The Alaska legislature launched a bipartisan investigation into the firing of Alaska's Public Safety Commissioner this past July.
The meat of the issue concerns suggestions that Gov. Palin fired the Public Safety Commissioner for his refusal to get involved in a family squabble involving an Alaska state trooper, who also happened to be her ex-brother-in-law.
Some additional background:
http://voices.washingtonpost.c...
http://www.adn.com/monegan/sto...
In addition to invoking Executive privilege -- refusing to turn over documents to investigators; Gov. Palin retained counsel on the day that John McCain selected her as his running mate. At the time of the selection Gov. Palin still needed to be deposed in connection with the firing.
Today, things have taken a turn for the truly weird.
TalkingPointsMemo has some additional details:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/a...
despite claiming executive privilege to shield requested emails, up until that point Palin had promised full cooperation with the probe.Now, however, she is refusing to submit to questioning by Branchflower [the independent investigator] unless he and the legislative committee that appointed him agree to relinquish control of the investigation and turn it over to a state review board made up of three Palin appointees.
In a truly bizarre move Palin had the Attorney General file an ethics complaint against her with the state personnel board. The main reason for this maneuver seems to be that Palin is angling to get the investigation taken out of the hands of independent investigator, so that the matter can instead be "investigated" by a board containing her appointees (e.g. a maneuver that would make a white-wash of the investigation much easier).
The legislature is pushing back citing its independent jurisdiction over the matter:
http://media.adn.com/smedia/20...
For a candidate who claims to be a "Maverick" this one has all of the sordid hallmarks of the Bush administrations stonewall in connection with the Department of Justice personnel hiring and firing scandals.
The move has more than the whiff of the kind of corruption that we have come to see from the GOP in recent years -- especially in reference to some officials in the Alaskan Republican party.
The obvious questions here are:
1. If Gov. Palin has nothing to hide, then why is she now refusing to testify to an investigator appointed by a bipartisan commission? Why is she reneging on her previously stated pledge to cooperate with the BIPARTISAN legislative investigation?
2. Why not clear this issue up so that we can resolve this issue sooner rather than later?
3. Why use Bush-Cheney legal maneuverings to push the ethics investigation until after the election?