Posted on 08/30/2008 10:05:34 AM PDT by edzo4
Less than 12 hours after McCain picks AK Gov. Sarah Palin as his VP David Shuster hosted a 1 Hour hit piece on the governor highlighting her Alleged scandal in Alaska
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032553/vp/26463356#26463356
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Never mention on MSNBC that the “state trooper” threatened to kill her father or that he used a taser on his 10 year old son. Maybe in MSNBC’s world 10 is not too old to abort.
MSNBC: Both Palins were interviewed by state troopers as part of an internal investigation, which dismissed many of the complaints.
WSJ: An internal police investigation substantiated the moose and Tasering charges, but threw out most of the rest.
http://www.adn.com/politics/story/476430.html
Is Wooten a good trooper? - PALIN’S EX-BROTHER-IN-LAW: Union says yes, but investigation found serious concerns.
Anchorage Daily News (AK) - July 27, 2008
EXCERPT
On April 27, 2005, trooper Sgt. Ron Wall began the internal investigation, interviewing and re-interviewing more than 15 people over a period of months. Witnesses included Palin, her husband, Todd, two of their children, Heath, McCann, her son, Wooten , friends, neighbors, a bartender, and other troopers.
Here’s what the troopers found out:
ILLEGAL MOOSE HUNT
In September 2003, Wooten , McCann and a friend who was a Wasilla police officer, Chris Watchus, hunted moose from a boat in the Jim Creek area.
McCann had drawn a permit for a cow moose but had never done that kind of hunting before, she told troopers in the investigation. They brought Wooten ‘s rifle, a .300-caliber Winchester Magnum. Chuck Heath had been riding her to make sure the permit was used, Wooten told Wall. It was the last day for the hunt, McCann said. The Mat-Su lottery tags are highly coveted.
Minutes into the trip, they spotted a cow. “Do you want to shoot the moose?” Wooten says he asked his wife. As he recounted it, she told him that she didn’t.
McCann said that Wooten took out the gun and shot the moose.
“I guess I assumingly thought that he would help me sight it in and whatever you do you know to tell me, show me how to do it. Unless he planned all along of just shooting it,” McCann told Wall, according to the transcript.
The first shot didn’t bring it down, so Wooten fired a second time. During the personnel investigation, Wooten initially insisted there was nothing wrong with killing a moose under his wife’s permit. At the time of the interview, he was a wildlife investigator for troopers. He was assigned that job in October 2004, about a year after killing the moose. Before joining the force, he was a wildlife conservation agent on Elmendorf Air Force Base but wasn’t responsible for enforcing rules on moose hunts, he said.
The killing of the moose without a permit was a criminal misdemeanor, Grimes wrote in the March 2006 letter to Wooten . He was removed from wildlife investigations.
Wooten was never charged criminally. Troopers say the moose shooting wasn’t investigated as a crime.
“Once a complaint is received on a trooper, more often than not it goes into what we call an administrative inquiry, and that’s how the discipline is handled,” said Col. Gary Folger, now director of the state Division of Alaska Wildlife Troopers, which was formed after Palin took office in 2007. At least that’s true for wildlife offenses, he said.
Col. Audie Holloway, director of Alaska State Troopers, said he couldn’t speak about wildlife cases in the separate division but said generally, “a trooper has to answer for his crime.” He said he couldn’t talk specifically about Wooten ‘s situation.
The statute of limitations for shooting a moose without a permit is five years.
TASING THE STEPSON
One day — maybe a year or two before the investigation — Wooten showed his stepson his Taser . He had just been to Taser instructor school. Wooten told Sgt. Wall that the boy was fascinated and pleaded to be tased.
“So we went in our living room and I had him get down on his knees so he wouldn’t fall. And I taped the probes to him and turned the Taser on for like a second, turned it off. He thought that was the greatest thing in the world, wanted to do it again,” Wooten told the investigator. The boy flinched but nothing more, he said. The boy was about 11 at the time.
