Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (28 page)

However, I believe that there was another equally important reason.

A couple of months before offering me Ivy's old job, an unlikely burgeoning friendship began. Todd Palin had a project of vital importance. He'd gone to Mike Tibbles and Attorney General Talis Colberg, but found their effectiveness lacking. As I'd become the Palins' “old reliable,” he recruited me for a crusade that became an obsession for him and, in short order, for me.

Our shared insanity, I believe, was at least partly responsible for my political rebirth. When our actions blew up in my face more than a year later, the fallout would lead to personal heartache, making me long for a chance to go back in time to the Governor's Picnic and say to Sarah, “Thanks, but no thanks,” on that job to nowhere. Instead I was about to become exhibit A in a miserable saga known universally as Troopergate.

PART THREE

Troopergate and Other
“Crap Clusters”

18
 

How Does Firing Trooper Wooten Make Us Safer?

O
n October 11, 2008, Sarah Palin was less than six weeks into serving as Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain's running mate. Standing in front of dozens of cameras and microphones, she declared in her isn't-this-great-news? voice, “Well, I'm very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing . . . any hint of any kind of unethical activity there.”

The infamous
Stephen Branchflower Report to the Legislative Council
had just been released, and the governor was conducting a news conference via phone to explain her jubilant reaction to the findings. In summing up matters, she reiterated, “very pleased to be cleared of any of that.”

The Branchflower investigation that Sarah so blithely suggested cleared her name began in August when the Alaska Legislative Council hired independent counsel Stephen Branchflower to investigate whether the Palin administration and staff, including me, exercised inappropriate influence on Department of Public Safety (DPS) Commissioner Walt Monegan by pressuring him to fire Alaskan State
Trooper Mike Wooten; when Monegan refused, he was eventually removed from office. Wooten, formerly married to Sarah's younger sister Molly McCann, had a history of run-ins with Sarah's family, including a bitter divorce and custody dispute with Molly dating back to 2005.

What Sarah neglected to mention in that conference call was that while, yes, investigator Branchflower found that the firing of Monegan “was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional and statutory authority,” Governor Palin also “knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates to advance a personal agenda, to wit: to get Trooper Michael Wooten fired.” And “although Walt Monegan's refusal to fire Trooper Wooten was not the sole reason he was fired by Governor Sarah Palin, it was likely a contributing factor to his termination as Commissioner of Public Safety.” The findings further concluded that Sarah “permitted Todd Palin to use the Governor's office . . . to continue to contact subordinate state employees in an effort to find some way to get Trooper Wooten fired.” Hence, Troopergate.

For Sarah, once she said, “cleared of
any
wrongdoing,” the words assumed written-in-stone status inside her head, and devoted followers joined her in wholeheartedly embracing her innocence and near martyrdom at the hands of abusive critics. This time, however—since I was at the epicenter of much of this controversy and knew better—there were no mental gymnastics that permitted me to blindly march alongside the ever-growing allegiant army. To answer her critics who actually read the Branchflower findings and disagreed with Sarah's conclusion that it gave her a glowing recommendation, Sarah, through her attorney Thomas Van Flein, condemned the report as a means to “smear the governor by innuendo.” Sarah's legal counsel wanted everyone to understand that Mr. Branchflower and those who hired him were evildoers, doing their evildoing best to victimize the soon-to-be vice president of the United States of America.

Along Sarah's road from scandal to self-proclaimed innocence, much of the residual blame fell at my feet—not that I didn't deserve a sizable dose. By allowing myself to be sucked into a family vendetta,
I did something monumentally stupid and wrong that took this from rumor to unprecedented PR disaster:

In February 2008, I phoned one of Walt Monegan's deputies and made known the Palin family's frustration with Trooper Wooten.

This ill-advised call was one of dozens—several directly to Walt Monegan—made by individuals connected to the Palin administration. The difference was that the man I phoned, Trooper Lieutenant Rodney Dial, recorded our twenty-four-minute conversation. (In a classic example of our tiny big state, Dial had been the Palin for Governor sign coordinator in Ketchikan.) Worse, the release of that tape in mid-August 2008, six months after being recorded, came in the midst of howling denials by Governor Palin that anyone had ever pressured Monegan regarding “his rogue and dangerous trooper.” She removed Monegan, she swore, because he was a failure and the department needed a new direction. Due in no small part to the timing and hard evidence from the recording, I became known as the “the Troopergate guy.”

My family suffered alongside me, largely in silence, while Sarah and Todd Palin resorted to doing what they had done so often in the past: deny, deny, deny. “His comments were unauthorized as well as just wrong,” she said about my February phone call during a hastily called press conference on August 13.

By this time we all understood that truth was something to be dragged out only when convenient. The deception we'd constructed had consistently worked miracles in keeping Sarah's ambitions on course, and if nothing else Sarah Palin continued to believe in miracles. For her to survive this latest mess, all I had to do was die a thousand deaths for the proverbial greater good. I did just that, including offering my resignation on three separate occasions, but not without wondering,
What is the greater good?
Did it extend beyond Sarah's personal ambition?

