Todd Palin Waged Campaign To Get Trooper Fired

It's a story of unintended consequences. It's also a story of power politics and media manipulation that's very un-McCain-like -- if you believe his national media hagiography.

But both of Cindy McCain's staged, teary drug-addiction confessions have been vintage John McCain. His MO is this: Get the story out -- even if it's a negative story. Get it out first, with the spin you want, with the details you want and without the details you don't want.

McCain did it with the Keating Five, and with the story of the failure of his first marriage (Cindy is his second wife). So what you recall after the humble, honest interview, is not that McCain did favors for savings and loan failure Charlie Keating, or that he cheated on his wife, but instead what an upfront, righteous guy he is.

Candor is the McCain trademark, but what the journalists who slobber over the senator fail to realize is that the candor is premeditated and polished. John McCain shoots from the hip -- but only after carefully rehearsing the battle plan, to be sure he won't get shot himself.

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Real Piece of Work

By Josh Marshall

In his statement to the legislative inquiry (which was supposed to remain confidential but promptly released to the press by the McCain campaign) Todd Palin admits that he'd been trying to get his trooper brother-in-law fired for years. But he insists, improbably, that that didn't have anything to do with the subsequent dismissal of the guy he and Gov. Palin were pressuring to fire him. That, and he too says, Walt Monegan, the Commissioner of Public Safety at the center of the story, was not fired but rather resigned.

In one of the odder parts of the deposition, he seems to have implied that two reasons Monegan was actually fired were for emailing the governor reports that she'd driven with her newborn son without a car seat and that he didn't have a state plane available enough for her trips.

For those of you keeping score, the Palins' purported rationales for firing Monegan are tellingly similar to those originally put forward for firing those US Attorneys -- vague and barely consequential complaints that no one ever seems to have mentioned before the press started asking questions, peppered with occasional defenses of the reasons for the firing which they claim aren't even the real reasons.

And oh yeah, he wasn't fired. He was reassigned but decided to quit.

With any luck the voters will spare the country from this intemperate, thuggish man.

Todd Palin Waged Campaign To Get Trooper Fired

By Zachary Roth - October 9, 2008, 10:07AM

Todd Palin spoke to over a dozen state officials, both before and after his wife became governor, in his effort to get state trooper Mike Wooten fired. But he says he never pressured Walt Monegan to remove Wooten.

That's what Todd Palin told independent investigator Steve Branchflower, according to a sworn affidavit released to reporters by the McCain campaign and Palins' lawyer.

In his statement, Todd Palin made clear that he carried a grudge against Wooten, a state trooper who was embroiled in a family dispute with the Palins, during and after a messy divorce from Sarah Palin's sister.

"I had hundreds of conversations and communications about Trooper Wooten over the last several years with my family, with friends, with colleagues, and with just about everyone I could -- including government officials," Palin said.

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The move by the Palin camp to release the affidavit, in advance of the legislative hearing tomorrow at which Branchflower is scheduled to unveil his finished report, appears to have raised some eyebrows.

State Senate President Lyda Green, a Republican but frequent Palin critic, told ABCNews.com: "The McCain campaign should not be releasing these documents."

The state's Supreme Court is scheduled to rule today on a GOP suit to quash the investigation, after a lower court threw out the effort last week.