Fresh off a campaign stop in the village of Point Hope, North Slope Borough mayoral hopeful George Ahmaogak Sr., found himself taking the long way home to Barrow. Bad weather forced him to loop through Kotzebue and continue on to Anchorage, where he had no way of knowing that an entirely different type of fall storm had just blown in.

On Thursday, a federal grand jury indicted his wife and campaign treasurer, Maggie, in an embezzlement case.  

George Ahmaogak, a five-time former mayor for the North Slope Borough running a strong campaign against four challengers, said the development won’t derail his candidacy. And he questioned whether the timing of the indictment had more to do with him than his wife. This summer, he said, campaign opponents engaged in a whisper campaign about his wife’s pending legal problems to try to discredit him.

“It is bad for me. (It’s) kind of like déjà vu, like what Senator Stevens went through,” George Ahmaogak said in an interview Thursday, referring to the late U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, who eight days before his November 2008 failed re-election bid was found guilty by jurors in a federal corruption case.

Prosecutors deny any political meddling.

“George is not going to be charged and this is absolutely not a politically motivated case against Maggie. Neither the case nor the timing of it has anything to do with the election,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Aunnie Steward, one of the federal prosecutors handling the case.

Maggie Ahmaogak, 61, is accused of stealing $475,000 from the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, where she served as the group’s executive director for 17 years until 2007, when she got fired after financial irregularities were uncovered. She is also the second person charged with dipping into the whaling commission’s federal funds. In July, Teresa Judkins, who took over as executive director after Ahmaogak’s departure, was indicted for taking $100,000 of the group’s money for her own use.

Within hours of his wife’s indictment, George Ahmaogak was doing what he could to calm voters. “These accusations are baseless,” he announced in a statement swiftly posted to his campaign website. “My wife has been cooperating with federal investigators for more than nine months, and we cannot believe her cooperation has ended with a sudden indictment one week prior to the election. My wife will be entering a not-guilty plea. The George Ahmaogak, Sr. campaign is still on track.”

But in the 12-day countdown to the Oct. 4 election George Ahmaogak may find himself confronting questions about his role in Maggie’s alleged spending sprees. Prosecutors claim more than once that thousands of dollars were directed to Maggie’s personal accounts just prior to gambling outings with an unnamed “family member” in Las Vegas, New Orleans and Washington state.

George Ahmaogak acknowledged that he has traveled and gambled with his wife on some of their trips together, but he declined to offer details, citing the pending case and the fact that he’s already answered authorities’ questions. If he did gamble with Maggie, it was on their own time and with their own money, he said.

“It doesn’t appear that this was in the form of stealing and I think that we can prove that,” he said.

The whaling commission is a nonprofit formed in 1976 to protect Inupiat and Yupik Eskimos’ relationship to bowhead whales. It conducts whale research and promotes cultural and hunting traditions. Largely funded by federal sources, it pulled in $2.4 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration between 2004 and 2007, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Maggie Ahmaogak, accused of stealing about a fifth of that amount from the whaling commission, is charged with wire fraud, two counts of theft from an organization receiving federal funds, and money laundering. She faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each count.