Palin’s Emails Reveal a Habit of Bringing Up Troubles With WootenToday’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.
