The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

by McGinniss, Joe

  The Troopergate imbroglio is worth examining in detail because Sarah’s actions, and those of her husband on her behalf, expose so clearly the vengeful, obsessive nature of the person who lurks behind the mask of sexiness and chirpy insouciance.

  Mike Wooten married Molly Heath McCann in 2001. She was his third wife. He was her second husband. Molly and Mike had two children: McKinley and Heath. Also, each had a child from a previous marriage.

  Molly filed for divorce in April 2005. At the same time, Sarah and Todd filed a complaint against Wooten for professional misconduct. In response, state police sergeant Ron Wall interviewed Sarah at her Lake Lucille home on May 5, 2005.

  Sarah told Sergeant Wall that Molly had called her on February 17 to say that Mike “was on his way home and was in a rage.” According to a state police transcript, Sarah said, “Molly called me. I was here at home with my kids and Molly was on her cell phone driving home from work and she said, ‘Uh-oh, Mike’s really mad, he’s in a rage. I don’t know what he wants, but he just told me to get my F’n ass home and don’t tell him F’n no, and you guys better not be F’n with me.’ ”

  Sarah said that when Molly arrived home, she “put the speaker phone on so I could listen. I was on my regular phone here. I could hear Mike come whammin’ through the door, screaming F’n this, F’n that, tellin’ Molly, ‘If your dad helps you through this divorce, if he gets an attorney he’s gonna, he’s gonna eat an F’n lead bullet. I’m gonna shoot him.’ He was in such a rage. I knew that if he had just walked in the door he probably did have his gun on, ’cause he wore it all the time. I was fearful of that. He just kept screaming, ‘I’m gonna F’n kill your dad if he gets an attorney to help you.’ My fear was that he was gonna kill my dad.

  “I drove over to Molly’s house … It was dark but the lights were on in the house, so I could see right into the living room. Payton, the twelve-year old, was standing there with one of the babies on his hip. Mike, Molly was standing in the living room. I could see all this so clearly on a dark night. He’s got his gun. He was flying his arms all over, obviously in a rage, waving his arms around, pacing. I could tell he was screaming. I could see this clearly through the window and I thought, ‘He is gonna blow.’ There’s no other step for him to take next except from [sic] physical violence.”

  Sarah said she watched through the window “for probably fifteen minutes.” Then, she said, “I had to leave. I had to head on into Chugiak. I had a meeting that I couldn’t miss.”

  Sergeant Wall found this hard to understand. She was in mortal fear that at any moment Wooten might “blow” and possibly kill both her sister and her father, but she left to go to a meeting?

  Did she at least warn her father to lock and load because his crazed son-in-law might show up at any moment at his place with gun in hand?

  No, Sarah told Sergeant Wall, not “till weeks later.”

  Why not?

  “Well, maybe Mike won’t.”

  “Why didn’t you guys call the police?” Wall asked.

  “We knew Mike’s job was probably on the line.”

  Wall struggled to make sense of this. At one point, he said, “We don’t mean to frustrate you with facts, but our life is fact-driven, okay?”

  Sigh. “I know,” Sarah replied.

  With the assistance of Chuck Heath, Bristol, Track, and, of course, Molly, Todd and Sarah spent months searching for “facts” that could cost Wooten his job. They even hired a private detective to keep Wooten under off-hours surveillance.

  Wooten had tasered his stepson. Wooten had had affairs. Wooten drove while drunk. Wooten had been required to take an anger-management class. Wooten had illegally killed a wolf. Wooten had illegally killed a moose.

  Between the spring of 2005 and spring of 2006, Palin and Heath family members filed twenty-five complaints against Wooten. All the charges were investigated. Only one was found to have merit. To that one—shooting a moose without a permit—Wooten fessed up.

  In 2003, on a hunting trip, Wooten and Molly spotted a moose. Wooten told her to shoot, because she was the one with the permit. She told him she just couldn’t do it and handed the rifle to him. Standing next to his wife, close enough to touch her permit, Wooten shot the moose. Chuck Heath butchered it in his garage. He and Sally and Todd and Sarah and Mike and Molly dined off it all winter.

