[Vision2020] Who was Alaska's Governor?

Saundra Lund sslund_2007 at verizon.net
Sun Oct 12 09:05:00 PDT 2008


http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-todd12-2008oct12,0,6624850.story

>From the Los Angeles Times
CAMPAIGN '08
Sarah Palin's husband, Todd, was a fixture at governor's office
The 'first gentleman' also read official correspondence and went to closed
Cabinet meetings, records and an investigation indicate.
By Kim Murphy
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 12, 2008

Barely two weeks after Sarah Palin had been sworn in as Alaska's governor,
in December 2006, then-Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan's executive
secretary got a confusing phone call from Palin's office: The first
gentleman would like to schedule a meeting with her boss.

"I was not familiar with the term 'first gentleman,' or didn't hear her
correctly, so I kept asking her, 'Who?' " the secretary, Cassandra Byrne,
testified recently. "And she eventually said, 'Todd Palin.' "

The appointment was fixed, and Monegan arrived in the governor's office to
find himself alone with the brawny, popular fisherman and snowmobile
champion, who was sitting at a 12-foot-long conference table, surrounded by
stacks of documents. One of the documents had the logo and letterhead of
Monegan's own Department of Public Safety.

The subject, it turned out, was Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten, who had
been involved in a messy divorce with the governor's sister. The Palins,
Todd made clear, wanted Wooten fired for a long record of behavior they saw
as inappropriate for a police officer.

"He kept using the term 'we.' 'We went to go talk to, we, we.' And so I
assumed it was he and Sarah, of course," Monegan testified.

The meeting "made me a little uncomfortable," he said. "We're having it in
the governor's office, and he's not the governor. I think he was trying to
use state trappings to handle a personal issue."

Todd Palin would become a familiar voice for the Palin administration.
Independent legislative investigator Stephen Branchflower's report on
Monegan's subsequent firing -- in part, the investigation found, because he
wouldn't fire Wooten -- contains an exhaustive record of Todd Palin's
frequent and intimate presence in the day-to-day workings of his wife's
administration.

Testimony compiled as part of the inquiry, and The Times' own review of
e-mail logs from the administration, show that Todd Palin was a fixture in
the governor's office, spending about half of his time there. He attended
Cabinet meetings that are supposed to be closed to the public, and was
copied on a wide variety of high-level government correspondence on issues
such as contract negotiations with the police officers union, Alaska Native
issues and the privatization of a dairy near the Palins' hometown of
Wasilla.

A campaign issue

The presence of the governor's husband at Cabinet sessions and in meetings
over the state budget has become an issue in Palin's campaign as the
Republican vice presidential nominee, raising the question of whether Todd
Palin would become the kind of activist spouse that Hillary Clinton proved
to be during the first years of her husband's administration.

"It's almost as if he's behaving as a lobbyist," said Andree McLeod, an
Anchorage activist who has sued to obtain the full text of government
e-mails sent to the governor's husband. On Friday, she won a temporary
restraining order requiring the Palin administration to preserve copies of
messages sent under the governor's private e-mail address.

"Here he is involved in a lot of high-level meetings, and he's really
involved in a lot of policy. He's involved with mining interests; he's
involved with Native corporations," McLeod said. "I'm very curious as to who
he's representing."

But Todd Palin last week defended his role in the administration, arguing in
written testimony to the Branchflower inquiry that he was being singled out
for scrutiny because he is married to the state's first female governor.

"I have heard criticism that I am too involved with my wife's
administration. My wife and I are very close. We are each other's best
friend. I have helped her at every stage in her career the best I can, and
she has helped me," Palin wrote.

"Few complained when Nancy Murkowski helped [former Gov.] Frank Murkowski.
Frank Murkowski even issued a memo telling everyone his wife was his closest
advisor, and would travel wherever he went," Palin said. "It is unfair to
apply a double standard against my wife, just because she is the state's
first female governor."

But according to the legislative inquiry, the "first gentleman's" influence
was so pervasive that senior staff members began to be uneasy about his
constant phone calls about Wooten. Former legislative director John Bitney,
the report said, took several calls a day from Todd Palin on his cellphone.

"Todd . . . would call me about once a day, sometimes two or three times a
day, just on a myriad of things" -- very often about Wooten -- Bitney
testified.

"You were kind of caught in the middle here?" Branchflower asked him.

"Yeah, but I didn't want to tell him I wasn't going to do anything . . . I
didn't think that was appropriate, but I didn't want to tell Todd that."

An unofficial regular

Bitney ended up losing his job. No reason was given at the time, but Bitney
believes it was connected to the fact that he had an affair with, and later
married, the wife of a close friend of the Palins'.

A variety of top-level administration officials told Branchflower that Palin
was a frequent presence in the governor's office, but many have said he was
often there to help baby-sit the couple's youngest child.

But Atty. Gen. Talis J. Colberg, during his interview with Branchflower, was
unable to explain the presence of the governor's husband at Cabinet
meetings.

"If someone said that they have seen him at more than one or two Cabinet
meetings, would that give you pause?" Branchflower asked.

"That would give me pause, but it's possible," Colberg responded.

"Are Cabinet meetings open to the public?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Is Todd Palin a state employee, to your knowledge?"

"No."

"Do you know why he was allowed to remain there?"

"No."

Taylor Griffin, a spokesman for the McCain-Palin campaign, said the answer
to his involvement was simple: Palin often asked her husband, who was at
home with the children, to print out government e-mails so she could read
them at home at night.

"Todd has played an appropriate and similar role to that played by the
spouses of dozens of governors throughout the country," Griffin said.

Todd Palin received copies of e-mails dealing with a bill on parental
consent for abortion; a radio talk-show host "hammering" a political
opponent of the governor; discussions about the police union, which was
involved in contentious contract negotiations with the state; invitations to
legislators for bill signings; and a wide variety of e-mails about Andrew
Halcro, a longtime irritant to the Palin administration who ran
unsuccessfully against Palin for governor in 2006.

Todd Palin also got a copy of the celebratory e-mail that circulated through
the governor's office about talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. The new Alaska
governor, Limbaugh had declared, was "a babe."

kim.murphy at latimes.com

Times staff writer Tom Hamburger in Washington contributed to this report.



More information about the Vision2020 mailing list