“For the record, no one ever said fire Wooten. Not the governor. Not Todd. Not any of the other staff,” Monegan said Friday from Portland. “What they said directly was more along the lines of ‘This isn’t a person that we would want to be representing our state troopers.’ “
The Monegan in that quote would be Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, whose recent firing by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and now Republican Vice-Presidential nominee has been dubbed ‘Troopergate’ by a liberally biased national media looking for anything to stop the momentum of the McCain/Palin ticket.
This latest attack on her involves her former brother-in-law, Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten. In 2005, long before she even ran for governor, she, along with other members of her family and community, tried to get the Alaska State Troopers to investigate the thuggish behavior of Trooper Wooten, who was married to her sister Molly McCann.. In the end, he was investigated and had 11 charges against him sustained by Colonel Julia Grimes, Director, Alaska State Troopers.
Included in the charges that were sustained are:
- Wooten used a Taser on his stepson.
- He illegally shot a moose.
- He drank beer in his patrol car on one occasion.
- He told others his father-in-law would “eat a f’ing lead bullet” if he helped his daughter get an attorney for the divorce.
These findings are in addition to many other incidents, from drunken brawls to having another trooper drive him home after pulling him over after a night of drinking. To calling Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol, a f’ing ***hole and losing his football coaching position at the local high school. Here is a portion of his official reprimand letter:
“The record clearly indicates a serious and concentrated pattern of unacceptable and at times, illegal activity occurring over a lengthy period, which establishes a course of conduct totally at odds with the ethics of our profession,” Col. Julia Grimes, then head of Alaska State Troopers, wrote in March 1, 2006, letter suspending Wooten for 10 days. After the union protested it, the suspension was reduced to five days.
Wow. A 10 day suspension, reduced to 5 after union thugs got involved. For tasing his 10 year old stepson. Illegally hunting. Drinking while on duty and while driving a state patrol car. Threatening to kill his father-in-law. A 5 day suspension.
And you will note that this occurred prior to Sarah Palin being elected governor – Frank Murkowski had yet to be defeated by her. Is it any wonder that, after the election and she was in office, Gov. Palin would say this:
“It was a joke, the whole year long ‘investigation’ of him,” the e-mail said. “This is the same trooper who’s out there today telling people the new administration is going to destroy the trooper organization, and that he’d ‘never work for that b****’, Palin’.)”
Or, when she was trying to clean up the corruption in the state, this:
In that first e-mail, sent a few weeks after the meeting, Palin encouraged Monegan to testify for a bill that would require 99-year sentences for police officers found guilty of murder. “For police officers to violate the public trust is a grave, grave violation — in my opinion. We have too many examples lately of cops and troopers who violate the public trust. DPS has come across as merely turning a blind eye or protecting that officer, seemingly ‘for the good of the brotherhood’.”
It is no wonder to me at all. But the liberal press expects politicians to be politicians, keeping the status quo in order to get along.
Sarah Palin is about anything but status quo.
Do you really want change in America? Neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden have the intestinal fortitude to take on the establishment. Can you imagine either of those guys taking on the entire State Trooper department? Laughable.
But Sarah did. Call it Troopergate if you want. I call it courage. Courage to take on the good old boys and accept nothing less than honesty and demanding that police officers be held accountable for breaking the law. I hope she takes that same attitude into the Vice-Presidency.
Background:
Statement by Charles Heath, Sarah Palin’s father (pdf)
Initial Investigation of Trooper Mike Wooten (pdf)
Second Investigation of Trooper Mike Wooten overturning parts of the first (pdf)
Suspension Letter of Trooper Mike Wooten (pdf)
InDepth Investigation by Anchorage Daily News
Washington Post Hit Piece Outlining Several Emails
Sarah Palin’s Ethics Disclosure Form (pdf)
Filed Under Front Page, National · · · · 
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24 Responses to “Sarah Palin Correct In Troopergate Involvement”Search
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All the charges against Trooper Wooten would be considered resume enhancers by dhimmicrats.