  SARAH WAS at loose ends professionally, having resigned from the oil and gas commission, and she pursued her vendetta against Wooten obsessively. On August 10, 2005, angered because Wooten had not yet been fired, Sarah sent a three-page e-mail to state trooper director Colonel Julia Grimes. The letter was filled with distortion and exaggeration.

  She began by saying that Wooten was “described by many” as “a ticking timebomb and a loose cannon.” However, only Sarah herself had used those terms to describe him. She added that although she had a family connection to Wooten (he was divorcing her sister), she was forwarding information about him “objectively.”

  She then ran through a laundry list of all the allegations Sergeant Wall had already investigated, and she repeated that Wooten was “a loose cannon” and “a ticking timebomb,” and said, “I am afraid his actions … may cause someone terrible harm.”

  As she concluded her letter to Colonel Grimes, Sarah resorted to using boldface for emphasis:

  Wooten does not tell the truth. He intimidates people and abuses his position. I don’t know what more can be said, except that considering just a few examples from those I’ve shared with you (namely, the death threat against my father, who is merely trying to help his daughter escape a horribly abusive relationship, the illegal hunting and the drunk driving!) all would lead a rational person to believe there is a problem inside the organization.

  She tacked on a P.S.:

  Again, Wooten happens to be my brother-in-law, and after his infidelity and physical abuse of his wife (my sister) surfaced, Mike chose to leave his family and has continued to threaten to “bring down” anyone who supports her. I would ask that you objectively consider this information, disregarding my sister’s pending divorce from Wooten, as I have objectively separated the divorce and Wooten’s threats against me and my family with the fact that the Troopers have a loose cannon on their hands.

  As Wall later observed in his report, “many of the issues that were noted in Palin’s email had previously been investigated.” Nonetheless, in a doomed attempt to pacify her, he conducted a new round of interviews.

  He traveled to the Palin home on the afternoon of August 18, 2005, to reinterview Sarah. Time and again, under Wall’s questioning, she was forced to concede that she had no personal knowledge of any of the “incidences” she described in her e-mail to Grimes.

  Wall’s report of the interview is littered with phrases such as “based on information she received from her sister Molly …,” “She again related that she had no personal knowledge …,” “Palin stated that Molly told her,” “the story was told to her by Molly,” “Palin again had no personal knowledge,” “She didn’t have personal knowledge,” and so on.

  An administrative investigator later stated that he’d never seen such a concerted effort against an individual officer. The judge handling the divorce case told the Heath/Palins that if their actions cost Wooten his job they would be financially liable. He also warned them to curtail their attacks. “Disparaging will not be tolerated—it is a form of child abuse,” he said. The judge added that “the parent [Molly] needs to set boundaries for her relatives.”

  The judge granted the divorce decree in January 2006, but added a further warning to Molly, saying he’d be paying close attention to any problems in the custody arrangement, specifically “the disparagement of the father by the mother and her family members. It is the mother’s responsibility to set boundaries for her relatives and ensure they respect them, and the disparagement by either parent or their surrogates is emotional child abuse.”

  Extraordinarily, the judge went further, writing that “If the court
finds it is necessary due to disparagement in the Mat-Su Valley, for the children’s best interests, it will not hesitate to order custody to the father and a move into Anchorage.”

  Sarah, by then a candidate for governor, finally received her pound of flesh on March 1, 2006, when Grimes suspended Wooten for ten days, later reduced to five after the state police union objected. Grimes cited a number of Sarah’s complaints and warned Wooten that “any further occurrences of these types of behaviors or incidents will not be tolerated and will result in your termination.”

  But Sarah and Todd wanted Wooten fired. And they would not be satisfied until he was. Almost a year later, on February 7, 2007, after she’d been governor for two months, Sarah sent Monegan an e-mail in which she complained, “It was a joke, the whole year long ‘investigation’ of him.”

