Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s husband admitted that he was obsessed with his wife’s former brother-in-law, state trooper Mike Wooten, and spoke about him so much, to numerous state officials, that Gov. Palin at one point allegedly told Todd to “stop talking about it with her,” according to a 25-page sworn affidavit Todd Palin provided to an independent counsel investigating whether Gov. Palin fired her public safety commissioner because he allegedly refused to fire Wooten.

The document clearly shows that Todd Palin has spent the entirety of Gov. Palin’s nearly two years in office trying to get Wooten kicked off the police force.

“In 2007, I was at the Yetna River area…when I saw Trooper Wooten operating a snow-machine-even as he claimed to the Alaska State Troopers that he was fully disabled an unable to work,” Todd Palin wrote in the affidavit, which his attorneys leaked to the media late Wednesday. “This typically dishonest disregard of the law offended me, and I offered photographs of Wooten’s snow-machine use to the appropriate authorities.

“Wooten also went on a spending spree during his 2006 divorce, buying all sorts of expensive toys; then instead of paying his debts honestly, he filed for bankruptcy and left some local businesses unpaid,” Palin wrote..

Wooten was married to Palin’s sister, Molly McCann. The couple divorced in January 2006 and over the next year or so was involved in a bitter child custody dispute.

“All of this upset me and I had hundreds of conversations with my family, with friends, with colleagues, and with just about everyone I could–including government officials. (In fact, I talked about Wooten so much over the years that my wife told me to stop talking about it with her.)”

Gov. Palin’s handling of the Wooten matter and her firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan have been under investigation by independent counsel Steve Branchflower, who was appointed by Alaska’s Legislative Council in July. Monegan said he believes he was pressured by Palin, her husband Todd, and several of her senior aides to fire Wooten. Branchflower is expected to file a report Friday.

However, the Alaska Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision Thursday on whether it will grant Republican lawmakers a temporary restraining order blocking the report from being released.

Todd Palin said in his affidavit that Monegan was not doing enough to defend Gov. Palin from false statements about her record on public safety or dispel rumors about her administration’s financial support for troopers and that Monegan’s firing was due to budgetary disagreements with Gov. Palin.

“I never told [Monegan] to fire Wooten,” Todd Palin said in his affidavit. “My understanding was that he was in charge of receiving any kind of complaint about a trooper. That was his job. At no time did Monegan tell me he felt “pressure” nor would I expect the top law enforcement officer in our state to feel “pressure” to do anything he did not think was right. He holds himself out as a man of integrity. I would assume he would tell me if he thought I said or did anything he was uncomfortable with or was unethical. He never filed an ethics complaint or reported anything.”

But Todd Palin’s claim in his affidavit that Gov. Palin was uninterested in what her former brother-in-law was up to stands in stark contrast to documents that have been publicly well before the probe commenced.

Since she became governor in December 2006, Palin was deeply enmeshed in the dispute with Wooten before she was sworn in as governor, according to a review of documents relating to the case.

Palin filed several formal complaints against her ex-brother-in-law over the course of three years alleging he engaged in illegal behavior while on duty. But her complaints relied heavily on second-hand information, some of which was later determined to be suspect and unverifiable.

Lodging 36 accusations against Wooten in 2005 alone, Palin and her family appeared to be waging a vendetta against the trooper who was assigned to the wildlife division. Palin personally seemed obsessed with ending his career.

In a three-page, sometimes rambling e-mail dated Aug. 10, 2005, and sent to Wooten’s boss, Col. Julia Grimes, Palin said the fact that her brother-in-law continued to be employed as a trooper caused Palin, her family and the community to lose faith in the “Trooper organization.”

“My concern is that the public’s faith in the Troopers will continue to diminish as more residents express concern regarding the apparent lack of action towards a trooper whom is described by many as being a ‘ticking timebomb,’ and a ‘loose cannon,’” Palin wrote in the e-mail slugged “Trooper Integrity, Character.”  

