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June 5, 2025
Committee during the biennial legislative session that ended in April.
The committee chair, Sen. Barry Usher, R-Molt, had relegated his Democratic vice chair to a seat far away from the bench where committee leadership usually sits.
On occasion, he would cut off Vice Chair Andrea Olsen’s microphone as she attempted to question witnesses, or reject her protests to conducting hearings without adequate public notice, among other things. Capitolized reported in January about Usher’s deteriorating relationship with Olsen, D-Missoula, which was no secret. The committee’s meetings were livestreamed for anyone across the state to watch.
After watching Olsen leave a hearing in tears, Dunwell, who does not sit on the judiciary committee, lodged a harassment complaint with the legislative branch in late March concerning the treatment of Olsen and people who testified before the body, including herself. The complaint was determined to be unsubstantiated. Dunwell opted to take her complaint to the Human Rights Bureau, which deals with workplace discrimination.
The protocol for addressing harassment in the Legislature occupies 10 pages in legislative rules. The last page is a harassment complaint resolution form, which Dunwell filed out in late March. Complaints are considered by the Legislative Conduct Panel, which consists of the House speaker, Senate president and minority leaders of each chamber. The panel can refer the complaint for investigation by legislative staff or private counsel and make a recommendation for corrective action, including removing the offender from a committee, or referring the case to the appropriate chamber’s ethics committee where discipline, including expulsion, is considered.
It’s rare that the panel substantiates a complaint. The Legislative Branch’s Human Resources Director Kelly DaSilva told Capitolized that she could think of only one substantiated case, but it was so long ago she couldn’t recall who was involved.
There have been complaints. In 2019, jars of Vaseline were placed on the desks of House Republicans who voted to extend the life of an expanded Medicaid program. Targeted lawmakers understood the lubricant to be sexually suggestive and a threat of physical harm if they didn’t toe the line of Republican conservatives opposed to renewing the program. Three legislators filed complaints — two female, one male. No action was taken, leaving the complainants frustrated.
One of the complainants, then-Rep. Wendy McKamey, R-Cascade, said the process stalled when lawmakers who witnessed the jars being distributed declined to testify.
That same year, then-Rep. Jessica Karjala, at the time a Billings Democrat, filed a complaint as vice chair of the House Human Services Committee against the chair, Rep. Dennis Lenz, a Billings Republican. Karjala told Capitolized recently she objected to the way the committee members and witnesses were being repeatedly talked over, including herself.
After Karjala filed the complaint, Republican leadership decided the answer was to remove Karjala from the committee. After that 2019 session the rules addressing harassment changed, she said.
“I think that came from a lot of disgruntled women, to be quite honest,” Karjala said.
There DOGE the neighborhood.
There was a Montana hook this week to Elon Musk’s departure from the DOGE, the government-dismantling project Musk captained as a chainsaw-wielding trimmer of federal agencies.
On his way out, the world’s richest man took Department of Government Efficiency Communications Director Katie Miller with him. Miller who reportedly will now work for Musk, is the wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Miller’s maiden name is Waldman, which was her handle when she worked as a spokesperson for Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana, from 2015 to late 2017.
She was working for the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2014 when NRSC staffers analyzed the War College thesis of then-Montana Sen. John Walsh, and discovered that most of the Democrat’s 19-page paper had been plagiarized.
Daines’ chances of election to the Senate improved when Walsh withdrew from Montana’s 2014 U.S. Senate race after the plagiarism was reported by the New York Times just four months before the election. Walsh had been appointed to the U.S. Senate by then-Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock that February to replace Max Baucus, who left the Senate to become the U.S. ambassador to China. Walsh was lieutenant governor at the time of his appointment. Daines that year ended up running against Democrat Amanda Curtis, beating her with nearly 58% of the vote.
Waldman would later recall that the NRSC discovered the problems with Walsh’s thesis shortly after Walsh took office, but kept the discovery under wraps until late July. The NRSC eventually took credit for the discovery in October 2014, during a forum organized by Politico.
