Gov. Sarah Palin Cleared In "Tasergate"
New Report by State Personnel Board Investigator
Ah, the death of a talking point…we have news from Alaska that
the investigator for the State Personnel Board has issued a report
- contrary to the findings of the Legislature’s independent
investigator - and concluded that Gov. Palin did not abuse her
authority in the case of State Trooper Michael Wooten, the
controversy over “Tasergate” or, if you prefer, “Troopergate.”
Let’s do a Q&A on
the 263-page Branchflower report, which I read from cover to
cover, and on
the 125-page Petumenos report, which I have only yet had the
chance to skim. I may return to this after the election when we
have more time to walk through the evidence (win or lose tomorrow,
Gov. Palin will continue to be an important figure in national
politics).
First, the Branchflower report:
(1) A report was issued by one man, Stephen Branchflower.
(2) Branchflower was handpicked, and his investigation directed,
by Hollis French - an Obama supporter who has a personal axe to
grind in the facts under investigation. Branchflower, French and
Walt Monegan, the chief witness in the case, all appear to go way
back together in Alaska law enforcement circles.
(3) The only wrongdoing Branchflower could find was under a
general statute that says public officials may not engage in an
“effort to benefit a personal … interest through official action”
- he did not find a violation of any specific statute, rule or
regulation. To conclude that Gov. Palin’s actions were in her
personal interest rather than the best interests of the Alaskan
people and their government, you must believe that her actions were
actually wrong.
(4) In order to find that Gov. Palin’s actions were
actually wrong, Democrats must be willing to argue that an
irresponsible and abusive state trooper who made death threats
against Gov. Palin’s father and menaced her sister in her hearing
and used a Taser on a 10-year-old is a good person to have wielding
armed authority on behalf of the State of Alaska. Because
otherwise they are making a technical legal argument that she did
the right thing in the wrong way - yet they don’t have any
technical violation to hang their hats on.
By contrast, the Personnel Board
investigator, Timothy Petumenos, found no impropriety and
concluded, regarding Branchflower’s report:
Independent Counsel has concluded the wrong statute was
used as a basis for the conclusions contained in the Branchflower
Report, the Branchflower report misconstrued the available evidence
and did not consider or obtain all of the material evidence that is
required to properly reach findings.
Read on.
Q: What is this story about?
A: In broad outlines, two things. One, the Palin family had a
long-running dispute - predating Sarah Palin’s campaign for
Governor - with Alaska State Trooper Michael Wooten, the ex-husband
of Gov. Palin’s younger sister Molly. Trooper Wooten remains
employed as a State Trooper. Two, in July 2008, Gov. Palin fired
Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, a Cabinet-level employee
whose job includes supervising the State Troopers. (Technically,
Monegan was demoted, not fired, but the point is that he was
removed from his job, and chose to decline the reassignment). The
issues are whether Gov. Palin acted improperly in seeking to get
Trooper Wooten fired or in firing Monegan.
Q: So, what did the Legislature find?
A. Nothing.
As Beldar explains, the Legislature’s not in session, so it
hasn’t done anything, and neither has the 12-member bipartisan
Legislative Council under whose authority the investigation was
conducted. (As the Anchorage
Daily News noted when the Council voted to release his report:
“His report was released Friday by a 12-0 vote of the Legislative
Council, with eight Republicans and four Democrats voting. Some
members of the panel said they didn’t agree with Branchflower’s
findings, however.” This despite the axes to grind
against Palin by both Republican and Democratic members of the
Council) The investigative report by Stephen Branchflower, a
retired
prosecutor living in South Carolina, is entitled to no more and
no less deference than previous determinations by Ken Starr, Robert
Ray, Lawrence Walsh, Donald Smaltz, George Mitchell, and other
investigative one-man bands. And to the extent that Branchflower
shows his own work, you or I are perfectly qualified to
second-guess his opinions - and so is Petumenos, the Personnel
Board investigator.
