page_title: Alaska Public Safety Commissioner dismissal
section_title: Contacts between Governor's office and Wooten's supervisors
hierarchical_section_title: Alaska Public Safety Commissioner dismissal / Contacts between Governor's office and Wooten's supervisors
caption_attribution_description: English: Ivy Frye (implicated in troopergate). This image was taken at a gubernatorial campaign forum with Sarah Palin in Ketchikan, Alaska.
context_page_description: The Alaska Public Safety Commissioner dismissal, also known as Troopergate, involves the possibly illegal July 2008 dismissal of the Alaskan Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan by Governor Republican Sarah Palin. A complaint alleged that Palin dismissed Wonegan because he did not fire Alaskan State Trooper Mike Wooten, who was in a bitter divorce with Palin's sister, Molly McCann.
  On October 10, 2008, the twelve-member bipartisan Alaska Legislative Council hired investigator Stephen Branchflower to investigate whether Palin had dismissed Monegan for not firing Wooten. The Branchflower Report found that Palin had violated the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act covering state executive employees, and released it to the public.
  Under Alaska law, the state's three-member State Personnel Board, not the Legislative Council, decides whether a governor has violated the ethics laws. On November 3, 2008, the bipartisan Personnel Board, all of whom had been appointed by Palin, released the findings of its own investigation which concluded that Palin did not violate any ethics laws. No action was ever taken.
context_section_description: In early December 2006, Palin took office as Governor of Alaska and appointed Walter C. Monegan III to be Public Safety Commissioner, a cabinet position.  Monegan is a former police chief of Anchorage and son of Walter C. Monegan, Jr. According to the investigator hired by the state legislature, "Right about that time, a little after the swearing in," someone from Palin's office called Monegan's office to schedule a meeting between Monegan and Todd Palin, the governor's husband.
  According to Monegan, the meeting took place in the Governor's office on January 4, 2007, with only Monegan and Todd Palin present. Palin asked Monegan to look into the Wooten affair. He gave Monegan various records, including material from a private investigator hired by the Palin family. Palin said that he disagreed with the five-day suspension, as inadequate and insufficient, and accused Wooten of a variety of transgressions, including drunken driving and child abuse. He asked Monegan to revisit the matter in light of some additional evidence he was providing.  Monegan agreed to do that. He detailed some staff for the review, who made a page-by-page comparison with the investigation that had been done earlier, and told Monegan that there was nothing new. Monegan then told Todd Palin that there was nothing he could do as the case was closed.  The troopers operate under a union contract that restricts the circumstances under which a trooper can be fired.
  According to Monegan, Governor Palin raised the matter with him personally twice, in January and February, and then kept raising the matter indirectly through e-mails, though she did not again bring it up directly.  In an email sent to Monegan on February 7, 2007 about a proposed bill to require 99-year sentences for police officers found guilty of murder, Palin mentioned Wooten as an example of an officer who violated the public trust.  The email listed several examples of Wooten's alleged misbehavior.  Another Palin email, dated July 17, 2007, concerned a proposed bill to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.  Palin wrote to Monegan that her first thoughts "went to my ex-brother-in-law, the trooper, who threatened to kill my dad yet was not even reprimanded by his bosses and still to this day carries a gun, of course."  A spokesperson for the McCain-Palin campaign says that Palin's contacts with Monegan were only to alert him to potential threats to her family.
  Monegan also has said he got telephone calls from three Palin appointees: her then-chief of staff, Mike Tibbles; Commissioner Annette Kreitzer of the Department of Administration; and Attorney General Talis Colberg. Colberg said he called after Todd Palin asked him about "the process" for handling death threats made by state troopers against the first family. Monegan told Colberg the matter had been handled, and Colberg reported back to Todd Palin that nothing more could be done. In mid-August 2008, the Alaska Attorney General's inquiry reported that Palin's staff had made about two dozen contacts with public safety officials about Wooten, in 2007 and 2008, with more than half initiated by Tibbles.
  In April 2007, Todd Palin told the Anchorage Daily News he had met once with Wooten's supervisor, Colonel Audie Holloway, to give her pictures of Wooten driving a snowmobile when he was out on a worker's compensation claim. Diane Kiesel, Alaska state personnel director, also called Holloway about the snowmobile incident.
  On November 19, 2007, a meeting was called by Mike Tibbles, at the time Palin's chief of staff, to discuss the process of how Wooten had returned to work after a worker's compensation injury. Present were Kevin Brooks, the deputy commissioner of the Department of Administration, Nicki Neal, director of the Personnel Division, and Diane Kiesel, former director of Personnel and Labor Relations.
  On February 29, 2008, Frank Bailey, the governor's director of boards and commissions, made a phone call to trooper Lt. Rodney Dial, the state troopers' liaison to the legislature. The Public Safety Department recorded the call
caption: Ivy Frye, special assistant to Palin, subpoenaed in Troopergate.[47]
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