"Summary of Public Findings and Recommendations":

1. There is no probable cause to believe that Governor Palin violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act by making the decision to dismiss Department of Public Safety Commissioner Monegan and offering him instead the position of Director of the Alaska Beverage Control Board.

2. There is no probable cause to believe that Governor Palin violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act in any other respect in connection with the employment of Alaska State Trooper Michael Wooten.

3. There is no basis upon which to refer the conduct of Governor Palin to any law enforcement agency in connection with this matter because Governor Palin did not commit the offenses of Interference with Official Proceedings or Official Misconduct.

4. There is no probable cause to believe that any other official of state government violated any substantive provision of the Ethics Act.

5. There is no legal basis or jurisdiction for conducting a “Due Process Hearing to Address Reputational Harm” as requested by former Commissioner Walter Monegan.

6. The Amended Complaint by the PSEA should be dismissed.

7. Independent Counsel recommends that the appropriate agency of State government address the issue of the private use of e-mails for government work and revisit the record retention policies of the Governor’s Office.

These findings differ from those of the Branchflower Report because Independent Counsel has concluded the wrong statute was used as a basis for the conclusions contained in the Branchflower Report, the Branchflower report misconstrued the available evidence and did not consider or obtain all of the material evidence that is required to properly reach findings.

Original Post: http://community.adn.com/adn/node/133919

Lawmakers say report by Associated Press was unfair to governor
Alaska legislators are criticizing a story on Gov. Sarah Palin by The Associated Press that challenged Palin's top accomplishment as governor - jump-starting progress on a natural gas pipeline.

"I thought it was a pretty shoddy reporting job, honestly," said Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, among many Democrats and supporters of Barack Obama who are coming to Palin's defense.

The story, written by AP reporters Justin Pritchard and Garance Burke, concluded that the Alaska Legislature used a flawed process when it chose TransCanada Corp. to develop a pipeline to bring Alaska's gas to the U.S. Midwest, and blamed Palin for the decision.

The Legislature and Palin sought to make sure the pipeline was operated as an independent pipeline, whether it was owned by one of the state's major oil and gas lease holders or an independent company.

The AP reporters called that process "flawed" and linked it to an alleged conflict of interest by a Palin administration staff member.

The AP reporters said Palin had been warned, including twice by Vice President Dick Cheney, to bring in the oil producers to the pipeline project. On Alaska's North Slope, Exxon Mobil Corp., BP and ConocoPhillips Co. produce the bulk of the state's oil and hold most of its discovered gas reserves.

The Legislature nearly unanimously established rules that required an independently operated pipeline, but allowed the producers to submit their own bid under terms resembling an independent pipeline.

The AP reporters said seeking an independent pipeline ultimately favored TransCanada and excluded the producers, which was why the process was flawed.

Sen. Gene Therriault, R-North Pole, Senate minority leader, called the story "way off base."

"We just wanted the attributes of an independently operated pipeline company, one that would protect the interests of Alaska," he said.

The Legislature spent much of the summer in special session, considering and rejecting those arguments, Therriault and Wielechowski said.

"The producers having complete control of the oil pipeline has cost the state of Alaska billions of dollars over the years; that's a fact. We've had less exploration and less drilling on the North Slope because the smaller independents have been squeezed out and because they can't pay exorbitant tariffs," Wielechowski said.

The AP story quoted only two legislators, Senate President Lyda Green, R-Wasilla, and Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, both in the minority who voted against the TransCanada deal.

Juneau Rep. Beth Kerttula said AP reporter Burke talked with her, but didn't include her defense of Palin.

"I don't believe Gov. Palin should become vice president, but I don't think this story was fair and accurate," she said.

Wielechowski called it a "hit piece" on Palin's record on the gas pipeline.

The story said the oil companies were unhappy that Palin did not support their request for 45-year tax and royalty freezes but didn't say that Palin and most legislators think that is not allowed under the Alaska Constitution.

