Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy has put forward a litany of head-turning appointments to serve in his administration and fill state commissions and boards — including a woman who practices “regenerative medicine” to the state medical board. But his pick for the Alaska Police Standards Council may take the cake.
Veronica Lambertson is the owner of the Bird Creek Motel between Anchorage and Girdwood, where she said she’s gained valuable experience working with law enforcement on issues like kidnapping and human trafficking, and has a long history of posting in support of fringe conspiracies ranging from Holocaust denial and elites harvesting children’s life force to flat eartherism, that 9/11 was caused by “project blue beam technology” and that there are 50,000 clones living in the country made in three ultra-secret cloning labs.
The council is responsible for developing standards for law enforcement in Alaska and investigating police misconduct.
While Lambertson’s beliefs haven’t drawn much attention in the legislative process so far, they were the centerpiece of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing on Wednesday, with several legislators saying they had recently learned about her posting history, pointing to several posts that have been circulating in the Capitol.
“I wanted to ask you a few questions about some of your social media postings to get your perspective on those,” said Anchorage Democratic Sen. Matt Claman. “One of the postings that I saw was a posting that you didn’t believe the Holocaust was real. … Do you believe that the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were killed, actually occurred or do you think that’s fiction?”
After a long silence, Lambertson said she simply had questions about the official record.
“Do I believe something happened at the Holocaust, a tragedy, and a lot of people died? Yes, I believe that actually happened,” she said. “Are we being told the true story about it all? No, I don’t believe we’re being told the true story about it.”
Claman asked what she thought the true story of the Holocaust was.
“That,” she said, “I don’t know, yet.”
Here’s the full exchange:
She went on to say that she believes parts of the Holocaust are still classified and only certain events have been allowed to be part of the official historical record. Until “we see the unredacted truth of the whole story,” she said, she’ll have questions.
Things were similar when Claman asked about her posts repeating extreme-right conspiracy theories about “elites” torturing children and harvesting adrenochromes — a byproduct of the adrenaline response — to essentially create youth potions that are used by people like Hilary Clinton and various Hollywood elites.
“Do you believe that children are being harvested for adrenochrome?” Claman asked after struggling with the pronunciation of the compound, which, to be clear, doesn’t actually have any documented rejuvenating effects.
“From the information I have seen and documentation that was provided, it’s a question that should be asked,” she said.
The adrenocrhome-harvesting conspiracy theory, which gained popularity in extreme-right groups and led to a gunman storming a pizza restaurant, is a light rebranding of the centuries-old antisemitic blood libel, a false claim that Jewish people were torturing Christian children for various rituals. The claims have long been used to fuel the violent persecution of Jewish people and were frequently used in Nazi Germany.
Claman replied that he didn’t want to know what other people think; he wanted to know what she thought.
“I have no evidence of seeing it personally,” she said.
Here’s that exchange:
The committee members also asked for her thoughts on January 6, to which she similarly insisted that the official story isn’t the whole story. It’s the media, she claimed, that sensationalized the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and she had questions about why former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had “disarmed” D.C. police ahead of the event — another foundational conspiracy theory to reframe the siege and bad actors as a false flag attack orchestrated by the government.
And it doesn’t end there.
Juneau Independent editor Mark Sabbatini caught up with Lambertson after the hearing for an interview that included her thoughts on whether the Earth is round.
“Have you gone into space, and you can verify it’s round or flat — or it’s both?” she asked. “Do you know the answer?”
While the committee has to advance her nomination for consideration of the entire Legislature in a joint session in the coming weeks — the only way for lawmakers to reject a candidate is through that vote, otherwise they’ll be automatically confirmed – several lawmakers said they hoped it wouldn’t get that far.
Sidestepping all her controversial beliefs, Anchorage Democratic Sen. Löki Tobin noted that she doesn’t believe Lamberston is even technically qualified to serve in the seat. That’s because the public seat she’s been appointed to is reserved for people from communities with fewer than 2,500 residents.
While Bird Creek may be tiny, Tobin pointed out it’s still wholly a part of the Municipality of Anchorage, a city of nearly 300,000 people.
“I think this is unfortunately a situation of where Ms. Lambertson has been put into a seat that she is not qualified to hold based on statute and practice,” Tobin said during Wednesday’s hearing, adding “I would encourage Ms, Lambertson to consider withdrawing her own name as she is in my, in my estimation and reading of the statute, isnot legal to sit in the seat.”
Lambertson told the Juneau Independent that she didn’t want to take a seat she wasn’t eligible for and said that if there really had been a misunderstanding, “that I will remove my name from the appointment.”
It wouldn’t be the first time that a Dunleavy appointee has backed out once their odious comments and behavior have come to light before being dealt a stinging public rejection, but if she stays in, it also wouldn’t be the first time a doomed appointee saw the process through to its completion.
Last year, lawmakers rejected the Alaska Medical Board appointee who practiced “regenerative medicine” and criticized other Alaska health care providers of broadly providing “subpar care” by a stunning 0-60 vote.
Typically, appointment rejections are more narrow, such as the rejection of a homeschool “principal” and a longtime anti-public-school advocate for the state’s Board of Education.
Wednesday’s hearing appears to be an effort by legislators to build the case against Lambertson on both moral and legal grounds, which is likely a smart move. Some conservative lawmakers in particular have a tendency to overlook kooky beliefs as long as they’re conservative, but the legal grounds raised by Tobin could be a way for conservatives to justify their opposition without necessarily coming out as Holocaust denier deniers.
Follow the thread: Live thread of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