Moreover, Branchflower’s report is inherently one-sided, as he
didn’t have access to Gov. Palin, her husband, her sister or a
number of other people supportive of the Governor. Obviously,
that’s due to the battles over the scope and authority of
Branchflower’s investigation, which in turn were driven by the
McCain-Palin camp’s justifiable concerns about the fairness of the
investigation. Branchflower
refused to reference or incorporate the written response by Gov.
Palin to the Personnel Board’s investigation or the sworn
statements of Todd Palin and other witnesses who provided
statements late in the game. He also does not appear to have
interviewed Trooper Wooten, receiving only a written statement from
him. (See Branchflower Report (”BR”) 5, 7). But he did find time to
interview Democratic Senate candidate Mark Begich, who was actually
the first person he interviewed. BR 2. As such, his report should
be considered only as one part of the story. Indeed, if you look at
his crucial conclusion on page 67 of the report regarding the
Palins’ concerns about Wooten, Branchflower draws inferences
against the Palins while admitting that “in the absence of an
interview with either Governor Palin or Todd Palin, the specific
answers to [his] questions [about the genuineness of their motives]
are left unanswered,” then goes about construing the remaining
evidence against them on what, as I note below, is a fairly slender
foundation. Gov. Palin has, of course, subsequently submitted to an
interview that will be part of the conclusions to be drawn after
the election by both the Legislature and the Personnel Board, in
both of which Gov. Palin obviously has more faith than in
Branchflower.
I should also note here that the meandering and repetitive
263-page report is only the public volume. There is also a
confidential portion the public can’t examine. We can only evaluate
Branchflower’s public work to see if it supports his conclusions.
As discussed below, the public report simply does not purport to
address many of the important issues.
Q: Who is Stephen Branchflower?
Branchflower has a longstanding working relationship with Monegan
dating to Branchflower’s time as a prosecutor in Anchorage, where
Monegan was Chief of Police *
(as
does Branchflower’s wife). Likewise,
Democratic State Senator Hollis French is “a former prosecutor and
colleague of Branchflower”. * That’s not all
that surprising (it’s a small law enforcement community), but
obviously Branchflower was likely to be predisposed favorably
towards Monegan and French, both of whom are aligned against Palin
here.
Q: Who is Hollis French and what does he have to do with
all this?
Branchflower
was handpicked as the investigator by Hollis French (over
the objections of the Alaska Attorney General, a Palin ally, who
wanted a retired judge or other more objective figure), and
French
effectively controlled the investigation including the witness
list.
* (Alaska TV
station KTVA describes French as “responsible for managing the
case”; the Anchorage Daily News (ADN) calls him the
investigation’s “project director.” *). Here is
the basis for concluding that French was running Branchflower’s
witness list:
Rep. David Guttenberg (D.) asked Branchflower why he
was requesting subpoenas for only those people attending the
meeting and not Tibbles himself.Branchflower said he would “have to defer that question to Mr.
French.”“I put the list together with, talking to Mr.
French,” Branchflower added.Sen. Gene Therriault (R.) told Branchflower, “I don’t
understand why you would have to defer that question to Sen.
French. If it’s your list you’re in complete control of
the list, then why can’t you answer the question?”Branchflower had no explanation. He only offered, “I’m not sure
why his name was removed. My initial request was to have him on the
list.” At that point, French interjected. “It appeared to
me there wasn’t the political will to
subpoena Tibbles.”
The Branchflower report was originally
designed to be released five days before the election on October 31
but was moved back to October 10 after complaints about the
timing.
*
Hollis French isn’t just a Democratic State Senator on the
Legislative Council; as I note below, his de facto
alliance with Monegan in the events that led up to Monegan’s firing
means that he’s effectively involved in the facts under
investigation, and really ethically should have recused himself
from this entire process. But French is also
a prominent Obama supporter whose testimonials are featured on
Obama’s own website *
* *,
and he had a job to do: provide what he
promised would be an “October Surprise” for the McCain-Palin
campaign. Speaking to
Newsweek in early September, “French … acknowledged that some
of his public comments about the ongoing probe may have been out of
bounds. ‘I said some things I shouldn’t have said’”…
Palin
questioned French’s impartiality from the time that “French was
quoted in The Wall Street Journal [in early August] saying the
governor could be impeached as a result of the [Branchflower]
probe.” (French argued that he’d been misquoted).