At the time of the
Branchflower Report
's release, Sarah was on the presidential campaign trail, wowing crowds by informing them that Barack Obama was “pallin' around with terrorists” and that she had said “Thanks but no thanks” to the so-called Bridge to Nowhere—
a proposed $233 million federally funded bridge connecting the Alaska mainland to Gravina Island's fifty residents; the project was eventually cut, but not before becoming a symbol of wasteful pork-barrel spending. The renewed furor from the independent investigator's report was unwelcome but did not appear to have the derailing effect that McCain-Palin critics had expected. For reasons best left to political analysts, Sarah remained Teflon. The stench of Troopergate hung over her, but it was like secondhand smoke, lingering and unpleasant, but dissipating. For those of us remaining behind, especially me, the stink was everywhere. If you Google “Frank Bailey,” the name will be forever linked with “Troopergate,” “Wooten,” and “Monegan.” But it's my fault. I made the call (and did so much more). It was wrongheaded, even if I believed what I said was true: Wooten is not a sympathetic person and, arguably, has no place in law enforcement.

Despite that, there were many questions I should have been asking. How was destroying Mike Wooten relevant to our job of governing Alaska? How was it remotely worth the hundreds and hundreds of man-hours spent trying to do so? How, for the love of God, would destroying him personally and professionally make the first family safer, as Sarah and Todd swore repeatedly was their main concern? And if safety was a real concern, Sarah forgot all about that when she complained about the inconvenience of having troopers accompany her on trips in and out of state. In an email to Todd on March 4, 2008, copied to those of us who would follow up, she ordered,
“No more security. It's a flippin waste of money.”

This saga, unfortunately, epitomized the worst of Sarah's dysfunctional psyche and administration, including the compulsion to attack enemies, deny truth, play victim, and employ outright deception.

And while the seeds of the scandal were planted back in 2005 and continued unabated into 2008, the pathos was exponentially elevated when John McCain reached out to Sarah Palin as a savior for his floundering presidential ticket. As such, these events directly related to McCain's own incompetent vetting process. As political perfect storms go, this resembled two Category 5s meeting head-on.

19
 

Loose Cannon, Ticking Time Bomb

W
ay back, in October 2006, Sarah briefly introduced me to the problems with her ex-brother-in-law when explaining why the troopers' union, the Public Safety Employees Association (PSEA), did not endorse her for governor. She believed that the organization's then business agent, John Cyr
“persuaded the PSEA . . . folks to back [Tony Knowles].”

By the time we'd won the election, however, I had no recollection of this specific communication, only that there was a personal reason for PSEA endorsing the wrong candidate. For all practical purposes, the Trooper Mike Wooten saga began for me in earnest less than a week after the general election. During those early postelection days,
I remained a central figure in organizing Sarah's agenda and fielding calls from those in government who needed to schedule meetings. One of the earliest of these was Gary Wheeler, head of what was to be the governor's security detail.

A day or two after the election, I arranged a sit-down in our mid-town Anchorage office. When Wheeler politely requested that this be a private meeting between him and the Palins, I gathered up my laptop and papers to leave, but Sarah said, “Frank, you can be here for this.” Only a couple of days removed from chasing down votes one at a time, I already felt that I was being distanced from the day-to-day decision making that had been part of my prior menu of duties. I could see that the power structure was changing, with political operatives taking over for us longtime Rag Tags. This small token—pulling me into a private meeting—was welcoming.

The session began rather curiously, I thought, as Wheeler chose to devote the initial moments of face time with the governor to discussing the importance of the previous governor's private jet that Sarah eventually made into a symbol of her frugality by selling—listing it, for a time, on eBay. He claimed that the Department of Public Safety needed such a resource to respond rapidly to threats across the state; if she didn't need the thing, they did. This discussion became a window into our new world, one where everybody seemed to have an agenda and a request, legitimate or not. Unfortunately for DPS, Sarah's sweet smile and “I'll hafta think on that, Gary,” was nothing more than polite lip service. With the massive popular support she'd receive for disposing of Murkowski's folly, there was no way she would sacrifice that to a department she believed was already eating up substantial budgetary resources.

Having stated his case on the jet, Wheeler proceeded to the topic of security. Todd said little, sitting back and staring through those cold blue eyes, stroking his chin from time to time as if he had something on his mind but had decided to withhold. Acting as if I were in a class lecture, I sat off to the side and took notes while Sarah sat behind the desk, legs crossed and hands folded. Wheeler gave an overview of how security operations had worked in the past, then asked if DPS needed to be aware of any threats to the Palin family. Sarah began a lengthy
detail of how her ex-brother-in-law, State Trooper Mike Wooten, had tasered his stepson, driven drunk in a patrol car, shot a moose illegally, called her daughter Bristol an “effing bitch,” and threatened to put an “effing bullet” in her “effing” father if he paid for an attorney to represent Sarah's sister Molly in their divorce battle. Clearly upset and having no interest in disguising her disgust, she went on to blast the department for allowing this “animal” to continue to wear a badge and carry a gun.