Michele Bachmann Supports Alaskan Dirty Trickster

Michele Bachmann is going to take time away from her campaign and her constituents to send her video support to Joe MIller:

Sarah Palin and other prominent right-wingers will today rush to the aid of the beleaguered Tea Party-backed candidate for the US Senate, Joe Miller, after newly released documents reveal he lied about a computer tampering scandal.

The row has created alarm about the election chances of Miller, until recently regarded as a safe Republican bet to win the Alaska race.

Palin is to attend a rally with Miller today and other rightwingers are to participate by video, including Mike Huckabee, one of the likely contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, Michele Bachmann, the outspoken congresswoman, and Jim DeMint, the Republican senator and godfather of the Tea Party.

The Republicans are on course to win control of the House in Tuesday's mid-term elections. According to the polls, they also have an outside chance of taking the Senate, but they cannot afford to lose Alaska, which had been considered a banker.

Miller, in personnel files released late on Tuesday, admitted lying about the computer scandal. In 2008, working as a lawyer for a borough in Fairbanks, Alaska, he used the computers of fellow government workers to vote in an online political poll, itself a breach of ethical policy. He then cleared lots of material from the computers to cover his tracks, and in the process deleted their passwords and saved websites.

In a memo at the time to his then boss, another lawyer, Rene Broker, Miller said: "I lied about accessing all of the computers. I then admitted about accessing the computers, but lied about what I was doing. Finally, I admitted what I did."

The documents were only released after legal action by the Associated Press, the Anchorage Daily News and other US media. Miller had been trying to block their release.