Lauer: Said that – anonymous leak that some top McCain advisers were, quote – and this is from Newsweek – “flabbergasted by the amount of money you spent on clothing and accessories for yourself and your family.”
S. PALIN: Well, I’m flabbergasted that anybody would say that I spent any money on clothes for me or my family. When I arrived at the Republican National Convention, there were stylists there, there was a wardrobe there. Receipts show that the wardrobe was being purchased before I even arrived at the convention for me and for eight members of my family. So I’m flabbergasted that anybody would still say that I purchased clothing from these…
Lauer: So the leaks that say you were told buy a certain number – you had a clothing allowance almost – but you were told buy a certain number of suits and then you exceeded that and that other people go out on their credit cards and buy things, patently false?
S. PALIN: What is patently false is that I ever asked anybody at this convention to go out and buy me anything. Certainly, I arrived with an overnight bag. I mean, that wasn’t much. But if I would have had two minutes out of the day, I could have gone to a store myself and purchased these things.
Also, though, it’s been reported that, you know, I insisted on going to Neiman Marcus and to Sachs.
Lauer: Right, designer duds.
S. PALIN: I’ve never been in these stores, you know…
Lauer: But did you have other people go to those stores for you?
S. PALIN: No, I did not order up these clothes. The New York stylists who were already there and already orchestrating what the wardrobe should look like. Just like they have people to figure out what the staging and the lighting and everything else, the wardrobe, I guess, was a part of that.
But, no – and here they say that it was $150,000 worth of clothes. I haven’t seen $150,000 worth of clothes. What I understood now is that about a third of those clothes got sent back right away because they weren’t going fit or weren’t – you know, that didn’t fit what they wanted the family to look like. **Another third did follow me along the trail, and those have all been sent back. **And then another third stayed in the belly of the airplane the whole time.
Lauer: I understand – and I think your father made this comment today – that you actually spent some time this last weekend at home…
S. PALIN: Yes.
Lauer: … going through things.
S. PALIN: Yes. Yes.
Lauer: … preparing because the story is that there is a lawyer either on his way – or I don’t know if that person’s been here, he or she – coming to Alaska to kind of do a wardrobe audit on you.
S. PALIN: That’s absolutely false, unless they’re doing that without telling me that. But, no, we don’t have any of the campaign’s clothes in our possession. And it was never anybody’s intention to keep these borrowed clothes from the RNC.
When staffers traveled with us from the lower 48 up to Alaska and we had boxes of campaign stuff – which include, like, stickers and campaign buttons and hats and T-shirts – loading all that stuff back up after emptying the belly of the plane of all this stuff. And that took place in our living room…
Lauer: Right.
S. PALIN: … over the past couple days. We put it all in boxes, put it in the FedEx plane and sent it back to the headquarters.