* Here’s how Beldar
describes French’s conduct:
Democratic state senator Hollis French, who’s managing
the investigation, is already jumping to conclusions, muttering
about “impeachment” to the press, and yet simultaneously he’s
short-circuited any kind of basic due process by refusing to
share with Gov. Palin or her counsel the historical evidence
(e.g., emails) that the Legislature’s investigator is collecting to
use against her! At least one Alaska legislator has already
called for
French to step down, citing his obvious bias. French has
already boasted to ABC
News of his desire to “release his final report by Oct. 31,
four days before the November election,” as an “October surprise”
that’s “likely to be damaging to the Governor’s
administration.”
John McCormack notes:
Hollis French is now managing the investigation into
Monegan’s firing, and French has already made partisan remarks
about it to the press,
saying to the Washington Post: “It undercuts one of the points
they are making that [Palin] is an ethical reformer.”
Amanda Carpenter notes that some press reports support the
notion that Wooten’s union, the PSEA (which as discussed below was
at loggerheads with Palin in the dispute that precipitated
Monegan’s demotion) is also coordinating with the Obama
campaign:
The same week PSEA filed their complaint, CNN reported
that Obama campaign officials had been contacting Wooten’s union,
although Obama spokesmen have vehemently refuted CNN’s report as
well as one from the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund that said more
than 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researches had been
deployed to Alaska to dig up dirt on Palin.
As for Monegan’s credibility, certainly Branchflower presents
him as a respectable law enforcement figure, and his testimony
seems reasonable on its face. That said, he obviously has an axe to
grind against Palin. And
Monegan himself was once subject to a domestic violence order of
protection for making death threats against his now-ex-wife, so
he may not be the most unbiased observer of Wooten’s situation.
Q: Who is Timothy Petumenos?
I’m not, as yet, as familiar with Petumenos, though I am sure we
will learn more about him and the Personnel Board. I assume, given
that Gov. Palin submitted her own request for a Personnel Board
investigation, that she felt it would be a more sympathetic
venue.
Q: OK, that’s all well and good, but let’s discuss the
merits here. Did Gov. Palin act improperly or illegally in firing
Walt Monegan?
Branchflower says she had every right to fire Monegan - he
exonerates the Governor on the totally obvious ground that she was
entitled to fire such a high-ranking officer in her cabinet for any
reason or no reason; Monegan serves at the pleasure of the
Governor. (See Finding Number Two at p. 69-71 of Branchflower’s
report). As discussed below, Branchflower’s only basis for
complaining about Monegan’s firing is that he believes that it was
partly motivated or precipitated by the dispute over Wooten. In
other words, all roads lead back to Wooten.
The evidence shows fairly overwhelmingly that Gov. Palin had
legitimate policy-related reasons to want Monegan gone; in her written
response to the investigation (”PR”), Gov. Palin refers to
these as “good-faith disagreements about appropriate government
policy.” PR 4(paragraph 16). Monegan was insubordinate;
he broke openly with Palin over her efforts to cut his agency’s
budget, siding instead with Hollis French, of all people, in a
budget dispute tied to Palin’s Administration’s negotiations with
the Troopers’ union, the PSEA, whose contract was due up in June
2008:
* 12/9/07: Monegan holds a press conference with Hollis French
to push his own budget plan.* 1/29/08: Palin’s staffers have to rework their procedures to
keep Monegan from bypassing normal channels for budget
requests.* February 2008: Monegan publicly releases a letter he wrote to
Palin supporting a project she vetoed.* June 26, 2008: Monegan bypassed the governor’s office entirely
and contacted Alaska’s Congressional delegation to gain funding for
a project.
