Word: trooper
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...first with prodding from his union, and then on his own, Monegan began telling people about the persistent pressure he claimed to have felt, in the months leading up to his dismissal, from the governor, her staff and her husband to get rid of a state trooper named Mike Wooten. Wooten happened to be Palin's former brother-in-law and had been involved in a bitter divorce and custody dispute with Sarah Palin's younger sister Molly McCann since 2005. Monegan's refusal to remove Wooten was, he said, part of what led to his firing. If Monegan...
...seems like he was at one point, based on the incidents the Palin family compiled. After all, who Tasers a 10-year-old boy, even if it was the boy's idea in the first place, and even if the Taser was on a low setting? But the state troopers investigated all the allegations and let Wooten off with just a 10-day suspension (the police union eventually got it down to five). As of this July, the custody case was still unsettled. And the fact that Wooten served on the Alaskan equivalent of a SWAT team shows that...
...comment that Palin says she and her son overheard. But Palin's most consistent claim, that her staff were just worried about her family's safety, rings hollow (as does, even more so, the other argument she made - that Wooten was such a lout that he would hurt trooper recruitment). Several years had passed, and even though Wooten had a domestic violence restraining order against him, he had never physically threatened the governor, her husband Todd or their children...
...made more than two dozen contacts with Monegan about Wooten, contacts she insists she hadn't known about. It turns out an increasingly wary state police had recorded one of those conversations, which is fairly explicit in its intent. The call, from Palin ally Frank Bailey to a state trooper, intimates that Palin was otherwise happy with Monegan except on the Wooten issue: "I'm telling you honestly, you know, she really likes Walt a lot, but on this issue, she feels like it's - she doesn't know why there is absolutely no action for a year on this...
...Halcro, a critic of Palin since she got into office, first broke the story of Palin's alleged abuse of power in trying to get her ex-brother-in-law fired as a state trooper. He's also written extensively about Palin's stance on the Bridge to Nowhere and a massive natural gas pipeline project...