Going Rogue: An American Life (106 page)

Stuff like rhis makes you wonder why anyone would keep coming back for more in public service-especially when you get an upclose and personal look at the popular political blood sport called the “politics of personal destruction.”

Prior to the VP campaign, my administration had received a normal number ofJegitimate FOrA requests from rhe public and media pertaining to official communications. This is good; this holds government accountable. But over the next ten months,

RogNe

the FOIA tequests swelJed into a tidal wave, and my administtation was hit with of demands for all communications:

months’ worth of e-mails between me, Todd, and my

and

every other combination of e-mail addressees you can imagine. Only the opposition really comprehends the work involved with FOIA requests-from the retrieval of all correspondence and emails, to copying them for lawyers and staff to review in order to remove confidential or privileged information, to assembling and packing them, and on and on. Just of these requests for a certain batch of e-mails generated 24,000 individual sheets of paper. So instead of doing our jobs, my staff, including attorneys, spent thousands of hours and wasted more than

million of public

monies to sort through it all one sheet at a time. The FOIAs were fishing expeditions-just attempts to see what could be seen, then pick it over to see if something, anything, might generate another story. Meanwhile, opponents filed many baseless ethics complaints and lawsuits against me. Combined with the FOIAs, the sheer volume of paperwork and legally required responses brought the business of governing the State of Alaska to a grinding. halt. Eventually, it overwhelmed us-and was obviously meant to.

Amazingly enough, a significant share of the complaints and information requests came from just two people. One was a reporter with the Associated Press. The other was McLeod,

the falafel lady. She was a disgruntled former state employee who made an art of filing frivolous ethics complaints and leaking them ro the media in violation of state law.

inspired a group of

cobelligerents who also learned how to disrupt our agenda, and these gadflies actually became “legitimate” news sources for the state and national media.

We tried to keep a sense of humor about the fact that the media took

seriously, especially after Mike Nizich, my

PALIN

chief of staff, teceived a ftesh complaint from her, this time alleging thar women in state service wore their clothes too tight. Breasts were apparently spilling from blouses allover the 49th Stare and Andree demanded I
do
something about it!

After the string of nutty complaints she’d already hit us with, this one just cracked us up. I told Nizich and Kris: “Yep, that’s my job. I’m the state Cleavage Czar. I’ll get right on it:’

We shot a few e-mails back and forth on the topic, even typed in a couple of smiley faces, copying Sharon, who I knew would appreciate the absurdity. She passed it along to a columnist at the local paper who thought Andree’s newest gripe’ about inadequare state bteast management was hystetical. It also put some things in petspective for her.

We always suspected that someone was funding and directing Andree’s efforts. During the spring of 2009, she was acrually still begging my administration for a job and led others to believe she hadn’t worked for a couple of years. Yet somehow she had enough time and money to turn harassment of the governor’s office into a fulltime vocation. Over time, the wording of her ethics complaints became more and more sophisticated, and we later found out why: prominent liberal attorney Don Mitchell was advising her. As early as September 2008, weeks before the presidential election, Mitchell had already detailed the ethics attack sttategy in an article in the
Huffington Post.
Later he sat with Andree as her counsel at one of her hearings.