In his interview with troopers, the stepson said it hurt for about a second, according to Wall’s report. The boy said he wanted to be tased to show his cousin, Palin’s daughter Bristol, that he wasn’t a mama’s boy. The probe left a welt on his arm, he said. His mother was upstairs yelling at them not to do it, the boy said.
As Bristol remembered it, the jolt knocked the boy backward, the trooper report says. She said she was afraid.
The probes are attached by thin wires to the Taser cartridge. In the field, an officer fires the probes into a suspect’s skin or clothing and the suspect receives a jolt of electricity for five seconds, said Steve Tuttle, a spokesman for Taser International, which makes the devices. They are only incapacitated during that time. In demos, the probes might be taped to a person so that they don’t accidentally strike an eye or injure the volunteer, he said. If the Taser is fired for just a second, it would feel like your funny bone was hit but the quick jolt wouldn’t knock you over, Tuttle said.
DRINKING AND DRIVING
Wall evaluated several accusations that Wooten was drinking and driving. He didn’t substantiate them. Some came only from McCann and family.
But Grimes re-interviewed a couple who lived nearby and found them believable about an incident that occurred in the summer of 2004. Adrian and Marilyn Lane told her they are friends of the Heaths but wouldn’t lie to help the family.
Wooten stopped by their house one morning in his white patrol car and drank a beer from the fridge in the garage, the couple said. On his way out, he grabbed another beer, popped it open, and got behind the wheel, they both told Grimes.
“And I was like “Whoa!” Adrian Lane said. They both thought he needed to watch himself.
Wooten contended he never drank in his patrol car. Grimes determined that he did.
Troopers looked into another drinking episode that occurred late one night in March 2005.
Wooten was at the Mug-Shot Saloon with a friend. Wooten got into it with another man, whom he thought was causing trouble for his friend. Wooten ‘s friend had to hold him back, and the bartender held back the other man, the bartender told troopers.
Wooten told the bartender he needed to eject the other man, the bartender said.
The bartender thought Wooten was out of line.
“Then he whipped out his badge and said ‘Lemmie let me introduce myself. I’m State Trooper Wooten ,” the bartender said, according to a transcript of his interview.
The other man took a cab.
Wooten and his friend left in a black Audi, with Wooten driving. It belonged to the friend’s brother but the friend was drunk, Wooten told the investigator.
Barely two blocks away, Trooper Dave Herrell pulled them over. Wooten jumped out to talk to him. Herrell told the trooper investigator that he “felt kinda weird” when he realized the driver was another trooper.
The bartender had called in to report Wooten as a possible drunken driver. “Said that you guys were severely intoxicated and caused a fight in the bar and then you guys left,” Wooten told the investigator, recounting what Herrell said.
As Herrell remembered it, “I was sitting there talking to him and I smelled ... just a faint odor of alcohol that was coming from his breath,” according to a transcript.
Herrell, who said he was No. 1 at the Palmer post with more than 250 drunken-driving arrests, didn’t think Wooten seemed drunk. He didn’t slur, his eyes weren’t bloodshot or watery. Herrell didn’t ask him to take any field sobriety or breath tests. That’s always up to the officer’s discretion, troopers say.
Was Wooten drunk?
“No,” Herrell told Wall. “I believe that he consumed an alcoholic beverage, but I don’t believe that he’s intoxicated. Or overly intoxicated above .08.”
That’s the legal limit for driving.
Still, Herrell, who is now a sergeant, told Wooten to park the car. He gave the men a lift back to the friend’s house.
McCann told the trooper investigator that Wooten called her about 3 a.m. to pick him up. They were separated, but he still came to the house to shower and get his things. He told her he and his friend “tore down the house last night” and were pulled over. “Oh I can play a good sober when I need to,” he said, according to what she told troopers.
In his investigation, Wall didn’t find that Wooten broke any policies or laws that night.
“F’ING BULLET”
The other incident happened in February 2005. Both McCann and Palin gave troopers detailed accounts of what happened. Wooten was headed home in a rage, McCann said.
She called Palin and put the phone on speaker so Palin could listen when Wooten got there and get help if things got bad. Palin had her teenage son Track listen in, too.
