Republican Senate Candidate from Alaska, Joe Miller, fought tooth and nail to keep the personnel records as a public employee sealed. Now we know why. He was trying to get one of his cronies elected to chair the Alaska Republican Party.

Joe Miller, the Republican Senate candidate from Alaska, was disciplined for using three co-workers’ computers for political purposes and initially lying about it when he worked as a part-time lawyer for the Fairbanks North Star Borough in 2008, personnel records released on Tuesday under a court order showed.

“He maintained the whole time that he did not violate the computer use policy and that actually all of us did for not securing our computers,” Jill Dolan, a lawyer for the borough and one of the colleagues whose computers was used, said in a written statement on March 13, 2008, the day after the incidents.

Ms. Dolan said Mr. Miller had eventually told her he was using the computers to vote with “different URLs” in an online poll about the state’s Republican Party chairman, Randy Ruedrich, whom Mr. Miller wanted removed.

“I told him the door was locked and he was a confidential employee and we shouldn’t have to worry about him using our computers,” Ms. Dolan wrote. “I explained to him that I am not a political person and that I did not appreciate him injecting me into his mess by making it look like I voted in some poll to oust Ruedrich.”

Mr. Miller cleared Internet cache files from each of the computers. He also used his own computer to participate in the poll and then cleared his cache.

After initially lying about the computer use, he eventually admitted to it in a letter to his supervisor, Rene Broker, the lead borough attorney.

“I acknowledge that my access to others’ computers was wrong, participating in the poll was wrong, lying was wrong and there is absolutely no excuse for any of it,” Mr. Miller wrote to Ms. Broker on March 17. “I accept whatever punishment you feel is appropriate.”

He was placed on administrative leave that lasted for about two weeks and then punished with the loss of three days’ pay. He was also placed on probation for six months, ordered to complete employee counseling and to “work hard to rebuild the co-worker relationships that were harmed” because of his actions… [emphasis added]