Word: wooten
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...action finally came in the form of Senator Hollis French, the Anchorage Democrat who is leading the investigation into whether Governor Sarah Palin abused the power of her office to get her little sister's ex-husband, state trooper Mike Wooten, fired by pressuring - and then dismissing - Commissioner of Public Safety Walt Monegan. French has been the focal point of the McCain campaign's objections to the Troopergate investigation. They say French, as a Democrat, has a partisan ax to grind. And while the mostly Republican committee had voted unanimously to start the investigation before Palin was on the McCain...
...Wooten allegedly told McCann that Palin's father would "eat a f___ing lead bullet", a 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...
...Monegan's firing, she said that "never was there any pressure put on Commissioner Monegan to hire or fire anybody." A month later, though, she held a surprise press conference, which revealed that key staffers and even her husband had 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...
...John McCain's running mate, she doesn't seem to be now. Only a few weeks ago, Palin had promised full cooperation with the legislature - "Hold me accountable," she told Alaskans - including testifying in front of the inquiry, which is also looking into allegations that her staff improperly accessed Wooten's personnel file. She also requested that the state attorney general conduct his own investigation alongside the legislature's probe. But Thomas Van Flein, the lawyer she had to hire because the attorney general, Talis Colberg, also called Monegan about Wooten and therefore could be a witness, had Palin take...
...they say, it's not the crime but the cover-up that could be most damaging. Wooten is not a highly sympathetic character - something Palin knows firsthand - and the public could perhaps understand why Palin wouldn't want him carrying a gun around. But Monegan is the one who lost his job. And by initially denying that there was any pressure, only to reveal that most of her senior staff, her husband and the attorney general had in fact been pressuring Monegan, Palin did far more damage to her carefully cultivated maverick image that is working so well...