Barely two weeks after Sarah Palin had been sworn in as Alaska's governor, in December 2006, then-Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan's executive secretary got a confusing phone call from Palin's office: The first gentleman would like to schedule a meeting with her boss.
"I was not familiar with the term 'first gentleman,' or didn't hear her correctly, so I kept asking her, 'Who?' " the secretary, Cassandra Byrne, testified recently. "And she eventually said, 'Todd Palin.' "
The appointment was fixed, and Monegan arrived in the governor's office to find himself alone with the brawny, popular fisherman and snowmobile champion, who was sitting at a 12-foot-long conference table, surrounded by stacks of documents. One of the documents had the logo and letterhead of Monegan's own Department of Public Safety.
The subject, it turned out, was Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten, who had been involved in a messy divorce with the governor's sister. The Palins, Todd made clear, wanted Wooten fired for a long record of behavior they saw as inappropriate for a police officer.
"He kept using the term 'we.' 'We went to go talk to, we, we.' And so I assumed it was he and Sarah, of course," Monegan testified.
The meeting "made me a little uncomfortable," he said. "We're having it in the governor's office, and he's not the governor. I think he was trying to use state trappings to handle a personal issue."
Todd Palin would become a familiar voice for the Palin administration. Independent legislative investigator Stephen Branchflower's report on Monegan's subsequent firing -- in part, the investigation found, because he wouldn't fire Wooten -- contains an exhaustive record of Todd Palin's frequent and intimate presence in the day-to-day workings of his wife's administration.
Testimony compiled as part of the inquiry, and The Times' own review of e-mail logs from the administration, show that Todd Palin was a fixture in the governor's office, spending about half of his time there. He attended Cabinet meetings that are supposed to be closed to the public, and was copied on a wide variety of high-level government correspondence on issues such as contract negotiations with the police officers union, Alaska Native issues and the privatization of a dairy near the Palins' hometown of Wasilla.
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A campaign issue