The AP reporters also claimed the head of Palin's gas pipeline team, Deputy Commissioner Marty Rutherford of the Department of Natural Resources, may have had a conflict of interest. Under the label "ties that bind" they reported that Rutherford had in 2003 left government service to briefly work for a lobbying firm, Jade North, that later handled the TransCanada application. She soon returned to state employment.

The AP story said that was something "the Palin administration didn't tell legislators."

Therriault and others disputed that, and said that was well known to legislators.

"Marty Rutherford's limited involvement with Jade North was discussed in committee," he said.

Kerttula said that not only was Rutherford's past employment well known, it was years ago and did not amount to a conflict of interest.

"I'm really unhappy about it," she said. "It made me feel kind of sick to my stomach to see Marty Rutherford get accused" of a conflict of interest.

Juneau Sen. Kim Elton, a strong supporter of Barack Obama, questioned why the AP blamed Palin for actions that he and the majority of legislators supported.

"It wasn't something that hadn't been carefully discussed and vetted," he said.

The AP reporters, he said, apparently "parachuted in here" and jumped to a conclusion without adequate research.

Therriault said he was surprised to hear allegations that TransCanada was favored. Earlier there had been allegations that Mid-American Energy Holdings, a company owned by Warren Buffet, was favored to win the contract.

"During the debate there were lots of assertions that this was written for Mid-American," he said.

Alaska-based AP reporters who could have filled in gaps in the story seem not to have been consulted. Requests for comment from AP were either not responded to or referred to a corporate communications officer in New York who was unavailable.

The story has had wide circulation nationally and internationally. In Alaska it has run in the Fairbanks News-Miner and the Juneau Empire, the state's second and third largest papers, though not in the Anchorage Daily News, the state's largest paper.

Original story:
http://juneauempire.com/stories/102908/loc_349549309.shtml

North to Alaska: It turns out that well before he was jettisoned for what he says was his refusal to fire trooper Wooten at the behest of Sarah Palin, Monegan had his own share of domestic troubles - some of them spilling all the way down to the Bay Area.

In October 1994, Monegan's estranged wife, who had moved from Alaska to the Peninsula with the couple's two daughters after more than 10 years of marriage, sought a temporary restraining order against him - accusing Monegan of threatening to kill her, waving a gun at her and dislocating her shoulder, according to her declaration on file in Santa Clara County Superior Court.

In an interview last week, Georgene Moldovan said Monegan had threatened several times to throw her body in an Alaska river.

Monegan, 57, who has since remarried, vigorously denied Moldovan's allegations, both in court papers filed at the time and in an interview with us last week. "I'm not a door slammer - I don't punch walls," he said.

Monegan admitted to dislocating Moldovan's shoulder, but said it was an accident that had happened before they were married, while they "were wrestling and tickling."

Moldovan was an emergency room doctor and professor at Stanford and shuttled back and forth from Alaska to the Peninsula the last seven years of their marriage. Monegan asked her for a divorce in 1993, but snapped when he learned he might lose the couple's house, she says.

One day in April 1993, she said in her court filing, "he pulled out his gun and waved it at me outside my home and yelled he would kill me if I stopped him."

In the interview, Moldovan said Monegan "would show up unannounced and break into my apartment and do threatening things. I was forced to get a restraining order because I was really fearful he was going to harm me."

Monegan denounced the allegations as "either half-truths or pure fabrications." He points out that Moldovan made her accusations in the midst of a bitter fight over who would get the couple's daughters.

If any of the allegations had been documented, he said, he would have been fired from his Anchorage police job and never been hired by Palin as Alaska's top cop in 2006.

As for whether any of his own troubles might have clouded his judgment in dealing with Palin's ex-brother-in-law amid his messy divorce, Monegan says no.

"In a nutshell, I never have and I never will condone domestic violence," he said.

And while Monegan hasn't spoken to his ex-wife in years, he says, he is still on very good terms with her first husband - Alaska's U.S. attorney, Nelson Cohen.

[Reference: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/14/BALE12T2N3.DTL]

Warren Buffett has more than $46 billion dollars, controls a company that’s interested in Alaska’s gas pipeline plans and, apparently, is a Sarah Palin fan.

