October 11, 2008
By: Hilzoy
Following up on
Steve's comments: I have read through the first 81 pages of the
Troopergate report (pdf). (If you want to cut to the chase, read the findings, p. 8, and the explanation of the first finding, pp. 48-68.) To my mind, what's interesting about the report is completely independent of what one thinks of Trooper Wooten.
If Wooten did something wrong, there are legal remedies for that fact. It would, to my mind, be OK for Palin to ask someone to make sure that the investigation into his conduct had been thorough and fair, but it is not at all OK to try to use her power to strip him of his livelihood. If Sarah Palin and her husband thought he was a threat to their family, the right response to that would be to make sure that the people Wooten had threatened had security. (In fact, the report finds that she cut back her security detail.) It is not to try to take away his job, which would, if anything, make him
more likely to hurt people, not less. And it is
certainly not to fire Walt Monegan.
***
The Palins really seem to have had it in for Wooten. This was obvious before -- most people don't try to get someone fired just for kicks -- but reading all the details makes it really clear. The report lists nine people whom Todd Palin contacted about Wooten; two say that he had "numerous conversations" and "10-20x", respectively, and the report lists nine contacts with the other seven. Sarah Palin contacted Monegan three times and another person twice; and her Chief of Staff, Commissioner of Administration, Attorney General, and Director of Boards and Commissions all contacted people about Wooten.
That's a whole lot of contacts. Enough to make
this claim by Governor Palin seem not just false, but absurd:
Governor Palin says, "All I know what the facts are and what the truth is. And the truth is never was there any pressure put on Commissioner Monegan to hire or fire anybody."
It also makes it very hard to believe Palin's
claim that she only became aware in mid-August that people in her administration had contacted Monegan and others about Wooten. That might be true if all the contacts had come from Todd Palin. But the idea that she was unaware not just that her husband was calling people, but that her Chief of Staff, Commissioner of Administration, Attorney General, and Director of Boards and Commissions were doing so, defies belief.
Moreover, the Palins seem to have had access to a private investigator's report on Wooten (p. 18). And Todd Palin called people on several occasions to inform them of something Wooten seems to have done wrong that, absent a whole lot of coincidences, he could only have known if he was having Wooten followed, or if he was himself stalking Wooten. Once he called to say that Wooten, who had been injured, was riding his snowmobile, that he (Palin) had pictures, and that he "thought there might be some workers' compensation fraud issues." (p. 29.) It turned out that Wooten had consulted with his doctor before going snowmobiling. Another time, Todd Palin called to say that Wooten had been seen dropping his kids off at school in a marked police vehicle. It turned out that Wooten had his supervisor's permission to do so. (p. 32.) It's pretty strange.
Generally, the report makes it sound as though the Palins, especially Todd Palin, were just obsessed with Wooten, in a truly peculiar and creepy way.
linkOctober 11, 2008
Now that Sarah Palin has been found to have
abused the powers of her office, the McCain campaign has two principal arguments: 1) the legislature's independent investigation found that the governor could legally fire the public safety commissioner for any reason she chose; and 2) the independent investigation was a partisan, "
politically motivated" exercise.
Both arguments are hopelessly misguided, for entirely different reasons.
The problem with the first argument is that it badly misses the point. Yes, Palin could fire former Alaskan Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan. He served at her pleasure. But the report found that she fired him, at least in part, because he
refused to go along with her personal vendetta against her ex-brother-in-law.
Palin, in other words, violated state ethics laws and abused her powers. That's not an exoneration; that's a condemnation.
For that matter, the report shows that Palin lied, repeatedly, about her own conduct. She lied about Monegan's firing, she even lied about "
fearing" Mike Wooten. In this sense, it's a double-whammy: Sarah Palin violated state ethics laws and abused her powers --
and then got caught lying about it. The McCain campaign, this is practically unspinnable.
The problem with the second argument is that it's just factually untrue. Alaskan officials of both parties voted to appoint the special counsel to investigate the scandal; Alaskan officials of both parties agreed publicly that the investigation was warranted; Alaskan officials of both parties approved of subpoenas as part of the probe; Alaskan officials of both parties resisted efforts to shut down the investigation; and Alaskan officials of both parties approved the release of the report.
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