Aide Claims Palin Broke Election Law
Anchorage Daily News reports:
A leaked manuscript by one of Sarah Palin's closest aides from her time as governor charges that Palin broke state election law in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign and was consumed by petty grievances up until she resigned.
The unpublished book by Frank Bailey was leaked to the media and widely circulated on Friday.
The manuscript opens with an account of Palin sending Bailey a message saying "I hate this damn job" shortly before she resigned as Alaska's governor in July 2009, less than three years into her four-year term. The manuscript goes on for nearly 500 pages, a mixture of analysis, gossip and allegation.
Copies of the manuscript were forwarded around Alaska political circles on Friday. The Daily News received copies from multiple sources, the first from author Joe McGinniss, who is working on his own Palin book. McGinniss didn't respond to a message asking where he obtained the manuscript and the reason he circulated it.
Bailey, a political insider who joined Palin's 2006 campaign for governor and became part of her inner circle, has never before told his version of the Palin story. Bailey has consistently refused requests for interviews and did so again Friday. The book was co-written with California author Ken Morris and Jeanne Devon of Anchorage, who publishes the popular anti-Palin website Mudflats.
Devon wrote on her website that the "draft manuscript" was leaked without the knowledge or permission of the authors. She said they are shocked and horrified.
Bailey wrote in the book that he and his co-authors put together the manuscript with the help of more than 60,000 e-mails he sent or received while working for Palin.
Pam Pryor, a spokeswoman for Palin's political action committee, said she didn't expect Palin to react. "Doubt she will respond to this kind of untruth," Pryor said in an e-mail.
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One chapter asserts Palin broke election law by coordinating with the Republican Governors Association during her 2006 campaign for governor. State candidates can't team up with soft-money groups such as the Republican Governors Association, which paid for TV commercials and mailers in Alaska during the election in a purported "independent" effort.
At the time, the Alaska Democratic Party had accused the RGA and Palin of working together on an ad that included Palin striding from the Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage.
In his book, Bailey says the allegation was true. Palin and her aides marched along the block in front of the hotel again and again in order to allow a camera operator to capture footage for the ad, he said. "(Palin aide) Kris Perry, when orchestrating that nutty- parade at the hotel, was following the directions of the RGA cameraman and/or whomever he was working for," Bailey wrote.
"Far worse, Sarah conducted multiple takes and knew exactly what was happening. She had, I suddenly believed, broken the law," Bailey wrote.
