McCain Allies Move To Derail Trooper Investigation

You forgot to mention Rezko got $14 million in return for the sweetheart house purchase -- one hand "washing" the other.

 

You don't typically talk about things until the investigation is over.....she has already released a statement she did nothing wrong, but that is all she can really say till they do their due diligence.

 

She did, but you won't listen nor will you allow investigators to condemn or exonerate her. The facts are there, but no medium (except Fox News to their credit) has looked into the rationale for the firings.

I think Palin's candidacy is scaring the stuffing out of Democrats.

 

thumbs, the thread is about Palin and a potential abuse of power by a politician. It isn't about the trooper who very well might be a lousy guy. It is whether Palin abused the power of her office.

Try reading this. I haven't highlighted any of it. Just read the whole thing with an open mind.


September 6, 2008

Alaska Lawmakers to Seek Subpoenas in Palin Inquiry

By PETER S. GOODMAN and MICHAEL MOSS

ANCHORAGE — Senior lawmakers in the Alaska State Legislature said Friday that they would seek subpoenas to compel seven witnesses to answer questions in an ethics inquiry into whether Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president, improperly put pressure on state officials to dismiss her former brother-in-law, a state trooper.

The lawmakers overseeing the inquiry said the investigator would deliver a final report by Oct. 10 to allow both sides ample time to respond before the presidential election. Ms. Palin, after pledging for weeks that she would cooperate with the investigation, has in recent days begun to challenge the Legislature’s jurisdiction in the inquiry.

The list of people the investigator is seeking to question — including a top Palin aide, the state personnel director and the cabinet-level commissioner of administration — indicates that the inquiry is focusing on accusations that the governor’s office unlawfully breached the personnel file of the trooper, Mike Wooten. He has had a particularly contentious divorce and custody battle with Ms. Palin’s sister.

Separately, the state troopers’ union lodged an ethics complaint this week against Ms. Palin and members of her administration, alleging that they had unlawfully gained access to Mr. Wooten’s personnel file.

The pursuit of the subpoenas, which are scheduled for a vote before a joint hearing of the Alaska House and Senate Judiciary Committees next Friday, increased tensions in the ethics controversy embroiling Ms. Palin as she seeks to become vice president.

The case seems certain to play out under the glare of the presidential campaign and amid considerable rancor between the governor’s office and the Legislature. Lawmakers said they were forced to seek subpoenas after the seven witnesses abruptly canceled appointments this week to be deposed by the Legislature’s investigator, Stephen Branchflower, a longtime Anchorage prosecutor.

The lawmakers asserted that Ms. Palin’s lawyer, Thomas V. Van Flein, had forbidden members of her administration to have any contact with the investigator.

“That is a misrepresentation of what is going on,” Mr. Van Flein said. “There are several witnesses who have their own lawyers, and they took their own positions.”

He added, “My client is just waiting to tell her side of the story, but we’re not going to do it secretly, in a closed room.”

The ethics controversy stems from Ms. Palin’s dismissal in July of Walt Monegan, the public safety commissioner, in what he has said was retaliation for his refusal to dismiss Mr. Wooten. Ms. Palin has accused Mr. Wooten of threatening her family and drinking while driving his patrol car. The governor denies that Mr. Monegan’s dismissal was related to Mr. Wooten’s case.

The increasingly adversarial relationship between the lawmakers supervising the inquiry and Ms. Palin’s office stands in sharp contrast with the spirit of cooperation she had promised to bring to the inquiry, even as she questioned the need for an outside investigator.

“I’m happy to comply, to cooperate,” Ms. Palin told the Anchorage television station KTUU in late July. “I have absolutely nothing to hide, no problem with an independent investigation.”

In early August she said, “We are very, very open to answering any questions anybody has of me or my administrators.”

But on Aug. 29, the day that Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, named Ms. Palin to his ticket, her lawyer, Mr. Van Flein, sent a letter to the state-appointed investigator asserting that, though he would cooperate with the Legislature’s inquiry, the accusations should be investigated by the state personnel board.

According to the letter, obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Van Flein argued that state law made the personnel board “properly vested with primary jurisdiction.”

Ms. Palin took the extraordinary step Tuesday of filing an ethics complaint against herself, making the matter fall within the bailiwick of the personnel board. Mr. Van Flein then asked the Legislature to drop its inquiry.

The three members of the personnel board are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Legislature. The proceedings of the board are conducted in secret, in contrast with the public deliberations of the Legislature.

“It seems obvious that the governor’s approach to the legislative investigation changed radically after she was chosen to be the Republicans’ vice-presidential nominee,” said Mike Doogan, a Democratic state lawmaker from Anchorage.

Taylor Griffin, a spokesman for the McCain-Palin campaign, said the governor had been cooperative and criticized the tenor of the investigation. “What was intended as a nonpartisan review has become a political circus,” Mr. Griffin said.

On Friday, a Republican in the Legislature, John Coghill of North Pole, demanded that the Democrat overseeing the investigation, Senator Hollis French of Anchorage, give up his role, accusing him of bias.

In a letter to the chairman of the legislative panel that authorized the investigation, Mr. Coghill focused on comments Mr. French had made in the press suggesting that the inquiry was “likely to be damaging to the administration” and suggesting that it could lead to impeachment.

“These statements cause me to think that the report is already written even though the investigation is only just begun and the most important witnesses have not even been interviewed,” the letter says. “The investigation appears to be lacking in fairness, neutrality and due process.”

In an interview in his Anchorage office on Friday, Mr. French acknowledged that he had improperly speculated about possible outcomes of the case and expressed regret. He maintained that the investigation had been insulated from political pressure, and he emphasized that he was not conducting the investigation but rather was acting as the Legislature’s liaison to Mr. Branchflower.

