Walt Monegan, Alaska’s former public safety commissioner fired by Gov. Sarah Palin in July due, in part, to his refusal to fire a state trooper who was married to Palin’s sister, filed a complaint Monday with the state’s personnel board calling for a hearing to “address reputational harm” caused by Palin.

In a six-page complaint, Monegan’s attorney Jeffrey Feldman said Palin’s series “inconsistent and changing explanations” for firing Monegan has damaged his reputation. At first she said she wanted to take the department that Monegan headed in a “different direction.” In recent weeks, Palin and campaign officials said Monegan was fired for insubordination.

“Mr. Monegan does not challenge the Governor’s right to discharge him as the Commissioner of the Department of Public Safety,” the complaint says. “But the Governor is not entitled to make untrue and defamatory statements about her reasons for discharging a cabinet officer. Governor Palin’s public statements accusing Mr. Monegan of serious misconduct were untrue and they have stigmatized his good name, severely damaged-and continue to damage-his reputation and impaired his ability to pursue future professional employment in law enforcement and related fields. This damage thus implicates his constitutionally protected liberty interests.”

Spokespeople for the McCain-Palin campaign and the governor’s office in Alaska did not return several calls for comment.

Last week, an investigative report released by state lawmakers concluded that Palin abused her authority and broke state ethics laws by sanctioning a campaign to pressure subordinates, including Monegan, to fire her former brother-in-law, state trooper Mike Wooten.

The report found that Palin violated a statute of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act, which says “each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.”

The investigation centered on whether Palin, her husband Todd, and several of her senior aides pressured Public Safety Commissioner Monegan to fire Wooten. In July, Palin fired Monegan, who then publicly blamed his dismissal on his refusal to fire Wooten.

Palin denied that she was retaliating against Monegan and initially welcomed the legislative inquiry, which was approved unanimously by the Republican-dominated Legislative Council, which then hired former prosecutor Steve Branchflower to head the probe.

In his findings, which the Council released Friday night, Branchflower said Monegan’s resistance to the pressure to fire Wooten played a part in Palin’s decision to terminate him as the state’s top police official, but that her firing decision was nonetheless lawful.

“I find that, although Walt Monegan’s refusal to fire Trooper Michael Wooten was not the sole reason he was fired by Gov. Sarah Palin, it was likely a contributing factor to his termination as Commissioner of Public Safety,” Branchflower said. “In spite of that, Gov. Palin’s firing of Commissioner Monegan was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional and statutory authority to hire and fire executive branch department heads.”

Neither Monegan nor his attorney would say whether they intended to file a lawsuit against the governor. In the complaint, however, Monegan’s attorney said alternatively “Mr. Monegan requests that the board declare, or secure a declaration from the Attorney General, that Mr. Monegan has exhausted his administrative remedies and may assert his claim in Superior Court.”

Wooten, the state trooper, is prepared to sue Palin, her husband, and the state for spending the past three years trying to get him fired from his job, according to John Cyr, the executive director of the Public Safety Employees Association, the union that represents state troopers.

That could cause additional turmoil for Palin if taxpayers are forced to foot the bill for a settlement with Wooten.

On Sept. 2, just a day before she accepted the GOP nomination, Palin also took the unusual step of filing an ethics complaint against herself – to move the investigation to the state personnel board whose three members are appointed by the governor- and to make the argument that Branchflower should stop his investigation. She followed that up with filings that said she fired Monegan because he has a “rogue mentality” and committed acts of “outright insubordination.”

“Governor Palin attempted to support these allegations with selected documents to make it appear that as if there was a factual basis for the assertions,” Monegan’s complaint says. “The allegations were untrue, however. Mr. Monegan was very much a team player. At no time did he have or exhibit a “rogue mentality,” nor did he commit any acts of insubordination during the period of time he served as Commissioner of the Department of Public Safety…[T]hrowing Mr. Monegan under the bus apparently was deemed a suitable, if wholly dishonorable, strategy to try to stem the questions and pressure building in what became known as ‘Troopergate.’”

Last week, Palin was confronted by a television reported during a conference call about the use of the word “rogue” to describe Monegan. She responded by trying to redefine the word “rogue,” saying, “Rogue isn’t a negative term when you consider that in a cabinet you need a team effort going forward with a governor’s agenda.

“Our agenda has been to find efficiencies in every department and make sure that we are serving the people of Alaska to the best of our ability given the resources that we have,” Palin said. “And remember I fought very hard to increase funding for state troopers so that we could fill positions there and goals not being met that included not being able to recruit and retain all the state troopers that I wanted to best serve Alaska. That could be characterized I think as a cabinet member who – it’s not a negative term I think — being rogue in terms of not meeting those goals.”

Monegan wants the personnel board to convene a hearing and provide him the opportunity to clear his name and “redress reputational harm by publicly proving that he was not a rogue employee or grossly insubordinate, as the Governor has alleged, and that he was not terminated as Commissioner of the Department of Public Safety for those reasons.”

Monegan’s attorney included more than 60-pages of documents to support his position. The documents, one of which is an emails that shows that Monegan traveled to Washington to seek federal funding to deal with sexual assault in the state, which the Palin and the McCain campaign characterized as evidence of “insubordination” because it was done behind the governor’s back, was, according to the email, a trip that Monegan and Palin coordinated over the course of eight months.