Click here for a video clip of Buffett congratulating Palin on her (2006 Governor) election victory.

DEBUNKING ALASKA'S "TROOPERGATE"
During my forty-year career in the New York City Police Department, I held nearly every rank, and was detached to run large and troubled investigative divisions of two major City and State agencies.  Since retiring from the Department, I have taught college courses in criminal justice and consulted or testified about police matters for such clients as Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, New York City, Newark, Chicago, the U.S. Justice and State Departments, and victims of police misconduct.

Examining the case involving Governor Palin's former brother-in-law, Michael Wooten, and the former Commissioner of Public Safety, Walter Monegan, as if I had been retained by a client to do so, here's what I found:

Wooten was found guilty of using official agency reports for personal reasons during his probationary year as an Alaska State Trooper - a serious charge that should at least have led to an extended probation.  It didn't, and Wooten gained civil service status after his first year.

During his next three years, Wooten committed an astonishing six additional acts of misconduct unrelated to Palin family complaints - for which he received written admonitions and no meaningful punishment.  The matter can be simply stated:  Any department that treats seven findings of misconduct during the first few years of a police officer's career by doing little more than creating a papered and ignored personnel file, can be categorically defined as recklessly managed. Then came the Palin family allegations.  They included Wooten's use of a police Taser on a minor, death threats made against his father-in-law (Governor Palin's father), a criminal hunting violation, public consumption of alcohol while operating a marked police vehicle, repeated acts of violence and alcohol abuse, and unlawful steroid use.  Given the seven prior findings against Wooten, any well-managed agency would treat each allegation as a presumptive basis for dismissal, and would treat some as bases for dismissal even for officers with impeccable records.

Yet after the department opened its investigation of the Palin charges, nothing happened for more than six months.  Only after Governor Palin's father complained was a report issued - and it revealed an investigation that:

·          Violated basic police investigative procedures by advising Wooten that he was under investigation before the complainant or suggested witnesses were interviewed.

·         Dismissed the drug charge on the basis of Wooten's self-provided lab report that his testosterone levels were normal - and made no apparent effort to find the 'blue pill' supplier. Wooten was alleged to patronize nor ordered any independent lab tests even for the steroid- use allegation which Wooten's report did not negate.

·         Disbelieved credible witnesses who alleged that Wooten drove his marked police vehicle into their driveway, took a beer from their refrigerator, finished it, took another, and drove away while drinking it.

·         Ignored allegations of Wooten's alcohol and anger-management problems, for which abundant leads existed.

·         Accepted Wooten's excuse that he did not know it was a crime to use another's hunting license.

Faced with charges of an investigative whitewash, the Director of the Alaska State Troopers conducted her own investigation, and, five months later, issued her findings.  Her report failed to note the death-threat charge that the investigator had sustained, or the allegations of Wooten's drinking and violence, and it accepted, without comment, the investigator's dismissal of the drug-use charges.  Nonetheless, the Director found that:

·         Wooten's seven prior misconduct charges needed to be taken into account in assessing his overall fitness, and found that Wooten's entire record demonstrated 'a serious and concentrated pattern of unacceptable and at times illegal conduct occurring over a lengthy period.

·          Wooten's Taser use on a minor demonstrated extremely poor judgment and a conscience [sic] choice "very serious in nature" to violate the department's standards of conduct, all the more because he was a departmental Taser instructor well-trained in the risks associated with use of the weapon on a child.

·         Wooten had consumed alcoholic beverages while operating his police vehicle, which "not only exposed the Department to liability, but further demonstrates your lack of judgment and lack of good character, disregard for law, and a profound disrespect for [your] responsibilities."

·         Wooten committed the crime of unlicensed hunting, which was 'exponentially exacerbate[d]' by the fact that he was a wildlife crimes investigator when he did so.  She found 'no question' of Wooten's knowing commission of a crime, and reported that Wooten 'finally did admit that [his] conduct was illegal.'  She concluded with a remarkable finding that damned her department more than it did Wooten himself:  'It is nearly certain that a civilian investigated under similar circumstances would have received criminal sanction.'