As McCann remembered it, Wooten said if their father got a lawyer for her “he would eat a f’ing lead bullet. I will shoot him.”
Palin was interviewed by troopers too.
“Mike in the conversation never did get to the bottom of what, what the foundational issue he was dealing with, he just kept screaming, “I’m gonna F’n kill your dad if he gets an attorney to help you,” Palin told troopers, according to the transcript.
Track told troopers he heard the comment, too.
Palin drove over and watched through the window. She and McCann both said Wooten was all wound up. A neighbor who stood watch as well later told troopers that Wooten looked angry but that McCann wasn’t cowering or anything.
Wooten told troopers he never said anything like that about his father-in-law.
The investigation concluded he did. It wasn’t a crime, because he didn’t threaten Heath directly. But it did violate trooper policy, the investigation found.
In August 2005, nearly four months after the investigation began, Palin wrote a lengthy e-mail to Grimes about Wooten that included some new accusations and new witnesses. She wrote that she was writing not as his sister-in-law but to express concern over the lack of action about a trooper whom she said many described as a “ticking timebomb” and “loose cannon.”
In October 2005, Palin announced she was running for governor. Sgt. Wall, who is now a lieutenant over patrol in Fairbanks, finished his investigation the same month. The following March, Grimes handed out the punishment.
The union’s Cyr says that ultimately Wooten was treated fairly by the Department of Public Safety.
“Clearly the folks have the ability to file complaints, and the state has the obligation to investigate them and that is what was done. He was disciplined, appropriately so we believe in the end. And you know, basically end of story. The only question in our mind would be has this pattern continued and has pressure been brought on anybody, I mean, after this whole sorry mess.”
Wooten and McCann’s divorce was finalized in January 2006. They continue to have disputes over custody and visitation.
Since that divorce, Wooten remarried and divorced again.
He remains on the force in Wasilla.
Why? to be clear, I didn’t make the MSNBC video, but I did write everything but the link in the first 2 posts.
MSNBC, CNBC, and NBC are all owned by General Electric. GE stock is a total dud, a reflection on its management.
Obviously the guy is a Democrat.
Obama has less experience than Mayor Ray Nagin the lunatic from New Orleans!!
That is BAD folks, real bad.
He got the story straight from his Obama campaign friends. Tell us about your sources, Dave.
How surprising that a “news media” that couldn’t find anything negative to say about Obama for months and months can come up with a negative story on Palin in 12 hours.
The “news media” not only lacks objectivity, it lacks shame. That said, I never watch them anyway. And I’m seriously thinking about cancelling my local paper.
From Macsmind.com (The blog owner does not appear to be a Plain cheerleader. In fact in his first post about the pick on Friday he expressed some concerned about her):
“Relax There is nothing to Trooper Gate
The National Enquire of the blogsphere the so-called “Talking Points Memo” has been harping about Palin’s “trooper-gate” as if it’s the scandal of the years.
The McCain campaign has fully vetted this story and the facts behind it and agreed it’s nothing and simply a partisan game. As of this date nothing substantive has been discovered. In fact fack on August 5th, Anderson Cooper was planning to go to the story on his show and after reviewing the facts declined. Subsequently other network news shows followed.
It is generally accepted that the so-called investigation has all the veracity of the present congress’s witch hunts on the Bush administration, none of which have returned anything except a waste of the taxpayers money and time.
UPDATE: For a exhaustive timeline on “troopergate” and proof that the story is more about a bad cop and a lousy under performing commissioner, see Flopping Aces. “
http://macsmind.com/wordpress/2008/08/30/relax-there-is-nothing-to-trooper-gate/
This smear story was already ready-made by Governor Palin’s enemies in Alaska. So all they had to do is take it and run with it.
I doubt whether it will have much legs, when people realize that the cop in question tazered his own son, and threatened to shoot Palin’s father. Hard to build up much sympathy for a guy like that.
I suspect they were hoping this dirty cop would take her out, and they would have clean hands.
MSLSD need a shovel!
Don't you think that's a little judgemental? I mean, the state cop only Tasered the stepson after the 12-year-old asked him to.
What's everybody getting upset about?
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