Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (30 page)

At one point, when older players on Track Palin's hockey team put Ex-Lax in a younger player's cookie as a prank and were disciplined, Sarah reacted by suggesting in an email to Todd and a small list of friends that
“students can't say ‘boo' nowadays without getting in big trouble.”
More significantly, however, Todd, with her knowledge, sent an email to school officials and tied Wooten back into the discussion. As they'd done repeatedly, they were not satisfied with trying to terminate his employment as a state trooper. They also lobbied long and hard to have him removed as coach of the Wasilla High football team. Todd, in focusing his anger on the school's administration, wrote,
“I am having a hard time understanding the difference between a prank involving a cookie laced with ex-lax and a WHS coach using disgustingly abusive and intimidating tactics while calling WHS student a ‘f***ing a**hole.' ”
That Wooten remained, at this time, a coach, Todd went on, was reprehensible.

Additionally, the couple solicited letters of complaint from friends
who knew Wooten and had a tale to tell. In one instance, a former Wooten friend described him grabbing a beer while at their home, opening it, and driving away while drinking. Many of these reports were sent to Colonel Grimes, to Wasilla High School administrators, and/or as recently as 2008 to me, media outlets, and eventually people like Brad Thompson as fuel to stoke new investigations of Wooten.

Even past and future radio critic Dan Fagan, in his 2005 love-Sarah days, jumped into the game. He spoke directly to Grimes secretly on Todd's behalf, seeking information about the Wooten investigation. On December 17, 2005, he wrote a follow-up, coming close to demanding information or he would be
“going public with all of this if something is not resolved shortly.”

Grimes had already responded to Chuck Heath's letter of complaint, writing,
“I will assure you, as I have assured Sarah (during our telephone conversation) and Todd (during his exchange with Trp. Cokrell), that we take these allegations extremely seriously. . . . I wanted to explain that since these are personnel issues, they are confidential and I cannot discuss them in detail as they are ongoing or when they are concluded.”
Despite Grimes's having personally contacted Sarah, Todd, and Chuck Heath, unbeknownst to her, she was being asked to send that message yet another time through surrogate Dan Fagan. She dutifully did so by reiterating in an email,
“Simply stated, the law does not allow for the complainant, the media or the public to obtain the results of any personnel investigation. . . . I am unable to provide any additional clarification as you have requested.”
Naturally Fagan forwarded her entire response to Todd within minutes of receiving it.

In an attempt to take some of the sting away from the three-year-long Palin attack on him, Wooten publicly released his personnel file at a Public Safety Employees Association press conference. The 482-page report, along with recorded investigative interviews, were made public on September 17, 2008—the exact day that Sarah claimed that she and her family never filed any complaints against Trooper Wooten. (Her letter to Julia Grimes was inside the file, verifying that misstatement.)

The PSEA documents revealed that Wooten had been investigated exhaustively. That investigation sustained three complaints filed
by the Palins and the Heaths and found unsustained approximately twenty-seven others. And despite Todd and Sarah's having described the list of complaints as “coming from the public,” every complaint investigated originated from them or from friends of theirs with Palin encouragement and assistance. The most spectacular of those, Wooten's tasering his stepson with a training cartridge, was sustained but merely as the unauthorized use of government equipment, a misdemeanor. The investigation took into account several factors that I had no knowledge of at this time and that the Palins did not ever disclose: the child requested he be tased to prove to his cousin Bristol that he was not a mama's boy, the setting was at low level “test,” the boy did not himself complain and told his mother he was “fine,” and the event was not reported for nearly two years (and only when Molly filed for divorce). The other two instances cited by Grimes were illegally hunting (he used Molly's permit to shoot a moose when she was reluctant to fire) and having an open beer in his patrol car. Taking all this into account, the violation resulted in a ten-day suspension that was later reduced to five days on appeal by the troopers' union.

When Wooten released his file, the news of his suspension stunned me. Despite later accusations to the contrary, I had never seen or read a single word of Wooten's personnel file. The sad truth is that had I known in February of the disciplinary hearing and Wooten's suspension, no call on my part would ever have taken place to Lieutenant Rodney Dial. Through my extensive experience with employment issues while in the airline industry, I fully understood that Walt Monegan could never—even if he'd wanted to—legally dismiss Wooten under union rules; once an investigation and findings are finalized, there is no recourse to initiate additional punitive action at a later date.

How Sarah could maintain in 2008 that she and her family never filed any complaints against Wooten is a question I'll never be able to answer. Given how many times she and Todd copied that letter she'd written to Colonel Grimes and the numerous occasions they sent those complaints to multiple media outlets and school and government officials—in addition to the hours Sarah and Todd spent helping craft complaints by friends, Sarah's father, and even daughter Bristol,
who wrote up her own account of her school run-in with Wooten—it is simply not credible that she forgot.

Despite my own dislike for Wooten and a lack of historical context for the compulsive attacks against him, my becoming Todd's go-to guy in an attempt to destroy another man's life remains inexcusable, representing a lack of common sense or due diligence. I should have known better. By the time Todd approached me to be his ally, I was fully aware that I worked for a couple who felt revenge a sweet drink. I joined in with too much enthusiasm and too few facts.