Mr. French dismissed suggestions that partisanship and the injection of the presidential race were coloring the investigation. He noted that 8 of the 12 members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees who were to vote on the subpoenas next week were Republicans.

The seven witnesses who would be subpoenaed include some of Ms. Palin’s primary aides. At the top of the list is Frank Bailey, who in February was recorded while telephoning a trooper commander to relay that the governor and her husband, Todd Palin, were unhappy that Mr. Wooten was still on the force.

Ms. Palin subsequently said Mr. Bailey had acted improperly, and she placed him on unpaid leave.

In an interview Friday, Jay Ramras, a Republican who is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in Alaska, said Mr. Bailey was being placed on leave to free him to cooperate with the investigation. Mr. Bailey’s decision to cancel his deposition helped prompt the pursuit of the subpoenas, Mr. Ramras said.

“We took great offense that Frank Bailey bailed out of the interview at the moment he was scheduled,” Mr. Ramras said. “In elementary school terms, we feel like he started it.” The others on the list to receive subpoenas, Mr. French said, are Dianne Kiesel, the former director of the Division of Personnel and Labor Relations; Nicki Neal, the current director of the division, which oversees the personnel board; Brad Thompson, director of risk management; Annette Kreitzer, the commissioner of the Department of Administration, a cabinet position; Karen Rehfeld, the state budget chief; and Kris Perry, director of Ms. Palin’s Anchorage office.

The lawmakers said they would not send the governor a subpoena, owing to her public pledge to cooperate and to her busy schedule.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/06/us/politics/06trooper.html?ref=politics

 

fine, obama is already on o'reilly and o'reilly said he grilled him about it. he's talking about it. your next concern?

 

and yet she's trying to stop the investigation or move it to people who worked under her? that doesn't make any sense to me.

 

what did obama do illegally in the rezko situation?

 

she's not scaring me at least b/c I DON'T KNOW WHO SHE IS. she hasn't said anything where it's via her thinking and not some written speech or statement prepared by people in the campaign.

 

wrong, the investigation was going on before she was the vp candidate.

palin is the gift that keeps on giving.

 

Someone being investigated want's it to stop...........go figure........this has to be a first

 

but she says she has NOTHING TO HIDE. she's the only claiming she's pure as hell with her "reformer" claim. she says she's not the typical politician. so in that sense, she is the first.

 

Thanks, Deckard. After a cursory read, despite my severe distrust of anything printed in the New York times, it seemed fair and I would assume accurate.

She -- or her attorney -- showed some pretty shrewd moves in getting the case out of the legislature where she obviously has enemies in the Democratic Party and scorched earth Republicans. Remember, as a reformer, she has kept a number of pols from making extra pork barrel money.

However, I get frosted when people drag out something and don't air all the facts. To make my point I was contrasting the "forgiveness" so quickly afforded in the Rezko flap by her accusers on this board.

In fact, I get so angry by the sexist and unfair attacks that I am seriously considering supporting the Republican ticket. I am not alone. During the past few days I have been talking with dozens of clients and carrier personnel about the race. Virtually all the women from small towns or with children and a career are sympathic to Palin.

These women are in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, California, Washington State and Oregon....it was a short week.

 

You seriously don't see a conflict of interest (between Palin the Governor and Palin the individual) in the actions of Palin in this case, or that she may have abused the power of her office and that it is worth investigating that? Or that her attitude towards it has taken a very astonishing turn since, out of the blue, McCain selected her as his VP?

 

Which specific attacks were sexist? The only one I could even see was the questioning who was the mother story, but no one even took that one seriously. If it's the questions about her daughter getting pregnant, please tell me you don't think it would be a big story if any of the other candidates teenage daughters became pregnant.

That would leave only those who question her parenting skills when she's taking on this huge undertaking months after giving birth to a baby with Down's syndrome. I would argue that is sexist as well. I also don't believe the MSM is harping on that at all.

If you think that any of the other questions into her scandals/associations are sexist, then you would have to say that any questions into Obama's past are racist. They aren't.

 

Nope. There is no such thing as the perfect pol. They all have warts, and her warts are not as serious as some. Hillary, for instance, didn't have warts...she was a pure wart! A voter has to look at the big picture and go with the least smelly package.

 

at least we agree on something -> go with the least smelly package, which is whoever that disagrees with george bush and his administration. so i'm glad you're voting for obama-biden and the democrats. welcome aboard

 

This is pretty interesting to me. I read the following a few days ago about Palin's speech at the RNC:

[rquoter]
Chris Matthews has a certain basic instinct for politics. He said after the speech that this was a declaration of war against all the city stuff that the Obamas represent. That was correct. Sarah's banner will be carried in a war on behalf of small town America, its values, good and bad, and its people. Jeff Foxworthy says that "redneck" connotes "a glorious absence of sophistication." Sarah is not in any way unsophisticated but for the vast number who are, her speech tonight was a Princess Diana moment.

[/rquoter]

When I first read it, I kind of filed it away as odd. But your comments brought it right back to mind. Maybe there is something there?

Outrage is by definition a very visceral thing. Is some of the power behind the outrage simply because you associate Palin with yourself? If so, that begs the question of whether you would be outraged if she was some urban woman with the same resume and the same problem. Whether the outrage is about whether "what is being done to her" is really unfair, or whether she is simply 'your gal' and any negative criticism (warranted or not) are seen as personal?

Maybe this is exactly what McCain's handlers wanted when they were pushing for McCain to choose her? She's "us", and "your either with us or against us" in the immortal words of dubbya.

 

its obvious what they're going for, forget obama, how do you think small town america feels about his wife compared to palin