Word on the street, via the blog and newspapers, is that Sarah Palin is now $500,000 in personal debt for legal bills.
Since governors have immunity (?) from official acts of their office, and have their own attorney/solicitor generals, legal staff, whatnot, why should she have any legal bills personally?
Much less half a mil.
Maybe for the same reason Bill Clinton ran up big legal bills over the Monica stuff.
Good question. One minor nitpick: while in many states Attorneys General are nominated by the Governor and part of his/her “team,” they all see their jobs as representing the people of the state, not the incumbent of the gubernatorial office. Which is not to say that the State AG Office might not represent an incumbent governor for his or her official acts – but they’d be doing it, not as a personal representative, but in their official capacity.
Add in edit: To speculate on the substantive question, if Gov. Palin did something outside the legal powers of her office, and was sued or otherwise required legal representation, her acts would not be covered by the “official acts” rule.
Gov X signs a law making selling used cars without a state licence a felony; he is sued by the State Used Car Dealers Assn. State defends him; it was an official act within his powers. Gov X takes a bribe; he’s stuck for his defense bills – that wasn’t a legal official act on his part.
Simple answer: because the state attorney general may or may not have any interest in ensuring that you don’t get embarrassed- just that you don’t get indicted- while your own attorney will look out for whichever interests you want.
They may have immunity from lawsuits, but not from ethics complaints. Alaska law allows any citizen to file any number of ethics complaints, and the state does not pay to defend the governor. Sarah Palin has been served with 16 such complaints since being nominated for VP. Of those that have been resolved to date, she has been cleared in every case, although one complaint resulted in her reimbursing the state $10,000 for family travel expenses.
Is there no jeopardy for the person who files the complaint if it gets dismissed? Seems like a good way to ruin a politician otherwise.
I’m curious why ONLY sixteen frivolous complaints have been filed against Palin.
Seems to me much more than 16 deranged leftwingers would gleefully file an ethics complaint for the sheer joy of annoying Palin–that’s what she seems to be claiming has been done with these sixteen, so why not sixteen hundred? Or sixteen thousand? Is there something keeping malicious lefties from filing a daily ethics complaint before they’ve had their morning coffee?
Or does there have to be a solid legal basis for such complaints?
A better question than the OP would be: Why is she insisting that she is saving Alaskans “millions of dollars” (her words) in legal fees by resigning? If all the complaints have been dismissed, where would these fees be incurred? Unless, of course, she was facing malfeasance charges.
Shouldn’t you get an answer to the question you pose before assuming that the complaints are frivolous?
Probably the investigation process itself and possibly an estimate of the disruption of normal government functioning it entails.
Given that the supposedly “frivolous” complaints included using the state police to harass her ex-brother-in-law, billing the state for her kids’ travel expenses, and charging per diem to live in her own house, among other things; and that despite what she claims, they weren’t all filed by democrats and weren’t all dismissed it seems totally appropriate to me that she should pay for her defense out of her own funds.
It’s not my assumption–it’s Palin’s characterization that they’re frivolous. I’m trying to ask why (apart from the fact they’re aimed at her) she calls them frivolous, and whether any standard exists to say, “No, this one seems legit.”
She is counting the time the state lawyers spent working on legal arguments that led to the dismissal.
But it’s a phony number. The state lawyers would have been paid for that time whether they were working on defending Palin or just sitting on their hands staring out the window. The spent their time on the Palin ethics complaints instead of working on other state legal matters, but saying it cost the state money is misleading. The state was going to pay them anyway.
Thats like saying burning the hundred dollar bill in my wallet is just the same as going to walmart and buying something with it. Either way I am out the money.
Unless those folks would have actually just sat on their hands otherwise, it certainly DID “cost” the alaskan taxpayers something to have staff putzing around with Palin stuff.
If Alaska’s legal staff was otherwise loaded with work to full capacity such that needed other legal work went undone as a consequence of taking on these cases, then there was a real cost. Not half a mill, just the value of other work undone. If that is not the case, if instead a few staff had a bit less free time and a few lower priority projects just got delayed for a few weeks more, then it cost the state nothing. Investigating ethic complaints isn’t what the legal staff is doing instead of their job; it is their job.
As a business owner additional work to be done only costs me if I have to hire additional staff to do it or I have to walk away from other business to handle it. Is there evidence that additional staff was hired? No. Are there examples of other projects that were not done (not just delayed a few weeks, not done) because of these additional cases? No.
If the current ethics law is poorly designed and allows truly frivolous complaints to take up substantial time and resources (and I have no idea if this is true) then those who championed the law should be slapped upside the head for doing it so poorly. Who championed this particular law? Who made it the centerpiece of an election campaign? Oh yes. That would be Sarah Palin.
And to the op question of what personal legal costs she has and why … well, her lawyer says yes, she does, that the ethics law she championed requires that she consult her own lawyer but I do not feel too sorry for her. What exactly is she and will she be charging as a speaking fee? How much is she getting for allowing a book to be ghostwritten under her name? How much will she otherwise get capitalizing on her celebrity status? I don’t begrudge her making the money, after all she is entertainment, but those alleged personal legal fees are way offset by the other aspects of her being “famous”.
It may be worthwhile to quote her lawyer (see above).
I stated incorrectly that she was required to have personal representation however. But the only way for her to be represented was to hire her own gun. And really one can’t blame her for wanting her interests represented in any proceeding even if she did nothing wrong. Of note though - there is no substantial economic benefit to her or the state by her quitting now. Again, her lawyer
Yeah, just one and I doubt that investigating the legality of using her legal trust fund needs much state staff time or even all that much of her lawyer’s efforts.
This was mentioned above but maybe not in a perfectly clear way… the attorney general absolutely does not represent the Governor or President as his/her legal counsel. The attorney general is essentially the chief prosecutor for the state, and in some cases might actually be compelled to prosecute the Governor/President.
A Governor or President does have legal staff to help advise them on the legality of their official duties (such as this week when New York Governor David Patterson bypassed the State Senate and appointed someone to fill the vacant Lieutenant Governor position). But likewise, that legal counsel would mot be in a position to represent the Governor/President for something that happened outside of their official duties, or that is alleged to have been an abuse of power, as is apparently the case with Gov. Palin.
Well:
If a case falls categories 1-2, it’s possible Palin could sue for malicious prosecution under some circumstances, but she’d have to prove that the case was initiated with malice and without probable cause and many courts have held that ethics complainants are immune from suit based on public policy. The ethics act itself doesn’t really address the issue of frivolous charges. I doubt a hearing officer would have authority to award costs or otherwise punish a complainant for a frivolous claim without such a provision.
That’s a somewhat misleading statement. In fact, all except one of them were dismissed. And on that one, no ethical violation was found, but she did have to reimburse the state. And as already noted, there’s a new one pending.
What is the basis for your doubt? Remember, this is the government bureaucracy we’re talking about.
According to Margaret Carlson on MSNBC, most of Palin’s private legal bill have been paid from her legal defense fund. So there’s some doubt that she’s actually on the hook for anything.
It is also worth noting, for those that don’t remember, that she initiated an ethics complaint *against herself *when the prior complaint found her to have violated her duties so that she could clear herself of her own investigation during the election. By some accounts, this may have been the most expensive complaint of all. (Cite.)
So as a matter of GQ, I think we have to say we don’t even know if she does in fact have any personal legal debts. If she does, she seems to have incurred them on these ethics complaints, including the ones she filed against herself for political purposes.