New Complaint Against Palin on Trooper-Gate

Sarah Palin could be facing another investigation in relation to Trooper-Gate.

NBC News reports that the police officer’s union of Alaska has filed an ethics complaint on behalf of Mike Wooten, the trooper who was embroiled in a dispute with the Palin family, and who the governor is alleged to have attempted to have fired.

According to NBC News:

The complaint alleges that the governor or her staff may have have improperly disclosed information from Wooten’s personnel records. The complaint alleges “criminal penalties may apply.”

The union argues that recordings of a phone conversation involving Palin-aide Frank Bailey — released last month as part of the Attorney General’s own Trooper-Gate probe — suggested that Wooten’s records were accessed improperly.

In response, the McCain-Palin campaign told NBC News that the files were not protected, and that Wooten himself had signed a waiver allowing a divorce lawyer to gain access to his personnel records. They added that Todd Palin, the governor’s husband, was the source of information for Bailey, and that the information came from Wooten’s divorce proceedings.

In other words, the McCain campaign is saying that Todd Palin gathered damaging information on Mike Wooten by looking through his divorce proceedings, then passed it on to an aide to the governor, who later used it to try to have Wooten fired. That may or may not be legal, but it doesn’t exactly sound like the kind of ethical, reformist approach to government that Governor Palin claims to stand for.