The combination became, sadly, a recipe for disaster.

20
 

Attack

T
odd's trusting me to be his front man on the Wooten workmen's compensation outrage brought us closer together than ever. Despite that, I still felt outside the inner circle when it came to Sarah, and the person most responsible for that remained Chief of Staff Mike Tibbles. In April 2007 I asked Todd, “Where's Tibbles in all of this?”

“Tibbles?” Todd said, not bothering to hide his disdain. “Mike has zero backbone to follow up on this stuff. It's time to get shit done, and it's us, Frank. You and me. Sarah can't have a loose-cannon trooper running around. What if he drives over someone drunk? What a shit storm that'd be. Yeah, it'll be one-term Sarah.”

The message was clear. Todd needed my robotic loyalty to carry out this mission. Before Todd left my Juneau office, I said something like, “I'll do everything I can. This guy's a loose cannon.”

A short time after that latest meeting, Todd phoned, breathless and excited. “Frank, the dirtbag lied on his trooper application. He says he got the injury from trooper duty. More Mike bullshit. Guy was already hurt when he applied for the job. I know from a source that knows for sure he left the air force with some kind of disability rating. Can you get this to Brad in risk management?”

“Will do. Absolutely.”

“It's important that you keep Sarah out of this, okay? They think she hates the guy, and she can't be involved.”

Even though Todd regularly withheld information, depending on
the audience, it was nevertheless
my
choice to participate and avoid asking questions, such as how did he receive confidential information from Wooten's military records. Nor did I seek to verify any of the Palin claims firsthand. These allegations declared war on my sense of justice, and I rushed to battle immediately. “You're telling me Wooten's taking state money for something that happened before he took his trooper job?”
This guy disgusts me
, I thought.
He's dangerous and stealing money from the government
. “On top of that,” I asked, “he's still able to ride a snow machine? What? Couldn't get the air force to pay him for backcountry recreation?” I jotted on a slip of paper, “prior injury. lied on application. stealing from state. Air Force disab rating. don't forget snwmchn.”

“Shouldn't lying on the application be grounds for dismissal?” Todd asked rhetorically. “Your friend Brad? He'll want to know, right?”

“I'm on it, guy.”

Minutes after hanging up with Todd, I hustled next door to Brad Thompson's office, where I detailed Wooten's prior injury and lying on his application, and shared my hand-scribbled notes. I explained that this was a dishonorable man who loved the badge and gun and status of being an armed officer, but was willing to milk the system. The anger became a cancer that spread from Sarah and Todd to me, and the only cure was to excise Trooper Wooten. My behavior in all of this
is
the definition of a Palin-bot—and at the time I wore the label proudly.

What I did not know until much later was in that same month, April 2007, Wooten's workmen's comp claim was contravened. He received a letter explaining that his injury was deemed the result of a preexisting condition. In response, the trooper hired an attorney to pursue the matter against the state.

When, a few weeks later, we discovered that Wooten had been put back to work on light duty, Todd did not receive the news well. His fury at the apparent blasé attitude had me feeling vulnerable. Todd wanted inside information that his ex-brother-in-law was going to be punished and, hopefully, fired, and I had nothing of substance to report. In the back of my mind, I feared that Todd was reporting back
to Sarah that “Frank isn't any more capable on getting Mike out of there than Tibbles.”

Thompson, who was now occasionally receiving calls directly from Todd, patiently explained, “Confidentiality rules prevent me from going into a lot of stuff here, Frank. The situation is being monitored, that much I can say.”

None of this kept Todd from pressing. As best as I could without sounding like I was soliciting inappropriate information, I suggested to Thompson, “I understand that it's cheaper to put Wooten back to work in light duty, but with everything else this guy's done, why does the state want to keep him at all? That seems crazy.”

Todd agreed this was the appropriate message. “And don't forget this is just between you and me. It's the job of others to get their hands dirty, not Sarah,” he reminded me. Each time I recounted a conversation regarding Wooten with anyone in government, Todd's profuse thanks helped ease my anxiety. At least he knew I was trying.

For much of the balance of the 2007 summer, I heard only sporadically from Todd on Wooten and the stagnating workmen's compensation issue. Part of the reason for this hiatus was that we had other crises.

Always with background chaos, we suddenly found ourselves operating on multiple fronts when dealing with enemies and largely self-inflicted chaos. Radio thorn Dan Fagan was stepping up attacks on Sarah's competence and seemed to have eyes and ears inside our administration. We needed to record, dissect, and counteract each criticism with friendly calls, self-penned letters to the editor, and op-eds. We'd phone in and blast Fagan (sometimes directly, other times using willing surrogates), send emails even while he was on air, and complain bitterly at what a bald-faced liar he was.

At one point, Sarah tried to reengage Todd in the battle by directing him to phone Fagan's show unannounced and “call him on his lies.” When the radio show host made an off-color remark about those in state leadership being “crack whores,” Todd suggested to the inner circle that we combine our mailing lists and coordinate people to call
in to his show and then go to his boss—an activity I am sure ratings-magnet Dan would have relished.