The Enlightened Despot

All legal challenges having failed, the Alaska Legislature’s report into Sarah Palin’s behavior surrounding the firing of Walter Monegan is now ready for release:

The Legislative Council is expected to vote sometime today whether to make the 263-page report public. The legislators will first meet behind closed doors, starting around 9 a.m. this morning, to receive a briefing from Steve Branchflower, the investigator they hired to look into the governor’s dismissal of her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, and whether she improperly pressured him to fire a state trooper divorced from her sister.

9 AM takes its time getting to Anchorage, so don’t expect to hear anything before this evening. In any case, it’s not clear how much there will be to hear, given the limitations of the investigation. Nevertheless, Palin’s people are doing some preemptive damage control:

Within hours of the court ruling, the McCain-Palin campaign looked to discredit the investigator’s report without having seen it. The campaign claimed the Legislative Council’s investigation is politically driven and that Palin replaced Monegan as public safety commissioner because of budget differences.

Palin has refused to cooperate with the Legislature’s investigation, although the campaign says she is cooperating with a separate probe by the state personnel board. Palin’s lawyer, Thomas Van Flein, said the Branchflower report won’t be complete because the investigator didn’t interview key witnesses including the governor and her former chief of staff, Mike Tibbles.

“They didn’t even try to interview the governor. You want to know why she reassigned Monegan, it would be nice to talk to her. They didn’t even try,” Van Flein said.

“It’s a report that’s going to be half-done at best. And anything that’s half-done will likely be half-baked.”

I couldn’t agree more about that last point, but the claim that ‘they didn’t even try to interview the governor’ is bizarre. For one thing, it’s a lie, though there’s nothing all that bizarre about that. The lie falls a little flat, however, given that the investigators very publicly tried and failed to get the testimony of Palin’s husband and aides, employing the generally effective strategy of issuing subpoenas.

Tags: Palin, troopergate

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 9:14 am and is filed under posts by Akhbar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.