In a July 7 e-mail, John Katz, the governor’s special counsel,
noted two problems with the trip: The governor hadn’t agreed the
money should be sought, and the request was “out of sequence with
our other appropriations requests and could put a strain on the
evolving relationship between the Governor and Sen. (Ted)
Stevens.”Four days later, Monegan was fired. He said he had kept others
in the administration fully apprised of his plans to go to
Washington.
Consider how even Andrew Halcro - a 2006 Gubernatorial candidate
defeated by Palin and now the blogger who started this whole
kerfuffle, and thus a person most ill-disposed towards Sarah Palin
-
described the budget battle:
the Palin administration wanted Monegan to go in another
direction. They wanted him to cut corners on a budget that had
already fallen behind over the last decade. Under Former Governor
Murkwoski there was significant investment made to try and catch up
with growing costs but Palin’s budgets have again started to starve
the agency.To make matters worse, the change to the state’s retirement
benefit program adopted by the legislature in 2004 has had a
negative effect on the departments ability to recruit new
Troopers.
+++
Monegan and his department were getting too far out in front of
Palin, acting in ways that were independent and contrary to the
governor’s wishes. Palin needed to replace Monegan with someone who
would be seen but not heard while doing the governor’s bidding.
+++
Walt Monegan was fired because he fought too hard. Governor
Palin fired Monegan because she understood too little and wanted a
puppet as commissioner.
Regardless of whose side you took in the budget battle, the fact
is, taking public sides against your boss’ budget decisions is very
close to the top of the list of ways to get yourself fired in
politics. There’s simply no way to gloss over the differences of
policy and politics that led Monegan to get demoted. Branchflower
really had no choice but to find that demoting Monegan was a
legitimate exercise of Gov. Palin’s authority.
Petumenos concurs that there was no impropriety in
demoting/reassigning Monegan.
Q: So, if Gov. Palin had legitimate reasons to fire
Monegan, what on earth is Branchflower complaining
about?
It’s all about Wooten.
Branchflower found that Gov. Palin “abused her power by
violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive
Branch Ethics Act,” which provides:
The legislature reaffirms that each public officer
holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a
personal or financial interest through official
action is a violation of that trust.
It’s undisputed that Gov. Palin did nothing to act in her
financial interest, so the question is whether she acted to benefit
a “personal” interest. As noted above, it’s undisputed as well that
she had other legitimate reasons to remove Monegan, and no
personal interest in doing so.
But let’s assume for the sake of argument that the strongest
case against Gov. Palin is true: that she pressured Monegan to fire
Wooten, and that the degree of the pressure to fire Wooten is
illustrated by the removal of Monegan from his position when he
wouldn’t do it himself. (This involves multiple leaps over gaps in
Branchflower’s evidence, but we’ll go there for now for the sake of
argument. I’m also glossing here over Branchflower’s confused legal
definition of what state of mind is required to “knowingly” violate
the Ethics Act, although I would argue as well that as a legal
matter, Branchflower really has no basis to argue that Gov. Palin
“kn[e]w that … her conduct [was] in violation of the Act,” BR
51).
Branchflower’s theory is that firing Wooten would be a “personal
benefit” to Gov. Palin because it would benefit Gov. Palin’s father
and sister and that she wanted “to get Trooper Wooten fired for
personal family reasons.” BR 65, 67. Now, as a legal matter,
Palin’s lawyers note that there’s pretty much no precedent in
Alaska law for finding a violation of this provision of the Ethics
Act in the absence of any financial interest. And of course in
a material sense, as noted below, it’s hard to see how
getting him fired would benefit his ex-wife.
That said, obviously it’s not hard to see why in the aftermath
of a bitter divorce, and with child custody issues still open to
revisiting, one could see a benefit to Gov. Palin’s sister to
ruining Wooten. Branchflower has no evidence of this, as a result
of which it’s improper for him as an officer of the State to jump
to that conclusion, but leave that aside for now. The fact is,
“personal interest” is at best vaguely defined (Beldar
suggests as an example that it could possibly include such things
as pardoning someone who could incriminate a
governor).
