What a strange finding. http://ktuu.images.worldnow.com/images/incoming/branchflowerreport.pdf Basically it says: "The Governor is innocent and acted entirely within her rights firing this man. She can fire him for cause, little cause or absolutely no cause, therefore, we find she abused her power."Okay-I’m pissed because AOL is running an article that is saying the complete opposite, that she abused her power!!! Freakin media!!!!!
“The Governor is innocent and acted entirely within her rights firing this man. She can fire him for cause, little cause or absolutely no cause, therefore, we find she abused her power.”
See now I thought it said, “She abused her power, but we only have hearsay as evidence, she broke no laws and I have no recommendation on what to do with her because I still really don’t know what she did.”
Stupid pdf isn’t even searchable. They probably threw it on a copier and let it scan the pages to pdf images. Morons.
Nice summary. The people who conducted this inquiry would not have been out of place at a 1930s Soviet show trial.
What's more incredible is that Branchflower utterly ignores the public admission made by Walt Monegan himself that ought to have ended this entire inquiry (boldface mine):
"For the record, no one ever said fire Wooten. Not the governor. Not Todd. Not any of the other staff," Monegan said Friday from Portland. "What they said directly was more along the lines of 'This isn't a person that we would want to be representing our state troopers.'"
That explains, of course, why it took a couple of weeks for Monegan to be persuaded that he'd been improperly "fired" (for supposedly refusing to fire Wooten) by an Alaska blogger, Andrew Halcro — a bitter loser whom Gov. Palin crushed in the 2006 Alaska gubernatorial race (he got less than 10% of the vote, proving that most Alaskans have long since figured out he's an untrustworthy windbag).
Instead, Branchfire (sic) has piled a guess (that the Palins wanted Wooten fired, rather than, for example, counseled, disciplined, or reassigned) on top of an inference (that when the Palins expressed concern to Monegan about Wooten, they were really threatening to fire Monegan if he didn't fire Wooten) on top of an innuendo (that Gov. Palin "fired" Monegan at least in part because of his failure to fire Wooten) — from which Branchflower then leaps to a legal conclusion: "abuse of authority." Branchflower reads the Ethics Act to prohibit any governmental action or decision made for justifiable reasons benefiting the State if that action or decision might also make a public official happy for any other reason. That would mean, of course, that governors must never act or decide in a way that makes them personally happy as a citizen, or as a wife or mother or daughter, and that they could only take actions or make decisions which left them feeling neutral or upset. This an incredibly shoddy tower of supposition, and a ridiculous misreading of the law...
...Branchflower, I'm told, is an attorney and a former prosecutor. If he thinks this kind of nonsense could support a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt, or even a finding of proof by a preponderance of the evidence, then he may be the worst lawyer I've ever encountered — and I've met a lot of awful ones in almost three decades before the bar.
yeah more double speak......they should give her credit for getting rid of those that do not listen to the boss’ wishes.