“Let me just share again with you a few of the many episodes in Wooten’s recent past that have been discussed with Wooten’s supervisors after the episodes were publicly discussed by Wooten with many in our community who are left scratching their heads regarding Wooten’s poor reflection of the Trooper mission to prevent loss of life and property as a result of illegal and unsafe acts….

“Wooten is my brother-in-law, but this information is forwarded to you objectively, and I trust it is received and considered by you objectively.”

Palin’s e-mail was sent to Grimes after Palin was interviewed by state troopers on two different occasions about previous complaints she and her family leveled against Wooten. But Palin was dissatisfied with the slow progress of the investigation and was angered that Wooten was still employed.

“Julia, as lifelong Alaskans, my family and I and concerned community members who have witnessed your employee’s actions still want to have faith in the Alaska State Troopers,” Palin wrote to Grimes. “But with recent public disclosure of abuses in the Trooper organization, and our own knowledge of Wooten’s blatant disregard for the laws he is hired to enforce, our faith is waning.”

Moreover, Palin sent an e-mail to Monegan on July 17, 2007, with a copy to Attorney General Talis Colberg, regarding proposed handgun legislation that would bar weapon sales to people who had made violent threats.

“The first thought that hit me,” Palin wrote, “about people not being able to buy guns when they’re threatening to kill someone went to my ex brother-in-law, the trooper, who threatened to kill my dad yet was not even reprimanded by his bosses and still to this day carries a gun, of course. …

“We can’t have double standards. Remember when that death threat was reported, and follow-on threats from Mike [Wooten] that he was going ‘to bring Sarah and her family down’ – instead of any reprimand WE were told by trooper union personnel that we’d be sued if we talked about those threats.

“Amazing. And he’s still a trooper, and he still carries a gun, and he still tells anyone who will listen that he will never work for that b*tch (me) because he has such anger and distain [sic] toward my family.

“So consistency is needed here. No one’s above the law. If the law needs to be changed to not allow access to guns for people threatening to kill someone, it must be applied to everyone.”

At the time, Palin was unaware that Alaska state troopers had already conducted an internal investigation into more than three dozen complaints that she and her family had filed against Wooten and that he had been suspended for five days. Todd Palin said that he first learned about the internal probe in July, when Wooten had authorized his union to release the investigation’s findings.

Workers Compensation

Immediately after becoming Alaska’s governor, Palin – along with her husband and senior aides – conducted what amounted to a rogue investigation into suspicions that Wooten was faking a job-related injury, according to state documents, law enforcement officials and former aides to Palin.

According to John Cyr, executive director of the Public Safety Employees Association which represents Wooten and other state troopers, Wooten was approved for workers comp benefits in January 2007 because he had suffered a back injury when he pulled a dead body from a wrecked automobile and slipped on icy pavement.

After Wooten started receiving workers comp, Todd Palin began following him around “snapping pictures,” Cyr said.
 
In the affidavit, Todd Palin said he had “so many” conversations about Wooten with Mike Tibbles, Gov. Palin’s chief of staff, “gave him a packet of information” on Wooten, and “spoke to him a couple of times about my questions whether Wooten was following the law on his workers’ comp claim.”
 
“I watched [Wooten] drive a snowmachine and then tip one over to work on it, all while he was supposedly fully disabled,” Palin’s affidavit says. “I took a picture of Wooten. I gave a file of information to Monegan. Monegan was head of [Department of Public Safety] and it was his job to receive complaints about troopers… I made a complaint [to another official in the Palin administration] about what I thought was a possible workers comp fraud issue.”
 
Todd Palin said he “makes no apologies for wanting to protect my family and wanting to publicize the injustice of a violent trooper keeping his badge and abusing the workers’ compensation system.”
 
“The real investigation that needs to be conducted for the best interests of the public at large is the Department of Public Safety’s unwillingness to discipline its own,” Palin wrote.
 
Palin also attacked the integrity of the investigation, claiming Branchflower, “in a rush to judgment, has done nothing to investigate or verify” that Monegan was fired for insubordination.