Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin (37 page)

For more than the hundredth time, I begged for Neen's forgiveness, swore I'd try to be a better husband and father, then found myself sucked right back in. Feeling as if I needed Sarah and Todd's approval, I simply felt unable to shut down or say no and walk away. No task was too big or too small. Todd and family needed a travel agent for a room in Seattle? He'd contact me, and I'd follow up with grade-A service, often using my personal credit card.

And I would give them detailed advice on arriving, staying, and where to send the girls to shop. When, after a vacation to Hawaii, they needed to get back home on the q.t. (because Sarah had decided to vacation during the all-important legislative session, a potential PR disaster), Todd knew I was their go-to guy:

Family vacation plans to Mexico? “I'm all over it, man.”

While pressure mounted, and Sarah scrambled in the background with the heady possibility of being a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, Todd continued waging the Wooten campaign with me as his windmill-tilting sidekick. Current and past Wooten rubble was weighing heavily enough to crack the first family's emotionally brittle spine. Something major had to give way soon.

On June 30, 2008, that moment arrived in a most unpredictable fashion when Walt Monegan sent an email that started off asking if Sarah had read a report he'd sent over days earlier. Then he wrote:

The second issue Walt referenced involved a complaint from an eyewitness. This legislator alluded to by Monegan claimed that Sarah, while taking her children on a tour of the Point Mackenzie Correctional Farm, had not buckled Trig into a car seat. In a briefly reported story that died a short and uneventful death, Monegan's heads-up and
entreaty that he was “trying to help” had the opposite effect. Sarah and Todd claimed that this was some kind of cleverly worded threat from a cabinet member who wanted to leverage authority over the governor. Monegan, they felt, had latched on to this accusation because he believed that the DPS needed more financial resources
and
because he was tired of hearing that Mike Wooten should be selling cotton candy at hockey games instead of carrying a gun and badge.

Sarah received Monegan's email around half past nine on that last Monday night of June. She immediately fired back,
“I've never driven Trig anywhere without a new, approved carseat. I want to know who said otherwise—pls provide that info now.”
This was a command. She needed to know who to attack and needed to know
now
.

In the meantime, Mike Nizich, the interim chief of staff who'd replaced Tibbles, read Monegan's email, ignored the child seat issue, and addressed the Report.

Despite later publicly utilizing the contents of the Report to rationalize Monegan's dismissal two weeks later, Sarah didn't seem to care; all she could concentrate on was the car seat. Her image as supermom was at risk. Forget that she admitted to disliking the click-it-or-ticket law or that I'd seen Todd and Sarah drive off with little Piper climbing from the back to the front to sit on Todd's lap while he drove. We even had a photo of Piper in the backseat of a car after a drive of several hours, asleep
on top
of her unbuckled seat belt.

Sarah's wrath was so great that she did not even understand what Nizich was referencing the report in his email. She fired back thirty seconds after receiving his e-mail,
“What are the details of the report? Who, what, where, what was I supposedly driving, etc?”
That Sarah copied me and several others on these communications meant that she wanted everyone on this
now
. As for Nizich, he undoubtedly pretended that he had his priorities straight all along and ignored the Report; state business could take an unbuckled backseat to this more pressing crisis of challenged motherhood.

We went into frantic overdrive. Not because this was necessarily a big deal, but because Sarah and Todd believed this to be a big deal. Kris Perry jumped in minutes after Sarah sent out her demands.
“This
is so flippin' ridiculus. I'm talking w/Nizich about it tomorrow. No details, just ‘here you go' at 9:30 at night.”

Sarah agreed:
“unflippin believable.”

I did what I knew was required. I immediately phoned Monegan. After my data-collecting conversation with him, I reported back to the Palins:
“Just caught him at home. He said the complaint did come from Lyda to John Glass who passed it to him.”
The moment I identified Lyda Green as the complainant, this morphed from bad to disastrous. The confluence of Walt Monegan, the tarnishing of Sarah's motherhood, Mike Wooten's being protected by the blue-line conspiracy, and now double-rumormongering-liar Lyda Green was unimaginable evil. In my mind, I heard the snapping of Todd's already fragile emotional spine followed by the sounds of Sarah's head exploding. In a classic bout of scathing sarcasm, Todd wrote me:

Adding a busted gas line to this fire, we had the makings of a conspiracy. Monegan let slip in our phone conversation that Deputy Commissioner Glass “is close to the Greens and goes snow-machining with them and such.” In passing this along to Todd, he concluded that they were all in cahoots to destroy Sarah Palin at a time when she was about to be put on a worldwide pedestal and potentially be named a vice presidential candidate. In July, after Monegan was let go, Sarah speculated that a more organized plot was brewing when she wrote,

No matter that Lyda Green had never supported Monegan as the governor's choice for DPS Commissioner; in Sarah's mind their mutual desire to destroy her was enough to bring them together. Todd did not mince words when he concluded his email with the directive
“The games these guys play, something needs to change.”
When Todd sent this, I had no idea how rapidly and ineptly a determined power couple could act.