Here is
Palin’s lawyers’ argument in response:
To the extent the Governor is alleged to have sought a
non-financial personal benefit from an attempt to have Mr. Wooten
dismissed, that benefit would have been a benefit shared
generally with the public — namely, the benefit of a trooper force
free from rogue officers who have been found guilty of acts of
violence and recklessness against the public. The Ethics
Act specifically permits state officials to act in such
circumstances, and thus even if the allegations were true — which
they assuredly are not — there would be not probable cause to
pursue the claim in this matter.
Beldar has his own take on what a “personal interest” is (he
notes that “Branchflower reads the Ethics Act to prohibit
any governmental action or decision made for justifiable
reasons benefiting the State if that action or decision might also
make a public official happy for any other reason,” which I suppose
might be a useful rule where you have a clear-cut benefit like a
financial interest), as does Paul
Mirengoff.
Petumenos, at pp. 17-19, essentially agrees with the Governor’s
lawyers, and specifically notes that it would be problematic to
construe the statute as broadly as Branchflower does - apparently
without precedent in Alaska law - in a way that would act as a
positive constraint against a Governor acting in the best interests
of the public on a matter in which she has no concrete
interest similar to a financial interest.
My own view is much the same: acting to get rid of a trooper who
is a hazard both to the public and to the State Treasury (through
the risk of lawsuits against the State if he misbehaved) is not
just a defensible use of the Governor’s authority, it’s her
job. It’s illogical to find a significant ethical
violation - as required by the precedents cited by Gov. Palin’s
attorneys - if the Governor reasonably and sincerely believed she
was acting in the best interests of the people she was elected to
represent. The Governor is, after all, the state’s Chief Executive,
with sole and really irreplaceable responsibility for public safety
and the public fisc. If she had information causing her to believe
that one of her subordinates represented a threat to public safety,
there’s really no good reason why she should have been precluded
from doing everything in her power to remove that threat (this is
especially true in a small state where people are more apt to know
each other).
I just don’t see how a legal prohibition on Gov. Palin acting
for a “personal interest” - where she had no financial interest at
stake - could be triggered if she reasonably and sincerely believed
she was acting in the best interests of the public in the case of a
trooper who was a menace to society. The fact is that if it is
shown that she reasonably and sincerely thought that Wooten should
not be a trooper, the benefit of removing him from that position
would not be significantly greater for her - as the sister of his
estranged and presumably embittered ex-wife - than for the average
citizen. There should only be any sort of ethics complaint here if
there’s a reasonable basis for finding that her concerns about
Wooten were pretextual and not supported by a reasonable
and sincere desire to protect the public interest, in which case
the personal aminus becomes a more significant element in the
decisional matrix. As I discuss below, Branchflower does not come
close to meeting that standard.
Q: Did Gov. Palin pressure Monegan to take action
against Trooper Wooten?
Branchflower dedicates the bulk of his investigation to this
question. As to Gov. Palin personally, the evidence suggests that
while she repeatedly made clear to Monegan her grievances with
Wooten as a trooper, she (1) never directly or indirectly
instructed Monegan to fire Wooten and (2) took to heart Wooten’s
admonition early in her term that for legal reasons she should not
talk directly to Monegan about Wooten.
On the first point, Monegan has
been unequivocal:
“For the record, no one ever said fire Wooten.
Not the governor. Not Todd. Not any of the other staff,”
Monegan said … “What they said directly was more along the lines
of ‘This isn’t a person that we would want to be representing our
state troopers.’”
Now, Monegan admits that he was never asked to fire Wooten. He
also admits that after he advised Gov. Palin early in her term
(February 2007) that it would be unwise to discuss the employment
of a particular trooper with him, she did not raise the issue
again.