  Monegan knew how improper it was for Sarah, as governor, even to discuss the Wooten situation with him, much less ask him to fire the trooper without cause. He told her, “Ma’am, I need to keep you at arm’s length with this.”

  As he finishes his coffee at Jitters and looks at his watch, Monegan tells me, “She didn’t seem to understand that if Wooten were fired and filed a wrongful dismissal suit, any conversations she had with me would be subpoenable and I might have to testify under oath. She didn’t seem to think in those terms. She just thought she should be able to do anything she wanted to, and that anybody working for her had an obligation to help.”

  Monegan did speak to Todd. “I tried to explain to him, ‘You can’t headhunt like this,’ ” he told the Washington Post in 2008. “ ‘What you need to do is back off.’ ” Monegan also told the Post that he’d called Sarah to explain, “there was no new evidence, the issue was closed. She also was unhappy with that.”

  Nonetheless, Sarah praised Monegan’s performance publicly almost until the day she sent a deputy chief of staff to tell him he was fired because he had, as she later said, a “rogue mentality.” This was back when rogue was a bad word in her vocabulary.

  “When Sarah was mayor of Wasilla, she had the power to fire the police chief, which she did,” Monegan tells me as we walk toward our respective cars outside Jitters. “As governor, she had the power to fire me, which she did. But neither she nor Todd nor any of her staff nor any member of her family had the power to fire a state trooper. Maybe she hadn’t realized there were limits on her power. Maybe she thought being governor meant she could do anything she wanted to anyone. I loved my job and I’m sorry she took it from me, but I’ve never had a moment’s doubt about what I did. It wasn’t an act of courage. My father was the one with the courage. All I did was what’s right.”

  TWELVE

  AS WITH EVERYTHING in regard to Sarah, two schools of thought about her actions in the Ruedrich case would emerge: her critics would say that everything she did was the result of political calculation and that her pursuit of Ruedrich was akin to her Wooten obsession; her supporters would see it as evidence that she was a beacon of integrity shining through the murk of Alaskan political corruption.

  In 2004, however, the critics were not yet on the horizon. As the year ended, Sarah found herself at the high point of her political career, without even holding an office.

  She claimed a new triumph when Governor Murkowski’s attorney general, Gregg Renkes, resigned in February 2005, at least in part because of an ethics complaint that Sarah had filed against him in December. By April—notwithstanding her frustration about Wooten—she was the happiest camper in the Valley. She even wrote a column for the Anchorage Daily News just to say how wonderful the Valley was.

  “Plato said you can learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation,” she wrote. “Same goes for cheering next to someone caught up in the insane intensity our Valley teams bring out in their fans. That’s because diverse demographics coalesce with the elation and heartbreak shared on the roller coaster ride called ‘Competition.’ ”

  But the Valley was more than just an amusement park. “For instance, thankfully, we don’t have cumbersome land use regulations that rid us of our beloved duct-taped blue tarps. Nor have we too many intrusive zoning laws that bid adieu to big stores with four walls, thus creating that boxy look that some curiously find so offensive …”

  In June, as she first mentioned that she was considering a run for governor, the Daily News profiled her more extensively. “Sarah Palin arrives at a coffee shop for an interview looking like any other soccer mom running late for her next rendezvous with an offspring,” the piece began. “She’s dressed down in a pantsuit, her youngest, daughter Piper Indy, tugging at a pants leg. Her son Track will arrive later with a friend, and mother will dutifully hand over a few dollars. She needs a job, and soon, she quipped, just to keep her brood in gas money.”

  The story continued in Q-and-A form:

  Q: I noticed there was a new business license acquired in the Mat-Su under your name.

  A: Rouge Cou, it’s a classy way of saying redneck. It’s a French word, rouge is red, cou is neck. It’s for marketing and consulting, in case I wanted to go that route, I’d have my ducks all lined up and have a business license …

  Q: I see that you have a penchant for quoting people like John Wooden and Plato, do you consider yourself well-read?