24
 

Rogue's Gallery

Of all the Palin complaints about Trooper Wooten and DPS Commissioner Monegan, none was as definitive as Todd's June 30 “chickenshit” email. In this instance, his whup-ass words were no idle threat. In that moment, both Sarah and Todd reached their breaking points. As Sarah said to me in response to the pressure, “How much torture can we take?” After all, Monegan had done nothing about the rogue, loose cannon, ticking-time-bomb trooper. Additionally, Sarah and Todd now suspected Monegan, Lyda Green, and Deputy Director John Glass (who was “close” to the Lyda Green family) of being in a plot to bring down the governor. As with every other perceived attack on her, Sarah needed no proof. Nor did I; none of us did. Conjecture was more than enough.

While Todd cared almost exclusively about the Wooten issue, Sarah constructed secondary frictions with the DPS commissioner besides Wooten's “head-scratching” continued employment. Sarah, for all the lip service she gave to being supportive of the Department of Public Safety, was reluctant to devote additional state resources to the department, certainly not to the extent Monegan desired. In early July 2008, Sarah went so far as to suggest that DPS management needed to do their job with the resources they had, just like everyone else. In other words, they had enough funding and manpower. Period. Being seen as not devoting sufficient resources to law enforcement, however,
wasn't a smart PR move, so other failings needed to be documented ahead of Monegan's removal. As a result, the governor cited his travel expenses and junkets, while emphasizing what she termed his failure in addressing issues relating to rural Alaska, such as high suicide and alcoholism rates. These logs, some of them legitimate, were thrown onto the fire that had as its primary source of fuel Trooper Wooten's ongoing employment. While it is fair to say that Wooten was not Sarah's
exclusive
beef with Walter Monegan, it is flat-out untrue to say—as she did under oath in the
Petumenos Report
, dated November 3, 2008—“that the Wooten matter played no role in her decision to terminate Mr. Monegan as Commissioner of DPS.”

Shortly after Todd's June 30, 2008, pronouncement of “needed change,” and days before she had current Chief of Staff Nizich drop the hammer on Monegan, on July 11, 2008, the compulsive need to attack and destroy grabbed hold of Sarah. Within hours of the Lyda Green car seat accusation, Monegan's fate was sealed. Five days later, Sarah began discussing replacements for Monegan.

I'd recently reminded Sarah about Kenai chief of police Chuck Kopp—a man I'd known casually and admired. Forty-three years old, with twenty years of public safety experience, he was presently a member of the Alaska Judicial Council, the body charged with reviewing candidates applying for state judgeships. Other than these credentials, nobody had reviewed his personnel files or interviewed anyone who worked with him. Kopp and I had discussions earlier in the year about Sarah and Todd's ongoing concerns about trooper conduct, including Mike Wooten. From those conversations, I came to believe that Kopp shared our trooper concerns. As luck would have it, almost exactly twelve hours before Monegan's June 30 car seat email, Kopp suggested in an email that he might be a sounding board and provide advice on DPS issues.
“If the administration is unhappy and looking for a change, let's talk in person when you get a chance.”
Kopp's timing could not have been better. In addition to his obvious interest in the job, he had been a member of Palin's Department of Public Safety transition team. Interest in the job, loyalty to the governor, and apparent law enforcement
credibility were ideal. On July 7 Sarah emailed and asked me to discreetly explore Kopp's interest in taking over at DPS once she removed Monegan. As I already had the answer to that question, I replied,
“He's interested . . . he'd love to serve under this Governor.”
Thorough understanding why Sarah and Todd were unhappy with Monegan, I added,
“He's also 110% onboard with dealing
[
with
]
some of the embarrassing issues that have blackened the eye of the entire Trooper around the state, namely Spitzer, Osborn, etc. I'm sure he'd take the Wooten thing seriously.”