Coming Soon, Another Palin Report

FICTION:

"Well, I'm very, very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing ... any hint of any kind of unethical activity there," the governor said from her car on the way to a campaign stop in Philadelphia.

FACT:
Stephen Blanchflower, the investigator hired by the legislative committee to conduct the investigation, said he found Mrs Palin in violation of a state ethics law that prohibits public officials from using their office for personal gain. He said she violated a statute of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.“Governor Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda, to wit: To get Trooper Michael Wooten fired," he said.


EVEN MORE FACT:
" Well, what the report found, everything Sarah Palin had said in terms of her motives for firing trooper Mike Wooten, who had divorced her sister, was completely false, that she felt threatened by Trooper Wooten, for example, was completely contradicted by the fact that as soon as she came into office, she demanded that her security detail be significantly reduced. And so, just across the board, everything she had said about Trooper Wooten being a threat to her was contradicted by this report, and that Todd Palin, the self-described “first dude” of Alaska, spent 50 percent of his personal time, you know, in the governor’s office seeking ways to fire Trooper Wooten and to fire Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, who happens to be sort of a local hero in Alaska.


So, the report itself is pretty devastating, and what Sarah Palin is saying is that she hasn’t—that the report finds that she hasn’t broken any laws. And technically, while that’s true, she also stands to be censured by the legislature and/or fined, which would completely erode her image as a reformer who’s above party politics and personal corruption, something that, you know, the McCain campaign had sought her out for.


Beyond that, there’s more trouble ahead for Sarah Palin. She had followed a terrible McCain campaign strategy—and this is a little bit complicated—by which she would file an ethics report against herself before the State Personnel Board. And the logic behind this was that because the governor controls the State Personnel Board, you know, reports directly to the governor, she could get a favorable report on her handling of the trooper controversy, and this would have a lot of public relations value and would sort of at least exonerate her before the public. But what wound up happening was the State Personnel Board appointed another tough prosecutor, someone named Timothy Petumenos, an Anchorage—an Anchorage lawyer, who also happens to be a Democrat. And they’re going to release their report in a few weeks, and I expect that this report could be equally, if not more, devastating for Governor Palin.

--Reporter Michael Blumenthal, on Democracy Now