The trooper was a psychotic nut case. I applaud any restraint Sarah showed at all in removing him.
After reading the links of this story, I defer to our resident cop-basher Phil_M.
This clown Wooten should be more than just suspended. Jail him. Now.
Why is it that the MSM has no more imagination than to append -gate to any word when trying to stir up a controversy?
Stuck on stupid…
illegally shooting moose should be a capitol crime.
Heh. LST ModNS
The Alaskan beauty mentioned in her speech that she will take on big oil companies after she goes to Washington.
If some other person with a D had said that the you guys will be jumping on him/her.
Double standard?
No double standards at all, Noodles. Think about ‘how’ she will take them on, not just the fact that she pledged to.
She is talking about some of the tax breaks that oil company lobbyists have secured. They will be history, as they are now in Alaska.
She and McCain will do the same thing to the stupid corn subsidies that both parties support.
Mavericks they are. Both of them.
I like it.
Rahman, It isn’t a double standard since Palin has shown that she has a history of balancing what is good for the economy with what is good for her constituents. Her economic policies obviously created an environment where the state of Alaska could receive good compensation from the oil companies while not being so onerous that the oil companies could not make a decent profit.
God bless Sarah Palin for standing up to a plainly corrupt and union thug-infested police bureaucracy. As a victim of Trooper Wooten herself, she knows all too well what damage is done when corrupt members of the law enforcement community abuse their badge and violate the public trust.
Several of the Alaska media articles on this story have quotes from the police union president defending Wooten even after all this evidence. Apparently the union boss is also from Wasilla and used to be partners on patrol with Wooten. His response to every malfeasance by this obviously corrupt and violence-prone thug with a badge: I’ve worked with Officer Wooten and I’ve seen that he always keeps his cool under the stresses of the job, so Palin must be lying. The same guy also dismissed the citations against Wooten as “minor.”
Yeah. Real “minor” stuff indeed…like driving around in your police car with a beer in your hand, tasering children, and threatening to kill your father in law. “Minor” stuff that, if it were done by anybody other than a police officer, would rightfully cause your children to be taken away from you, get you fired, and you behind bars for the better part of the decade. And that is exactly where Officer Wooten deserves to be.
Instead, thanks to his union boss friends and a corrupt police administration, he is still to this day out on the streets of Alaska. If Sarah Palin was trying to get this guy fired, God bless her for it and I earnestly pray that she is successful.
Breaking: This thing just keeps getting more absurd!
The corrupt cop union involved in this case just filed an ethics complaint against Governor Palin on Officer Wooten’s behalf. They are asking for “criminal penalties” against Palin for supposedly illegally disclosing Wooten’s lengthy rap sheet to the press.
Naturally the MSM is having a field day, treating every word of this worthless criminal organization as if it were true. Every rotten cop in this case should be sitting in jail right now for aiding and abetting a dangerous menace to society in their own ranks and trying to tarnish a good and decent woman at his behalf. “Representing Alaska’s Finest” my @$$.
Here’s a PDF of their complaint.
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/tvnews/deep%20background/alaskapoliceunioncomplaint.pdf
Here are the union thug cops in their own words defending the indefensible:
Cyr is the same guy who filed the ethics complaint against Palin asking for criminal charges against her, the victim of Wooten.
The union president is just as disgusting in his defense of the guy. He essentially argues that since they are buddies who worked together on patrol and since he claims to have seen Wooten acting cool under pressure, all the evidence of wrongdoing against him doesn’t matter.
Source: http://www.adn.com/politics/story/476430.html
And it continues to get even better. Officer Wooten, whose crimes include driving around in his patrol car while drinking, was a member of the Alaska State Trooper’s DUI enforcement team.
This hypocritical menace to society should be strung up. Instead he’s got the entire MSM’s sympathy and the backing of the country’s most powerful police unions.