That said, and for today at least I’m skimming over some of the
details here that were covered exhaustively in the reports,
basically the investigators’ conclusions turned on Todd Palin and
some of the Governor’s key staffers constantly pestering Monegan
about what a bad trooper Wooten was.
The argument as to why this was improper is, mainly, that
Monegan really couldn’t fire Wooten - apparently, under
the collective bargaining agreement (and possibly state law as
well, I’m writing quickly here and can’t recall offhand) since he’d
already been investigated and given a slap on the wrist, there was
no way to reopen his case.
Of course, (1) the Governor can change the law and (2) the
collective bargaining agreement was open to renegotiation - it
expired in June 2008. That’s not to say in either case that Gov.
Palin had imperial power to just rewrite the civil-service laws,
but it’s worth remembering that the rules here were not cast in
stone forevermore, and in fact the example of how Wooten got away
with the things he had done seems to have stuck in Gov. Palin’s
craw as an example of why she should be reconsidering the
supervision of the troopers.
Q: Did Gov. Palin reasonably and sincerely believe that
Trooper Wooten should not be a State Trooper?
I believe the evidence shows rather compellingly that Trooper
Wooten’s conduct, and specifically the conduct that the Palins
complained about, demonstrates his unfitness to serve as a State
Trooper and that his continuance in that position presented a risk
to public safety as well as a liability risk to the State of
Alaska. The record clearly supports that both Gov. Palin and her
husband believed this to be true. Thus, to challenge the Palin
family’s complaints about Trooper Wooten, her critics must argue
that Trooper Wooten is a good person to have exercising armed
authority on behalf of the State, or, alternatively, that the
Governor should not have done anything about him even though he was
a menace.
And it’s not just limited to dangers to the public. The evidence
is also quite clear that Gov. Palin was concerned, repeatedly,
about the possibility that Wooten could do something to a member of
the Alaskan public that would open the State to the threat of a
big-dollar lawsuit, a concern apparently triggered by public
reports about other troopers whose conduct led to such judgments
during the time period in question. If you know anything about
litigation, you know that if the State continued to employ Wooten
after the Governor herself knew that he was a ‘ticking time bomb,’
that would present elevated risks of a massive damages award in the
hands of a skilled trial lawyer. New Governors are not required to
check at the door the things they have learned in life outside
government; there would be no way in such a lawsuit to keep it from
coming out that the state’s chief executive knew of an extensive
history of Wooten’s misconduct that rendered him unfit to carry a
gun and a badge.
Monegan said Palin mostly backed off, but kept raising the
matter indirectly through e-mails. In the fall of 2007, Monegan
said he alerted her to a bad jury verdict against a trooper in
rural Alaska, and she replied by mentioning Wooten, but not by
name.“She said troopers like this one and my former brother-in-law,
or that trooper I used to be related to, are the things that make
people not trust troopers,” Monegan told The Post yesterday.
Mike Gravel, who surely has no particular motive to side with
Palin,
thinks this is plenty of reason to want the man off the
force:
This trooper should have been fired … if the unions didn’t
want to step up to the plate. …This is a guy that shouldn’t be wearing a badge, not when he
threatens people’s lives. …Did they have to wait ’til he killed somebody before they got
rid of him?
Certainly Todd Palin is
utterly unapologetic about the hazard posed by Trooper
Wooten:
“We had a lot of conversations about a guy who
threatened my family and verbally assaulted my daughter. We talked
about my concerns. We talked about Wooten possibly pulling over one
of my kids to frame them, like throwing a bag of dope in the back
seat just to frame a Palin,” he said of his conversations with one
Palin aide.
+++
“I make no apologies for wanting to protect my family
and wanting to publicize the injustice of a violent trooper keeping
his badge and abusing the worker compensation system. The real
investigation that needs to be conducted for the best interests of
the public at large is the Department of Public Safety’s
unwillingness to discipline its own.”
