Today's new Trooper-Gate report (pdf), shows a number of the emails between Gov. Sarah Palin and fired Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan that discuss Trooper Mike Wooten. While the report finds that Palin did not violate any ethics code in firing Monegan, it's worth looking at the emails between the governor and Monegan -- many of which seem to go out of their way to bring up the governor's grievances against her former brother-in-law Wooten.

An e-mail sent on Feb. 7, 2007 from Palin to Monegan with the title "CONFIDENTIAL cop bill" actually spends little time discussing the cop bill at all. While the email briefly touches on the bill -- which addressed jail time for police officers after killing someone -- the governor spends a full three paragraphs discussing her family's history with Wooten.

It was a joke, the whole year long "investigation" of him - in fact those who passed along the serious information about him to Julia Grimes and Tandeske were threatened with legal action from the trooper's union for speaking about it. (This is the same trooper who's out there today telling people the new administration is going to destroy the trooper organization, and that he'd "never work for that b****, Palin")

Three months later, after a flair up with another state trooper, Palin used the incident as an excuse to mention Wooten again to Monegan:

[B]etween this and the message I received the other night where an Ak [sic] State Trooper recently told a friend of family [sic] that he could further "mess with the governor's sister" by claiming falsehoods about us. . .

In July of that same year, Palin emailed Monegan about a legislative proposal on guns. Again, Palin used the opportunity to bring up Wooten:

The first thought that hit me when reading Gara's quote about people not being able to buy guns when they're threatening to kill someone went to my ex-brother-in-law, the trooper, who threatened to kill my dad yet was not even reprimanded by his bosses and still to this day carries a gun, of course. We can't have double standards.

And in Sept. of 2007, Palin brought up Wooten as the "trooper we've talked about before" in an email to Monegan relating to a state settlement with another trooper.

The take-away on Palin's emails to Monegan listed in the exhibits, is that she didn't shy away from inserting her personal history into her official dealings. Whether or not it was Monegan's failure to pay deference to these (not-so) subtle hints that led to his firing, is still unknown -- but this report would have you believe it didn't.

As we noted before, this report is the result of the investigation at the behest of Palin herself -- so it's not any kind of big surprise that it exonerates her.

The Alaska State Personnel Board's Trooper-Gate report has been released, and it clears Sarah Palin of any wrong-doing.

CNN reports:

"There is no probable cause to believe that the governor, or any other state official, violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act in connection with these matters," Timothy Petumenos, the Anchorage lawyer hired to conduct the probe, wrote in his final report.

Of course, this was an investigation that Palin herself initiated, by filing an ethics complaint against herself. The three members of the Personnel Board are appointed by Palin, and she cooperated with the investigation.

By contrast, the only independent investigation into the matter -- which was conducted by the state legislature and with which Palin did not cooperate -- found that Palin had violated state ethics laws by pressuring subordinates to fire Mike Wooten, a trooper with whom she was embroiled in a family dispute.

The report's "Summary of Public Findings and Recommendations" follows after the jump...

Read more »

Here's a funny note from the report that brings home the depths of Sarah Palin's antipathy toward Mike Wooten:

Shortly before the annual celebration of Police Memorial Day on May 15, 2008, Commissioner Monegan had dropped off a color photograph at Governor Palin's Anchorage office with a request that she sign and present it at the ceremony. The photograph was of an Alaska State Trooper who was dressed in a formal uniform, saluting. He was standing in front of the police memorial located in front of the crime lab at AST headquarters in Anchorage, partially obscured by a flagpole. The picture to be signed by the Governor was to be used as a poster to be displayed in various Trooper Detachments around the state.

Shortly after he returned to his office from dropping off the photograph, he received a call from Kris Perry, Governor Palin's Director of her Anchorage office who asked [according to Walt Monegan's testimony] "Why did you send a poster over here that has a picture of Mike Wooten on it?" Until that moment, Commissioner Monegan never realized it was indeed a photograph of Trooper Wooten. Governor Palin cancelled her appearance and sent Lieutenant Governor Parnell in her place.

Monegan's eventual replacement as Public Safety Commissioner, Charles Kopp, testified that Palin aide Frank Bailey later called him and told him the administration was thinking about replacing Monegan as commissioner. When Kopp asked why, Bailey cited the incident with the Wooten photograph as one reason, among several, for the governor's displeasure with Monegan.

