Report: Two-Thirds of Cost of Palin Ethics Probes Was Spent on a Charge She Filed against Herself
In Sarah Palin’s bizarre, rambling statement on Friday announcing that she was quitting her job as governor of Alaska, she claimed that a series of investigations into ethics charges filed against her and her staff had been too costly to state taxpayers and to herself personally:
PALIN: The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I’ve been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations — such as holding a fish in a photograph, wearing a jacket with a logo on it, and answering reporters’ questions.
Every one — all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We’ve won! But it hasn’t been cheap — the State has wasted thousands of hours of your time and shelled out some two million of your dollars to respond to “opposition research” — that’s money not going to fund teachers or troopers — or safer roads. And this political absurdity, the “politics of personal destruction” — Todd and I are looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills in order to set the record straight. And what about the people who offer up these silly accusations? It doesn’t cost them a dime so they’re not going to stop draining public resources — spending other peoples’ money in their game.
However, last Wednesday, two days before the governor’s announcement, the Juneau Empire reported that records released by the state government under a public information request revealed that there had been 13 investigations — not 15, as Palin claimed — and that the total cost of all the investigations had been $296,042, not “some two million dollars,” as she also claimed.
The Juneau Empire also found that the most expensive investigation of Gov. Palin was a probe into the “Troopergate” scandal that the governor filed against herself.
