The Enlightened Despot

I have a guest post up over on the Mudflats sister site. For regular readers, there’s nothing there you haven’t seen before, but if you love Alaskan political scandals as much as I do, give it a look. For any Mudflatters who find their way here, welcome!

Readers who have been with us since the beginning will recall that the first topic the Despot really went crazy for was Sarah Palin’s refusal to release emails thought to be relevant to Troopergate. You can click some or all of those links if Alaskan politics are near and dear to your heart, but here’s a quick recap for the rest of you:

• Way back before John McCain reminded us all that we had a state stashed up somewhere near Canada, former Sarah Palin fan and long-time self-appointed corruption watchdog Andree McLeod requested a large quantity of emails from Palin’s office under Alaska’s version of the Freedom of Information Act. The governor complied, but with heavy redactions: over 1,000 were withheld entirely except for times, recipients, and subject headings, on the grounds of executive privilige or deliberative process.
• McCleod filed an appeal with the governor, and later in court, over the redactions. Particularly questionable were withheld emails sent by or to Palin’s husband Todd, who is not employed by the State of Alaska. While the relevant laws and precedents are (natch) complicated, one cannot generally claim privilege selectively - if something is not too sensitive to reveal to one private citizen, it’s not too sensitive to reveal to us all.
• On February 28th 2008, Palin aide Ivy Frye sent an email to a group including both Palins and aide Frank Bailey with the subject heading ‘PSEA’, which is the labor union representing Alaska’s State Troopers. The next morning, Sarah Palin replied to the same group of recipients. Shortly thereafter, Frank Bailey called Trooper Rodney Dial to discuss upcoming negotiations with PSEA. The focus of the call was to recruit Dial as a mole, passing internal union documents along to the governor’s office. This fun bit of corruption was foiled by the fact that Dial wasn’t actually a member of PSEA. Bailey then went on to ask about Trooper Walt Moneghan, the subject of Troopergate. This call was recorded, and was the most publicly understood piece of evidence against Sarah Palin, who repeatedly claimed she had no idea, before or after the fact, that Bailey and Dial had ever had the conversation.
• Shortly after the call, Bailey contacted Frye to tell her that Dial didn’t have access to “that stuff”, but would pass along anything he heard.

All of which is to say that there is a very good chance that emails which Palin is legally required to disclose very probably show that she was blatantly lying on the most straightforward question in the Troopergate investigation. McLeod’s appeal to uncover those emails is still going on. Meanwhile, Alaska’s Democratic Party has filed a seperate request for a wider group of emails. The governor’s office has delayed complying with this request for months, claiming technical difficulties. The request has to be read to be believed:

In the request, Alaska Democratic Party chairwoman Patti Higgins sought Palin’s schedules and calendars between Jan. 1, 2007, and Sept. 15, 2008. The Democrats also sought various categories of e-mails for about the same time period, including:

• All those between Palin and state Rep. John Coghill, R-North Pole, or between Palin and state Sen. Fred Dyson, R-Eagle River, with the words “abortion” or “AGIA,” which is short for the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act;

• All e-mails from Palin containing the following words: babysitter, childcare, McCain, Obama, Democrat, Huckabee, Wal-Mart, Eskimo, Natives, Kuwait, passport, Ruedrich, or Kopp;

• All e-mails between Palin and her husband, Todd, with any of the following words: vote, veto, budget, oil, Monegan, or Wooten; and

• All e-mails between Palin and her sister, Molly McCann, with the words Wooten or Monegan.

‘Kuwait’? ‘Eskimo’?  The PSEA emails will always be my Dead Sea Scrolls, but the Democrats seem to think there’s a lot more fun stuff where that came from. Which, after all, is about what you’d expect.

Whatever the Legislative Council releases today will almost certainly be the most visible Palin story of the day. But unless that report found much more than it was expected to, the more important story is this:

A lawsuit aimed at forcing Gov. Sarah Palin to preserve any private e-mails she wrote involving state business hits the courtroom today.

Former state employee Andree McLeod filed the suit a week ago. The goal, she said, is to make Palin retrieve e-mails from her private accounts that involve state business and make them part of the state’s public records.

The Despot has long argued that these emails are the most likely place to find a smoking gun in Palin’s past. A one sentence summary: based on the times and subject headings of emails Palin has withheld on the grounds of executive privilege, there is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that Palin knew about, or perhaps even ordered, the phone call from Frank Bailey to Rodney Dial that has been the most damning piece of evidence in the scandal so far. If anything of the sort is in those emails, and the court rules that they be made public before the election, it would be a complete disaster for John McCain.

As usual with this story, the coverage is pretty slim. In fact, if you follow the link above to the story at the (excellent) ADN, you’ll see that it is only a few paragraphs above a longer story about Ted Stevens’ “Neck and Neck” reelection campaign. This is what makes Alaskan politics so fun to read about: electoral victory is never guarunteed, even with a slogan like “I Definitely Won’t be in Prison for Corruption on Election Day!”

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.

As Sarah Palin gets ready to debate in St. Louis on Thursday, lawyers working on her behalf will be in court, attempting to halt the legislature’s investigation into Troopergate. That might not make the top five Palin stories of the day, but if the investigation is allowed to proceed, the results will be due on October 10th. The refusal of Palin’s aides to cooperate (for which they may be held in contempt of court) makes it unlikely that there will be much of anything new to report, but it could mean more bad press, and more akward questions for Palin to refuse to answer.

For my money, though, the withheld emails are still the issue the media should be pressuring Palin about.