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Board exonerates Palin
She flatly denies having conversations about trooper Wooten with Walt Monegan

By LISA DEMER, KYLE HOPKINS and MEGAN HOLLAND
Anchorage Daily News

A new report, released on the eve of Election Day, clears Gov. Sarah
Palin of any ethics violations in her firing of her public safety
commissioner and directly contradicts earlier findings of an
investigator for the Legislature.

The new state Personnel Board-sanctioned investigation is the second
into whether Palin violated state ethics law in firing her public
safety commissioner earlier this year.

The board is set up in state law as an independent agency to hear
complaints of violations of state ethics law brought against executive
branch employees. Members are appointed by the governor, though Palin
only had a role in appointing one of the three current members.

Both investigations found that Palin was within her rights to fire
Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan.

But the new report says the Legislature's investigator was wrong to
conclude that Palin abused her power by allowing aides and her
husband, Todd, to pressure Monegan and others to dismiss her
ex-brother-in-law, trooper Mike Wooten. Palin was accused of firing
Monegan because Wooten, the target of a series of complaints from the
governor and her family, stayed on the job.

Timothy Petumenos, an Anchorage lawyer, conducted the investigation.
He was hired as independent counsel for the Personnel Board to examine
several complaints against Palin.

The Troopergate matter became sharply politicized after Palin joined
the ticket of Republican presidential candidate John McCain in late
August.

Palin, after first promising to cooperate, never gave a statement to
the special counsel hired by the Legislature, but she gave three hours
of sworn testimony to Petumenos.

As for the last-minute timing — Petumenos gave out his report hours
before the polls opened on Palin's bid to become vice president — the
investigator said it wasn't ready until now.

"If you think this is being done to favor the governor politically, it
certainly would have been much more favorable for her to receive this
days before now," Petumenos said.

He'd hoped to release it Thursday, but it wasn't finished, he said.
Personnel Board chair Debra English got her copy at about 4 p.m.
Sunday.

The board voted to accept the report Monday, ending the investigation.

Petumenos finished his report on a separate ethics complaint against
Palin — also released Monday — on Oct. 15. That one, which involved a
claim of political favoritism in hiring a state worker, wasn't
unveiled earlier because the people involved didn't waive their right
to confidentiality until this weekend, English said.

The McCain campaign quickly put out a statement by Palin's lawyer,
Thomas Van Flein.

"The Governor is grateful that this investigation has provided a fair
and impartial review of this matter and upholds the Governor's ability
to take measures when necessary to ensure that Alaskans have the best
possible team working to serve them," the statement said.

The new report says Palin, in her testimony, denies Monegan's versions
of events; specifically, she says two conversations that Monegan
described having with her about Wooten never took place.

One was a phone call Monegan says Palin made to him in January 2007 in
which she complained that Wooten, who went through a nasty divorce
from Palin's sister, had only received "a slap on the wrist" from his
superiors. The other was a conversation he described having the next
month with the governor while they were on their way to wish happy
birthday to a state senator. Monegan said Palin brought up Wooten once
again.

"Both of those conversations are denied, in their entirety, by the
governor," Petumenos said.

Reached Monday afternoon, Monegan said he hadn't yet had a chance to
read the new report but was disappointed it contradicted the earlier
investigation.

He said the governor is wrong when she claims they never spoke about Wooten.

"It happened," Monegan said.

Both Monegan and Palin made their statements under oath.

John Cyr, executive director of the troopers union, called Monegan
"scrupulously honest."

"For the governor to suggest or to outright say that he has lied about
this is at best a mischaracterization," he said.

Petumenos combed through tens of thousands of e-mails, including four
sent by Palin to Monegan in which she alludes to Wooten. But there's
no independent verification of the meetings that Monegan remembers,
and even if there were, Petumenos says, his findings would be the
same.

Petumenos wrote that he was concerned about the use of private e-mail
accounts for state business by the governor and some of her staff and
questioned whether he was able to retrieve all the pertinent
correspondence he needed. Palin had used a Yahoo account until it was
hacked.

Petumenos concluded that the Legislature's special counsel, former
state prosecutor Steve Branchflower, used the wrong state law as the
basis for his conclusions and also misconstrued the evidence.

"(Branchflower) assumed that the governor knew about things and should
have stopped them, when the evidence we induced is that she didn't
know about them in the first place," Petumenos said at a Monday
afternoon press conference.

Petumenos said that Palin told him she had no idea what Todd was up
to. He said she didn't know that Todd met with Monegan about Wooten in
the governor's office in January 2007, soon after Palin took office.
At the meeting, Todd presented a stack of documents with concerns
about Wooten.

The Palins have argued that Wooten was a loose cannon who Tasered his
stepson, drank beer in his patrol car, shot a moose on his wife's
permit and threatened Palin's father. They say their complaints about
him were justified.

Was there anything wrong in what Todd did?

"There is no prohibition in the law for a private citizen to make
inquiries, to express discontent, to give opinions," Petumenos said.
"If someone wants to make an exception for the spouse of a high
official, then they need to change the law."

Branchflower had found that Palin didn't act to stop others, including
Todd, from pressing for Wooten's dismissal, and that amounted to an
abuse of power.

But Petumenos wrote that Branchflower wrongly relied on a portion of
statute that outlined the overall legislative intent. He said
violations of the ethics act instead must be based on one of eight
specific prohibitions.

"The legal analysis of the Branchflower report is completely wrong,"
Petumenos said.
Some key legislators dispute that.

State Sen. Kim Elton, chairman of the bipartisan Legislative Council,
said Branchflower's report was solid and the work that went into it
was meticulous.

"I think that the reading of the law in the Branchflower report is
absolutely spot on," said Elton, a Democrat from Juneau. The council
approved the hiring of Branchflower and authorized last month's
release of the legislative report, but never voted on the report's
conclusions.

"If the governor brought inappropriate pressure upon Walt Monegan, she
violated the ethics law. If she allowed others to do it and didn't
stop it, she also violated the ethics law," Elton said.

Palin herself asked the three-member Personnel Board to determine
whether her dismissal of Monegan violated the ethics law, but that was
after the bipartisan Legislative Council had already approved its own
investigation.

Petumenos' investigation covered several related complaints.

The troopers union — the Public Safety Employees Association —
complained to the board that Palin and others improperly disclosed
confidential personnel and workers' compensation records of Wooten,
and that the governor and others engaged in continuous, systematic
efforts to have Wooten fired. Petumenos recommended the union
complaint be dismissed.

Monegan had asked the board for a hearing to clear his name but
Petumenos determined the Personnel Board wasn't the proper place to
air such a case.

". . . I think we just have to move on with life, I guess," Monegan
said. "Am I interested in suing anybody? No."

Regarding the Personnel Board, Palin reappointed English, who lives in
Anchorage, in January. The other two members, Laura Plenert of
Ketchikan and Al Tamagni of Anchorage, were already on the board when
Palin took office in 2006 and their terms don't expire until 2010 and
2012. The members are volunteers. Plenert is a registered Republican;
English and Tamagni are undeclared.
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