As I said, I have not had time to synthesize in a post all of
the evidence here. Let’s note the big one. In February 2005, as the
marital dispute between Mike Wooten and Molly McCann was
escalating, Sarah Palin (then a private citizen) was called by her
sister to listen in on a big argument between Wooten and his wife
(Palin
noted in an August 2005 email that this particular altercation was
precipitated by the revelation that Wooten had been cheating on his
wife). Fearing for her safety in a heated argument, Molly
called her older sister Sarah “in case I do need help,” and Sarah
stayed on one open line and had her son Track listen in with her.
You can read the State Trooper investigator’s interview 2 months
later with Sarah Palin
here (I’d block-quote at greater length but I can’t copy and
paste from these PDFs) - what they heard was chilling, and I wonder
how Democrats can read her witness statement and take sides with
Wooten as he storms in yelling at his wife in a rage (Palin notes
that he’s a very big guy, towering over his wife, and was likely
wearing his service revolver) and tells her, “If your dad helps you
through this divorce, if he gets an attorney he’s gonna, he’s gonna
eat an F’n lead bullet. I’m gonna shoot him.” and “I know people in
all the right places, in high places. I know judges. I know
attorney’s [sic]. I have relationships with these guys. You guys
are all going down.” Palin got concerned enough that she had Track
call Molly’s neighbor, and Palin drove over to their house herself,
eventually leaving when Wooten seemed to have calmed down.
Palin noted in an August email the history of Wooten’s “physical
abuse of his wife.” On April 11, 2005, Molly obtained a
Domestic Violence Protective Order against Wooten.
Just for one example out of many,
this, which also comes from an April 2005 report originating with
Molly and Chuck Heath, should give a flavor of Wooten’s
menace:
Page also relayed that Inv. Wooten may be taking some
kind of steroid supplement and having problems with alcohol and
relayed a story where (nv. Wooten drove while intoxicated from the
Mug Shot Saloon. Page said he had encouraged Molly and Heath to
report this behavior to the troopers but they are scared. Page has
personally observed Jnv.Wooten’s behavior change over the last few
months and described him as “disconnected.”
+++
Mike has also told Molly that he is taking a
testosterone supplement that is illegal. He gets the substance from
a friend he weight lifts with whose name she does not know. She
cannot recall the name of the substance, just that it has a three
letter initial name like MTD, and comes in small, blue
pills.
(That’s aside from the drinking and driving angle in that
particular report).
So far as I can tell, nobody but Wooten himself seriously
disputes that Wooten made the threats in question.
Wooten “told troopers he never said anything like that about his
father-in-law,” but the state troopers’ investigation did not find
in his favor on the facts, concluding only as follows:
Molly McCann, Sarah Palin and Track Palin allege that
on February 17, 2005, Investigator Wooten made a comment to Molly
McCann that he would shoot her father if he hired a Iawyer for her.
McCann advised that Investigator Wooten made this comment to her,
and that Sarah and Track Palin who were listening over an open
telephone line overheard it. Investigator Wooten was questioned
about the comment and denied ever making the statement.
Although McCann, Sarah Palin and Track Palin all recalled
hearing the statement, a statement ‘or implied threat to a
non-present third party is not a crime. Although McCann
and Sarah Palin felt that their father’s life was in danger by the
statement, neither mentioned the threat to their father for several
weeks. Nevertheless, a statement of this sort by a trooper reflects
badly on [Alaska State Troopers].
Newsweek
cites subsequent comments by the divorce court judge asking Palin
and her family to cool the jets on their complaints about Wooten
and eventually dissolving the domestic violence protective order,
but those are steps, as
Beldar notes, that are fairly common for a divorce court
looking to put the family dispute behind everyone, and they don’t
really address whether the death threats are consistent with
believing that Wooten is a menace to public order as a State
Trooper. Certainly
the Washington Post’s characterization of his remarks suggests a
concern for something other than getting to the bottom of whether
Wooten was a bad Trooper:
Anchorage Superior Court Judge John Suddock reviewed the
complaints filed by Palin and her family. At trial on Oct. 27,
2005, the judge expressed puzzlement about why the family was
trying to get Wooten fired, since depriving the trooper of a job
would harm his ability to pay family support to Palin’s sister.“It appears for the world that Ms. McCann and her family have
decided to take off for the guy’s livelihood — that the bitterness
of whatever who did what to whom has overridden good judgment,”
Suddock said in an audio recording from the trial on TV station
KTUU’s Web site. “Aesop told us not to slay the goose who lays the
golden egg. For whatever reason, people are trying to slay the
goose here and it tends to diminish his earning capacity.”