  A: (Laughs.) I’ll let other people judge that. I’m glad you mentioned John Wooden. Most of my inspiration has come from being involved in sports …

  Q: Do you have your sights set on any particular office that you’d like to serve in?

  A: The list is long and I think the most, maybe the most fruitful office would be in the executive branch … I wouldn’t hesitate if at some point in the future a door opened for me to be able to serve Alaskans in the executive branch …

  For Todd, June meant his annual escape to Dillingham to supervise the family’s fishing business. And to enjoy himself in other ways.

  “Todd’s a player, especially when he’s out there at fishing camp,” a friend of his from Dillingham told me in 2010. “I could probably fill up most of my fingers with the names of women Todd has screwed in Dillingham. That man has sowed his oats. The ones in Dillingham, he knew them from growing up. Today, they’re in their forties, still caught up in drugs. In the summertime, when Todd came into town without Sarah, it was a fun time. Todd was partyin’, we all had a good time, daylight twenty-four hours a day.”

  Sarah visited only infrequently. “Those people out there hate her,” a former Dillingham resident says. “All of Todd’s family hated her. She never interacted with any of them. J.D.’s wife, Wendy, cannot stand Sarah. Sarah has always treated Wendy like she was a piece of trash. And she hated J.D., was always mean to J.D., was always basically like, ‘J.D.’s not comin’ over here with his trashy friends,’ and Todd used to always be like, ‘I can’t even have my own brother around.’ ”

  Sarah wanted no part of commercial fishing. “She’s never fished,” a longtime acquaintance says. “I was out there for years. She was never on the boat. She never was up at the fish camp. J.D., and I think Todd was part of it, they bought into a fish camp at the mouth of the Nushagak River. It was called Fishing Adventures or something like that. You’d bring the people in, you have a cook on site, you have tents, and basically you make big bucks.

  “Sarah was never there. Sarah was never part of that. What she would do, maybe every two years she would show up and dump the kids and stay hidden. She’d never even come out to eat.

  “When she was in town—for maybe three days, or two days, if she even came—oh, Todd was a completely different guy. We were all warned. When Sarah was around we were always pre-warned. ‘Don’t tell her I did this, don’t say anything about that, don’t say nothin’.’

  “If she didn’t win the governorship, they were going to divorce,” this acquaintance says. “Of course, back then they were divorcing every other month.”

  IN 2005, Alaskans outside a closed circle of Wasillans were hearing none of these stories. Sarah was portrayed a
s the blessed mother of the Valley, a God-fearing Christian hockey mom wielding the big stick of true reform.

  On October 18 she became the first Republican officially to enter the race for governor. “Keeping it simple is my philosophy,” she said. The Daily News reported on December 11 that she had “promising early poll numbers,” but said, “the former Wasilla mayor needs to work on name recognition.”

  IT WAS NOT until late May that Frank Murkowski announced his intention to seek reelection. Having been elected in a landslide, Murkowski had used cronyism and imperiousness and an abject devotion to the interests of Big Oil to turn himself into the most unpopular governor in the country, with a June 15 disapproval rating of 78 percent.

  A poll in late July, one month before the primary, showed Sarah leading with 36 percent, former state senator John Binkley of Fairbanks coming in second with 23 percent, and Murkowski last with 20. Twenty-one percent were undecided. Sarah’s one negative seemed to be her lack of experience. An August 4 letter to the Daily News called attention to this:

  Sarah Palin has no business running for governor. Where is her experience? What should concern people is she will have to come into this office at full gallop and won’t have a clue about leading the state. Ms. Palin, why don’t you run for state representative and work your way up? …

  I’m sure Sarah Palin is a nice person and deeply regarded by the Christian community. But Christian doesn’t cut it if you don’t have what it takes. Stay home, be a wife and mother, isn’t that fulfilling enough?