In his recent New Yorker story, Philip Gourevitch noted that even as Sarah Palin was arguing to him that she had fired Walt Monegan for other reasons, "she seemed to be saying something else--that her vendetta against Wooten was wholly justified."

And watching Palin's recent interview with Sean Hannity, we got the same impression.

Palin told Hannity: "This trooper tasered my nephew...that was...it's all on the record. It's all there. His threats against the first family, the threat against my dad. All that is in the record. And if the opposition researchers chooses to forget that side of the story, they're not doing their job."

Sounds like she still feels she had a legitimate beef.

The Sarah Palin Trooper-Gate saga has taken so many twists and turns lately that we decided it was worth taking a step back, to consider what we've learned to date, and what it might all amount to.

As regular readers of TPMmuckraker know, Trooper-Gate centers on allegations that Sarah Palin fired the former Alaska Public Safety Commissioner for his refusal to axe a state trooper who had undergone an ugly divorce from Palin's sister, and who was embroiled in a bitter feud with the Palin family. But as is so often the case when powerful figures are accused of wrongdoing, the effort to conceal what happened by Palin and Alaska Republicans, apparently with the aid of the McCain campaign, may be just as revealing as the original event.

The whole sordid tale started on July 13th, when the Anchorage Daily News -- which has been all over Trooper-Gate since the start -- reported that Walt Monegan, the state's respected public safety commissioner, had been fired without a clear explanation.

Read more »

The Associated Press reports that Mike Wooten, the trooper at the center of Trooper-Gate, says he has not been contacted by investigators.

The independent investigator on the case, Steve Branchflower, has been on the job since around August 1st, and his contract runs through October 31st, though legislators overseeing the probe recently announced their intention to move up the final report's release date by three weeks.

Wooten told the AP he'd cooperate with the investigation if contacted. The AP also reported that former state public safety commissioner Walt Monegan will meet with investigators today.

The case centers on claims by Monegan that he was fired by Sarah Palin for refusing to fire Wooten -- a trooper who had undergone a messy divorce from Palin's sister and had become embroiled in a bitter dispute with Palin's family.

Newsweek reports that in 2005, a judge warned Sarah Palin and her family to stop disparaging Mike Wooten, the state trooper who at the time was undergoing a bitter divorce from Palin's sister and is at the heart of the ongoing Trooper-Gate investigation.

According to court records of the divorce proceedings obtained by the magazine, Judge John Suddock called the attacks on Wooten by the family "a form of child abuse." And an official with the troopers' union told the judge that he had received up to a dozen family complaints against Wooten. The official said he believed the complaints were "not job-related" and that Wooten was being "harassed" by his estranged wife's family.

And in his January 2006 order granting a final divorce decree to Wooten and Palin's sister, now known as Molly Hackett, Judge Suddock threatened to curb Hackett's child custody rights if her family continued to criticize Wooten. It appears that the judge did not ultimately limit those rights.

The Palins' alleged animosity toward Wooten is central to Trooper-Gate. The former state public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, alleged in July that he was fired by Sarah Palin, who was elected governor in November 2006, because he refused to fire Wooten from his job as a trooper. The state legislature has appointed an independent investigator to look into the matter.

Gov. Palin had at first pledged full cooperation with the probe, but since she was announced as John McCain's running-mate, that cooperation has ground to a halt.

CNN caught up earlier today with Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten, the former brother-in-law of Sarah Palin, who is at the center of Trooper-Gate.

Wooten doesn't appear to have spoken publicly since his name became the focus of the investigation involving the firing of Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, who claimed he was terminated by Palin after he refused to fire Wooten.

Wooten has been embroiled in a bitter dispute with the Palin family since a messy 2005 divorce from Palin's sister Molly McCann. In 2005, complaints were filed against Wooten to the state troopers which resulted in an internal investigation of Wooten. Thirteen charges were investigated and four were ultimately found to have merit. Those included charges that he tasered his 11 year-old stepson, shot a moose out of season, drove drunk in his trooper car and threatened to "put a bullet in [the] f***ing brain" of Palin's father.

Wooten received a 10-day suspension from the force as a result of the findings, which was shortened to 5 days after advocacy from the troopers union.

Yesterday, the troopers union filed an ethics complaint against Palin for improperly accessing Wooten's personnel record. In her defense Palin states that she received information on Wooten from the divorce proceedings, which Wooten had made public by signing a waiver.