When I was in Alaska last month, several people told me they were afraid to speak about Sarah Palin on the record, lest they invite retaliation from the governor’s office or, God forbid, from the next vice president. At the time, I didn’t take such worries too seriously.
As scandals go, Troopergate is absurdly picayune. According to the report, released Friday by the bipartisan legislative council that authorized the investigation, Palin and her husband tried to use their political power to have her sister’s ex-husband, state trooper Michael Wooten, fired from his job and investigated for workers compensation fraud. They also pressed authorities to prosecute him for a moose shooting that was unlawful because of a technicality (the permit had been issued to his then-wife, who was with him at the time, rather than to Wooten, who pulled the trigger). The governor then fired Walt Monegan, the public safety commissioner, because he refused to get rid of Wooten, something he could not legally have done. This stuff is so ridiculously small it seems silly to even be writing about it.
Yet given that there is still a chance — albeit a diminishing one — that Palin could soon be in a position of national political power, it’s worth looking at how she has exercised power in the past. Though Palin claims the report has exonerated her, that’s an outright lie. It is true that it concluded that she was within her rights to fire Monegan, since the governor is allowed to replace department heads without cause. But it also found that Palin “abused her power” by violating the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act, which holds that any “effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action” is a violation of the public trust.
