty plea of Jim Clark, ex-Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski's Chief-of-Staff, came as no surprise to me. Nor to a lot of people, I suspect.Sean Cockerham had an impressive biographical piece on Clark up an hour ago. Richard Mauer led the story on the Anchorage Daily News web page, and Wesley Loy has chimed in for them from Juneau. It appears many people were expecting this.
A close friend in Juneau reports that he saw Sen. Lyda Green this afternoon, just after the news broke. She looked like "a bomb had gone off next to her."
I need to disclose that one of my most dear friends is Clark's daughter, Jocelyn. I know that she has been under tremendous stress over this since last summer. I feel a need to keep my distance and find more objectivity in watching Clark's role in this unfold than I have, for instance, in covering Rep. Vic Kohring.
Clark's admission makes a number of remarkable stipulations, possibly the most important of which is this:
26. JAMES CLARK acknowledges that the statements and admissions contained in the foregoing Factual Basis for Pleas do not constitute all of the facts relevant to the matters discussed herein, nor do the foregoing paragraphs contain a complete discussion of the acts taken by CLARK and 'or his co-conspirators. Instead, CLARK understands that this Factual Basis for Plea is merely a summary of some, but not all, criminal conduct engaged in by CLARK.
Update - 10:45 p.m: Steve Aufrecht at What Do I Know? has a good pre-analysis post up on this. From Thailand. Imagine that - an Alaska blogger in Thailand beats 75% of the Alaska media to this important story...