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Palin unlikely to meet 'Troopergate' investigator
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Fired, but offered another post
When Monegan was fired, the governor offered to let him head the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. Asked why someone with a history of insubordination would be given such a position, Stapleton said that without having to deal with a budget, Monegan would be able to focus on alcohol abuse issues.
The governor "respects the fact that he was respected in the community," she said.
Thomas Van Flein, a lawyer for the governor's office, cited the newly released e-mails Monday in asking the Personnel Board to find no probable cause for an ethics investigation.
In an interview Monday night, Monegan said Palin never raised concerns about his management. In fact, at an event in May, she singled him out and praised his efforts to reduce violence against native women.
"In my time as a commissioner, the governor has never talked to me about complaints about my efforts," Monegan said.
He said all he meant to convey in his farewell letter was that because he was being fired, the governor must have believed he didn't support her, and to the extent his communication skills were to blame, others should avoid his mistake.
The e-mails made clear that some Palin staffers believed Monegan and the Department of Public Safety worked outside normal channels. One was written in May by Randy Ruaro, then a special assistant to Palin, to the governor's budget director, and concerned efforts to pay for and build a crime lab.
"I FEEL YOUR PAIN! DPS is constantly going off the reservation," he wrote.
Contradiction to governor's veto?
In February, Monegan signed a public letter of support for a $3.6 million project designed to keep troubled teens off the street in Anchorage — even though the governor had vetoed the project last year and hadn't included money for it in her budget this year.
"I am stunned and amazed — do you know anything about this?" budget director Karen Rehfeld wrote to two other high-level staffers when she learned of the letter.
"Think about that: one of the governor's own cabinet members publicly contradicting her veto decision," Stapleton said.
Monegan acknowledged he shouldn't have signed the letter, because it put the governor in the awkward position of defending her veto decision. But he said he thought of the letter as simply making another run at getting funding for a worthy project.
The last straw, the McCain campaign said, was in July, when Monegan planned to travel to Washington to seek federal money for a plan to assign troopers, judges and prosecutors who could exclusively handle sexual assault cases — one of the state's most intractable crime problems.
In a July 7 e-mail, John Katz, the governor's special counsel, noted two problems with the trip: The governor hadn't agreed the money should be sought, and the request was "out of sequence with our other appropriations requests and could put a strain on the evolving relationship between the Governor and Sen. (Ted) Stevens."
Four days later, Monegan was fired. He said he had kept others in the administration fully apprised of his plans to go to Washington.
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