Alaska's Palin Faces Probe

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

July 31, 2008


Alaska's Palin Faces Probe
Star GOP Governor To Be Investigated For Abuse of Office
By JIM CARLTON
July 31, 2008; Page A4

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- When Sarah Palin was elected governor as a Republican outsider in 2006, she didn't just take on an incumbent from her own party. She took on Alaska's Republican establishment. Ms. Palin vowed to clean up a long-cozy political system that had been sullied by an FBI corruption investigation. She endeared herself to Alaskans by making good on her reform promises and showing homey touches, like driving herself to work. Now, one of the bright new stars in the Republican Party has suddenly become tarnished. The state legislature this week voted to hire an independent investigator to see whether Ms. Palin abused her office by trying to get her former brother-in-law fired from his job as an Alaska state trooper.

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This is the first real chink in the armor of Alaska's first woman governor, whose popularity soared above 80% as she enacted an ethics bill, shelved pork-barrel projects by fellow Republicans and jump-started a campaign by her lieutenant governor, Sean Parnell, to unseat veteran U.S. Rep. Don Young of Alaska. Ms. Palin has shown similar boldness in going after Big Oil, whose money has long dominated the state and helped fund its Republican machine. In a snub to the oil majors, she has proposed TransCanada Corp., a Calgary energy company, be given the primary contract to lead the $30 billion job to build a natural-gas pipeline from Alaska's North Slope.

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A native of Idaho who grew up in Alaska hunting and fishing, Ms. Palin made an early stand on ethics. In 2004, she resigned as chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission after Gov. Frank Murkowski appointed the chairman of the Alaska Republican Party to a seat on her commission while allowing him to keep his partisan post. When she ran against Mr. Murkowski in 2006, Ms. Palin says, she got a call from Ben Stevens, then president of the Republican-run Alaska Senate and son of Sen. Stevens. "He told me, "You're not just running against Murkowski. You're running against me, my dad, the whole state Republican party,'" Ms. Palin said.

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The controversy now surrounding Ms. Palin stems from a messy divorce between state trooper Mike Wooten and his wife, Molly McCann, who is Ms. Palin's younger sister. In 2005, Ms. Palin alleged to Mr. Wooten's supervisors that he had threatened to harm her sister and father and had engaged in numerous instances of misconduct, including using a stun gun on his 10-year-old stepson, according to state documents. In one instance, she told state investigators, she overheard him on the telephone threatening her sister: "I'm gonna f-kin" shoot your dad. He's gonna get a lead bullet." Mr. Wooten told investigators he tested a Taser stun gun on the boy at his request but never threatened the Palins. An internal police investigation substantiated the stun-gun incident and some other charges but threw out most of the rest. Mr. Wooten was suspended for five days in 2006... On July 11 of this year, Ms. Palin fired Department of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. Mr. Monegan then complained that she and her husband had pressured him to fire Mr. Wooten. Ms. Palin, in a statement, denied that, saying she had removed the commissioner she had appointed 18 months earlier because she wanted "a new direction."

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