Branchflower’s Troopergate report: Palins’ behavior ran afoul of Gov. Sarah’s ethics statute

When Sarah Palin was selected as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate, many observers mistakenly believed that the impending “Troopergate” investigation could prove to be her greatest liability for the Republican ticket. Given that most Americans viewed Alaskan politics as an unprincipled slough, the investigation of Palin seemed to undermine the campaign’s insistence that she represented an alternative to the state’s Corrupt Bastards Caucus.

Fortunately for Palin, the summertime scandal over the firing of Walt Monegan was gradually overshadowed by her gross ignorance of national issues, her cavernous inability to use the English language extemporaneously, and her willingness to play the role of zombie George Wallace during the campaign’s last, bilious days. Still, when the anticipated results of the legislative investigation were released late Friday afternoon, anyone who still cared was reminded of why Sarah Palin is, if not unfit to be Alaska’s chief executive, at least poorly suited to run for national office as a clean government reformer dedicated to laboring on behalf of the people.

The floral essence of the Branchflower report (.pdf available here) is simple: For the first 18 months of her administration, Palin allowed the resources of her office to be used to further a private grievance against a state employee. The employee in question, of course, was a state trooper who had recently been divorced from Sarah Palin’s sister and who had been suspended in 2006 for, among other things, tasering his stepson and drinking a beer in his vehicle. While Sarah and Todd Palin continued to insist that Mike Wooten posed a threat to their family and a risk to the state, Wooten’s superiors concluded otherwise; they declined to reopen an old investigation and lacked sufficient cause to open a new one. (In fact, the report also notes that Sarah and Todd Palin did not seem to view Wooten as a threat. The governor actually cut her full-time security detail by two-thirds shortly after assuming office.)

Given the almost total lack of cooperation offered by Palin, her attorney general, and nearly a dozen state employees who refused to comply with legislative subpoenas, the report is surprisingly courteous to the governor. It concludes that while Palin was empowered by the state’s constitution to fire Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan without cause, she was nevertheless not free to use her public office to pursue an essentially private vendetta against Wooten, whose misconduct had already been investigated and reprimanded. And as the report clearly points out, the ethics statute — which Palin’s own administration amended and strengthened in 2007 — declares that employees of the executive branch cannot use their offices to “benefit a personal or financial interest.” Alaska’s Executive Branch Ethics Act clearly defines “benefit” as including “anything that is to a person’s advantage or self-interest, or from which a person profits, regardless of the financial gain” (emphasis added).

As the report enumerates in great detail, the Palins took a deep personal interest in the professional fate of Mike Wooten. Not satisfied with the results of the Wooten investigation, Sarah Palin began lobbying Monegan for Wooten’s dismissal within weeks of taking office, calling and e-mailing him twice in early 2007 to insist that her ex-brother in law was not someone “that should be wearing a badge.” Todd Palin approached no fewer than nine separate state officials about Wooten from December 2006 to the summer of 2008; several of these individuals were treated to literally dozens of lengthy sermons from the “First Dude” about the shame of Wooten’s employment.

When Todd Palin’s efforts came to naught, and when Monegan explained to the governor that her several queries might violate ethics rules, the lobbying campaign against Wooten expanded. Monegan soon received calls from Palin’s chief of staff, from the state’s attorney general, and from another commission head — all of them repeating the same case he’d heard from the state’s first family. According to the report, Monegan advised all of them that their conversations were legally “discoverable” and rendered the state vulnerable to civil action if Wooten were ever fired during Palin’s term in office.

In spite of the warnings, the message did not sink in. The kvetching continued from Palin’s staffers, including several calls on a recorded line to administrators with the Alaska State Troopers — calls that the Branchflower report describes as “infamous” and which Palin herself described as a “smoking gun” during a mid-August press conference, after the existence of the recordings was disclosed.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole investigation is not what it reveals about Sarah Palin, but rather what it reveals about her husband. Andrew Halcro, a former state legislator and blogger who first broke the Monegan story in July, has described Todd Palin as a “shadow governor” whose influence in his wife’s administration has raised eyebrows before. More generously, a spokesman for the McCain campaign has compared him to Eleanor Roosevelt.

The “First Dude” — who is not in fact an employee of the executive branch — was by his own account the lead goon in the campaign to get Mike Wooten fired. He initiated literally scores of conversations with various administrators in the Department of Pubic Safety, the legislature, the Alaska State Troopers, and elsewhere in the state government, and the report strongly suggests that he encouraged the Governor’s own subordinates to open up similar lines of attack. In particular, Palin spent a lot of time attempting to document new evidence of misconduct that might scuttle Wooten’s career. In each of these cases — including several instances in which Wooten used his state vehicle to bring his children to and from school — it turned out that the trooper had sought and received permission from his superiors.

Perhaps Todd Palin had nothing else to occupy his time, but the details of the report suggest that his interest in Wooten had little to do with concerns for his family’s safety or the wider public interest. The Palins appear to have regarded the Wooten saga as an affront to their family’s honor and, following the 2006 election, as an affront to Sarah Palin’s authority as governor, which presumably should have included the right to force a revisitation of a lengthy disciplinary investigation that was by every indication fair and thorough. Todd Palin himself may have regarded Wooten’s continuing employment as a direct challenge to his masculinity. How else to explain some of the fruitless, stalker-like behavior revealed in the report?

Regardless, the key result of the investigation is that Sarah Palin allowed her husband to carry on a lengthy and unlawful campaign of serial interference with state business. When Palin’s defenders insist that Palin could fire Monegan for any reason or without cause, they miss the entire point of the investigation, which was not simply to investigate the firing per se, but to examine the broader patterns of conduct exhibited by the governor and her staff during the months leading up to Monegan’s dismissal. On that latter count, it’s clear that the governor violated the very ethics legislation that she’s been proudly touting on the campaign trail. She may not be embarrassed by the report, but she should be.