(See also BR 53-54). Branchflower mainly concluded that concerns
over Wooten must be pretextual because the Palins dispensed with
much of their security detail…but that’s a logical non-sequitur;
you could believe that Wooten is a dangerous guy with a
hair-trigger temper who has no business in law enforcement and
still not think he would hunt down and kill the governor of the
state. At the same time, Branchflower’s report makes clear that
Gov. Palin expressed not wanting to have Wooten at events she was
attending.
There’s a whole bunch of other problems with Wooten I lack the
time here to fully explore (including a number of findings against
him by a state police internal investigation) - some minor, some
more serious, but collectively giving the impression of a guy who
drank too much, was very confident that he was above the law, and
had little respect for rules - a bad combination indeed. The most
notorious is the time he Tasered his 10-year-old stepson (he
“offered” to do the same to Palin’s daughter Bristol, who witnessed
this lunacy). Wooten himself - who has been married four times -
tries
to minimize the Taser incident but nonetheless admits it was
terrible judgment:
He said that he was a new Taser instructor, and his stepson was
asking him about the equipment. “I didn’t shoot him with live, you
know, actual live cartridge,” Wooten said.Instead, he said, he hooked his stepson up to a training aid
“with little clips. And, you know, the Taser was activated for less
than a second, which would be less than what you would get if you
touched an electric fence. … It was as safe as I could possibly
make it.”He said his stepson was on the living room floor surrounded by
pillows, that he “was bragging about it,” and that the family
laughed about it.Asked whether it was a dumb decision, Wooten told CNN,
“absolutely.”
This is a guy the state was supposed to trust with deadly
force?
Q: What did Petumenos find?
Here’s his
summary of findings:
1. There is no probable cause to believe that Governor Palin
violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act by making the decision to
dismiss Department of Public Safety Commissioner Monegan and
offering him instead the position of Director of the Alaska
Beverage Control Board.2. There is no probable cause to believe that Governor Palin
violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act in any other respect in
connection with the employment of Alaska State Trooper Michael
Wooten.3. There is no basis upon which to refer the conduct of Governor
Palin to any law enforcement agency in connection with this matter
because Governor Palin did not commit the offenses of Interference
with Official Proceedings or Official Misconduct.4. There is no probable cause to believe that any other official
of state government violated any substantive provision of the
Ethics Act.5. There is no legal basis or jurisdiction for conducting a “Due
Process Hearing to Address Reputational Harm” as requested by
former Commissioner Walter Monegan.6. The Amended Complaint by the PSEA should be dismissed.
7. Independent Counsel recommends that the appropriate agency of
State government address the issue of the private use of e-mails
for government work and revisit the record retention policies of
the Governor’s Office.These findings differ from those of the Branchflower Report
because Independent Counsel has concluded the wrong statute was
used as a basis for the conclusions contained in the Branchflower
Report, the Branchflower report misconstrued the available evidence
and did not consider or obtain all of the material evidence that is
required to properly reach findings.
We can pick over as we go the debates about the details here,
but the argument that there’s somehow a formal and uncontested
finding that Gov. Palin acted unethically is now unsupportable.
MORE READING:
The McCain-Palin campaign’s August 30, 2008 press release makes
many of the same points addressed above.
* (You can get the graphic version here). And
H/T Flopping Aces for some of the links in this post.
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Hey! I like your post “Gov. Sarah Palin Cleared In "Tasergate"” so well that I like to ask you whether I should translate into German and linking back. Greetings Engel
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November 24th, 2008