Despite those findings, and the Director's conclusion that Wooten's conduct 'constituted a gross deviation from our department's standards and will not be tolerated,' she merely reassigned him from the Wildlife Investigations Unit, warned him of dismissal if 'these types of behaviors or incidents' were repeated, and imposed an indefensibly inadequate ten-day suspension.  Worse still, and with textbook demonstration of the department's managerial dysfunction, the Director responded to union pressure by reducing the suspension to five days.

Given the department's record in the Wooten case, serious police misconduct cases with tragic outcomes have predictably occurred.  Thus, the State has paid large liability sums to the contemporaneous cases of an officer who received a promotion after being found by a jury to have tortured a suspect with his Taser, another with a prior record of undisciplined violence who remained unpunished even after wrongfully killing a disabled suspect deemed unthreatening by his partner, and yet another, who committed five rapes after the department failed to investigate harassment complaints of one of his victims. 

Further, the protection given Wooten for conduct 'nearly certain' to trigger criminal prosecutions against members of the public apparently remains the department's norm.  Recently asked how he handled hunting violations like Wooten's, the Director of the Wildlife Troopers Division said: [M]ore often than not it goes into what we call an administrative inquiry, and that's how the discipline is handled.

Even more revealing is former Commissioner Monegan's definition of the Palin family complaints as acts of harassment against Wooten, and his belief that his primary obligation in handling the case was to protect departmental morale.  He said: My job was to provide passion and support to 900 people, almost 900 people, in the Department of Public Safety, and one of them who included Trooper Wooten. He was an irritant to her [Governor Palin].  The statement alone justifies Monegan's dismissal for its failure to understand that Alaska's good police officers do not feel 'support[ed]' by indifference to the rogue conduct of officers like Wooten.

Wooten's conduct clearly merited his dismissal, and his is among the most poorly-handled disciplinary cases I have ever encountered.  Unless Wooten and his supervisors merit immunity because their inexcusable conduct related to Governor Palin's family, the Governor's opposition to Alaska's embedded 'good old boy' police culture will greatly serve its citizens - and its honorable police officers.

Edward Mamet is a retired New York City Police Captain and a police practices consultant.

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer, a/k/a Beldar)

David Talbot, the founder of Salon.com, has accomplished an amazing journalistic coup on his website today: In a breathless report entitled, "Mean Girl," Mr. Talbot reports the stunning news that the Alaska politicians whom Sarah Palin has either directly beaten or seen driven from public office for corruption, tend not to like her very much!

Stop the presses! (In other stunning news, the sun rose this morning in the east, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.)

Mr. Talbot's narrative begins with Gov. Palin's first run for Mayor of Wasilla against incumbent John Stein. We're assured that ex-Mayor Stein is "an eminently reasonable and reflective man," or so he appears to a San Francisco online journalist like Mr. Talbot, who doubtless spent many, many hours coming to know Stein intimately enough to vouch for him.
[read more]

The more we find about "Troopergate," the more justified Sarah Palin seems in firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan.  

The increased media attention to the controversy has revealed both men at the center of the inquiry have disturbing records of physical abuse against their family members.
 
Monegan is the man who Democrats believe GOP Vice Presidential contender Sarah Palin improperly used her political power to fire over his alleged unwillingness to fire Palin's former brother-in-law, Wooten.

He recently admitted dislocating his wife's shoulder "by accident" by "wrestling and tickling" her, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
 
His estranged wife, Georgene Moldovan, however, tells it a little differently.
 
Moldovan said she sought a restraining order against Monegan in 1994 after he threatened to kill her, waved a gun at her and knocked her shoulder out of socket, according to court papers. The court papers say, "he pulled out his gun and waved it at me outside my home and yelled he would kill me if I stopped him."
[read more]

CITIZEN-TAXPAYERS’ LAWSUIT FILED AGAINST UNLAWFUL OBAMA-BACKED INVESTIGATION

[click here to view PDF]