Two weeks before the November election, attack ads started showing up on Facebook targeting independent and Democratic state legislative candidates.

“Calvin Schrage is no independent,” said one of the ads, referring to the independent candidate for a House seat representing the Anchorage Hillside. “He is a typical liberal Democrat.”

This ad attacking independent Anchorage state House candidate Stephen Trimble came from the Council on Good Government. Most of the Council on Good Government’s money came from the Republican State Leadership Committee, whose largest Alaska donor in the lead-up to last year’s election was telecommunications company GCI.

The group paying for the ads, the Council on Good Government, received nearly all of the $380,000 it raised from a single group: the Washington, D.C.-based Republican State Leadership Committee. But only after votes were counted did the RSLC have to reveal its own donors, who contributed a total of $8.5 million to deploy weeks before Election Day.

When the RSLC did file that report with the IRS, it showed just one large Alaska donor: GCI. The Anchorage telecommunications giant gave the RSLC $100,000 in early October — one day before the group reported transferring $75,000 to the Council on Good Government.

Of the seven Republicans who voted to convict former President Donald Trump, only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is up for reelection in 2022. But a new Alaska election system with an open primary and ranked-choice voting may protect the incumbent.

Murkowski voted to convict the former president on Feb. 13 for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. Murkowski told reporters after her vote that she stands by her decision regardless of its possible detrimental effects on her 2022 chances.

“This was consequential on many levels, but I cannot allow the significance of my vote to be devalued by whether or not I feel that this is helpful for my political ambitions,” Murkowski said.

The Senate acquitted Trump, falling 10 votes short of the two-thirds supermajority needed to convict. Murkowski was the first Repubican senator to publicly state that Trump should resign, telling the Anchorage Daily News that he “has caused enough damage.” She also told the paper that she blames Trump for Republicans’ Senate losses in Georgia.