Thanks for getting this information out there Phil and BigJ. Or maybe I should say thanks for getting the whole story out there rather than just the side of it that makes Palin look bad. I know by now that the crap that is presented as news by most of the media is not to be trusted, and sure enough, when we hear the rest of the story…
Important to note, so I’ll repeat a post from last week:
And while the part of the taxes on profits of the oil companies are correct, the truth that goes untold is that there were huge tax breaks she got passed for oil companies to develop drilling in Alaska - with added incentives for wildcatters. Drilling is where the real risk and bottom line losses come in. Not refining (unless there is an uninsured, catastrophic event). She’s made it easier for the folks that take the risk to drill to not pay taxes through the nose.
Additionally, a great deal of those taxes go right back into the hands of Alaskan citizens - including oil workers, which generates across the board growth in Alaska. It’s NOT the government spending it all on government programs. If the refiners offered a local program for people to invest in the refinery and reap the profits, perhaps they could well offset those taxes.
You can’t say she just raised taxes on oil companies without presenting all sides of the story. That’s something I expect of liberals, not conservatives.
#15 Big45,
Yet another example of where knowing the rest of the story can make a world of difference. Thanks.
Phil_M said:
“This hypocritical menace to society should be strung up. Instead he’s got the entire MSM’s sympathy and the backing of the country’s most powerful police unions.”
Is it union or unions? What other police agency employee representative group in the USA is supporting the Wooten cause? Settle down Phil. Most everyone here agrees with you for once that the scumbag is just that.
Four offenses, all shown to be true.
At a minimum 3 of the 4 should have gotten him fired.
One of them should have gotten him jail time.
According to their website Wooten’s union represents Alaska’s “State Troopers; State Fish and Wildlife Protection Troopers; Airport Police and Fire Officers at the Anchorage and Fairbanks International Airports; Court Service Officers; Deputy Fire Marshals; Police Department Employees of the City and Borough of Juneau; Public Safety Employees of the City of Unalaska; Rural Public Safety Officers; Police Department Employees of the City and Borough of Sitka; Police Department Employees of the City of Fairbanks; Police Department Employees of the City of Ketchikan; and, Police Department Employees of the City of Soldotna.”
That’s every state police agency and the police departments of every major city in the state except for Anchorage. When it comes to cops in Alaska, they’re pretty much the only game in town.
” When it comes to cops in Alaska, they’re pretty much the only game in town.”
Pretty much. Yet still not strong enough to save the losers ass. McCain just got the endorsemnet from the Fraternal Order of Police, 328,000 members. Perhaps Palin could shake them up also if need be. After all, those 100,000 cops that Clinton promised STILL haven’t shown up on the streets.
Last I checked, Officer Wooten was still freely patrolling the streets of Alaska, and his only punishment for his many abuses of power and plainly illegal activity - a measly 10 day suspension - was cut in half when the union went to bat for him.
It’s pretty clear that this cop union exercises far too much power in the state of Alaska, and they do it in a very corrupt way that protects the very worst of their own bad cops on the street even when they are a danger to other civilians.
Palin was right. There’s something rotten in the Alaska state trooper bureaucracy and it needs to be fumigated from top to bottom.
That’s cause they’re busy doing invasive pat-downs on nuns and elderly wheelchair bound grandmothers in the airport security lines where Bush put them.
You should also know that Hollis French, the investigator in the Troopergate witch hunt, has been exposed as a partisan Democrat Obama supporter who has tipped his hand by saying the final report would be damaging to Palin even before the investigation really got under way. Not WRIGHT for America http://notwrightforamerica.com and http://www.riehlworldview.com have the details.
Phil_M said:
“That’s cause they’re busy doing invasive pat-downs on nuns and elderly wheelchair bound grandmothers in the airport security lines where Bush put them.”
Interesting how the 8 years of Clinton PRIOR to 9-11 always seem to disappear when the opposition is trying to make a point.