An article published last week accused six Democrat senators and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) of benefitting from a type of illegal campaign funding called Smurfing. Since Alaska’s senior senator is a Democrat at heart, I took a little peak at her campaign finances to see if she might also be involved in the Smurf scandal. Here is what I discovered.

First, let me explain what smurfing is. All contributions to political candidates must be reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), and there are limits on the amount an individual may contribute. Smurfing refers to a money laundering scheme which gets around those limits. It occurs when an unscrupulous third party makes political contributions in the name of another person, making the innocent person an unwitting “straw doner.” These straw doners are often unaware that this has occurred. The practice is a form of identity theft that often targets senior citizens whose personal information is available online and used without their consent.

To be clear, and so I don’t get sued, these are only allegations. The six Democrat senators and Gov. Whitmer have not been charged or convicted of any crime, and even if Smurfing did occur, they may have unwittingly benefitted from the illegal activity of others. If you want to read more details about the accusations, you can read about it here.

To see if U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s reelection campaign had similarly benefited, I went to the Federal Election Commission website to examine her campaign finance records. The FEC maintains a database on all federal politicians and the contributions they receive. You can find a link to their database here.

The large amount of campaign donations from every year made it difficult to evaluate, so I restricted my search to just the contributions that Murkowski received in 2025.

Note that Murkowski is not up for re-election as a senator until 2028, and contributions to political campaigns are typically cyclic. This year is midway in her election cycle, comparable to 2017 in the last election cycle, and you would expect a relatively quiet period for contributions.

Murkowski Historical Campaign Contributions – Chart Credit: Open Secrets

However, examining Murkowski’s 2025 contributions and comparing it to 2017, we see something unexpected. In 2017, the Murkowski reelection campaign raised $2,192,724. Not bad a bad number in an off-cycle year, but something has really changed in 2025. This year according to the FEC database, Murkowski has raised $6,842,138, over three times as much money as you would expect, that is if she is planning to defend her senate seat in three years. Of course, if she were to be planning a run for the open Alaska Governor seat next year this large fundraising in 2025 makes a lot more sense.

Whatever her next campaign is, you might think the large number is a sign that Alaskans really approve of the job our dear Lisa is doing, but you would be wrong. It isn’t Alaskans that are donating to her re-election. In 2025, only a paltry $225,893 came directly from Alaskans. The remaining $6.6 million came from doners living outside the state.

To determine if smurfing was responsible for the large fundraising number, I needed to do a deeper dive, and honestly, after looking at spreadsheets for three days straight, I almost decided it was impossible to comprehend all of the information, so I refined my search a bit.

First a note about contribution limits. The FEC limits contributions to political campaigns to $3,500 per election cycle, but there is a way around this limit, known only to very savvy individuals. The FEC considers primary elections and general elections to be two different political campaigns, so it is permissible to donate $3,500 to each campaign, effectively doubling the amount of contributions made. Not many people do this, and it demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of campaign laws. As you might expect, there were some individuals that took advantage of this loophole to contribute. Most of these double contributions were from lobbyists, however, there were 31 individual donors who were also in this category. To simplify my Smurf search, I focused my attention on those individuals.

A portion of the people in this group are retired, and since that is the group typically targeted for the Smurfing scam, I examined the contributions these individuals made, not just to Lisa Murkowski, but also to other political campaigns to see if they were prolific donators. This information is also available on the FEC website. After looking at the data, I did find what has the appearance of smurfing. Out of the 31 super doners, 10 of them stood out. A summary of the data can be found in Table 1.

The average age of the 10 individuals was 80 years old. They each averaged almost 800 contributions in a four-year period to various candidates, which works out to about 200 political donations per year. The amount they spent averaged just over 12 million dollars per person. These are what Smurfing activities would look like if they were taking place, but it is impossible to prove this allegation with the level of investigation that I have done. Some might argue that these 10 people are simply a bunch of rich 80-year-olds with nothing better to do than sit around all day writing checks to political campaigns and PACs. Maybe.

What conclusions can we draw from this brief examination of Lisa Murkowski’s re-election finances? First, she gets the vast majority of her donations from people living outside the state. The Bible tells us, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Campaign contributions are probably an indicator of who Lisa listens to, and that certainly isn’t Alaskans. It is the outside interests that support her reelection.

What about the question that started this investigation? Did Lisa Murkowski receive campaign contributions that were Smurfed? It is impossible to say definitively, but if I were a Republican planning to run against her in her next election campaign, I would have my campaign staff digging into this question a little deeper. It sure looks suspicious.

The views expressed here are those of Greg Sarber. Read more Sarber posts at his Seward’s Folly substack.

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