On Sep 16, 8:15*pm, James Of Tucson wrote:
Answering a subpoena is not an admission of guilt.
Refusing to answer a subpoena, on the other hand,
is to commit a separate crime before a world of witnesses.

The investigation is tainted because the leading Democrat in the
investigation, State Senator Hollis French, said the report would be
damaging before the report was compiled.
And there is more. This investigation has Obama written all over it.

ANCHORAGE — Five Republican state lawmakers on Tuesday filed a lawsuit
seeking to halt an inquiry into Gov. Sarah Palin’s dismissal of her
public safety commissioner, arguing that the Legislature has exceeded
its authority by conducting a “McCarthyistic investigation.”
The lawsuit, filed in the state’s Superior Court, comes as the McCain-
Palin campaign has escalated its involvement in the bipartisan
inquiry, providing Ms. Palin’s lawyer with help and mounting a public
relations offensive.

The legal action marks the most aggressive challenge yet to the two-
month-old investigation, which Ms. Palin initially said she would
cooperate with.

The campaign said Tuesday that it had no involvement in the decision
to file the lawsuit.

The lawmakers are being represented by a local lawyer, Kevin G.
Clarkson, and the Liberty Legal Institute, which is based in Texas and
has a history of taking up conservative causes.

Hiram Sasser, director of litigation for the institute, said he had
not spoken with anyone at the McCain campaign, but was contacted by
Mr. Clarkson, who sought him out because of his constitutional
expertise. Mr. Sasser’s co-counsel in the case is Kelly J.
Shackelford, who founded the institute. He told reporters at the
Republican convention that Mr. McCain’s selection of Ms. Palin
“resurrected” the party’s social conservative base.

The lawsuit, consisting of 26 pages, was filed against two Democrats,
State Senator Hollis French, who is overseeing the investigation, and
Senator Kim Elton, who is the chairman of the Legislative Council,
which voted on July 28 to open the inquiry; and Stephen E.
Branchflower, the independent investigator, a former Anchorage
prosecutor who now lives in South Carolina.

The plaintiffs said they hoped to persuade the Legislative Council, a
bipartisan body of House and Senate members who can convene to make
decisions when the Legislature is not in session, to drop the inquiry
by naming it in the lawsuit.

At the heart of the lawsuit is the argument that the inquiry exceeds
the Legislature’s constitutional power and that the process has been
handled in a politically biased fashion intended to besmirch Ms.
Palin’s reputation and affect the outcome of the November elections.

“The defendants are conducting a ‘McCarthyistic’ investigation in an
unlawful” and “partial and partisan political manner,” the lawsuit
said.

The ethics case has its roots in Ms. Palin’s decision this summer to
dismiss Alaska’s public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, who
contends that he was dismissed for refusing to fire Ms. Palin’s former
brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, a state trooper.

Ms. Palin has denied that, saying his dismissal stemmed from his
“insubordination” over budget matters.

Tuesday’s lawsuit contends that the investigators have a
“predisposition to make findings against Governor Palin” and are
manipulating the timing of the inquiry “so as to affect the outcome of
elections” by not agreeing to release the report after Nov. 4.
Lawmakers have said the report would be completed by Oct. 10 to give
both sides ample time to respond. “There is no nonpartisan reason
that” the investigation “needs to be completed prior to the election
on Nov. 4, 2008,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit singles out Mr. French and Mr. Elton, pointing out that
Mr. Elton gave $2,000 to the Obama campaign and citing comments in
which Mr. French called Mr. McCain’s selection of Ms. Palin a “bad
choice.” It also accuses Mr. Branchflower of having a conflict of
interest because his wife once worked under Mr. Monegan. Mr. Elton
said in a written statement that while the lawsuit is a distraction,
the investigation would continue.

Among the five lawmakers who filed the suit was Representative Wes
Keller, an elder in Ms. Palin’s church whom she appointed to his
seat.

The reaction among their Republican colleagues was mixed. The House
Speaker, John Harris, asked the Legislative Council to convene a
meeting within the week to discuss the status of the investigation.
“What started as a bipartisan and impartial effort is becoming
overshadowed by public comments from individuals at both ends of the
political spectrum,” Mr. Harris said in a letter to Mr. Elton.

State Senate President Lyda Green, a Republican who has frequently
clashed with Ms. Palin over policy, said the lawmakers who filed it
were all “step-by-step followers” of Ms. Palin.

“The McCain campaign is the one that has made this partisan,” Ms.
Green said. “This was 100 percent bipartisan effort on the part of the
Legislature to ask questions that deserve to be answered.”

Ms. Palin’s lawyer has sought to move the investigation to the state
Personnel Board, whose members are appointed by the governor for four-
year terms. But on Tuesday, Ed O’Callaghan, a former senior Justice
Department official advising the campaign and Ms. Palin’s lawyer, said
that even if Ms. Palin succeeds she had not yet decided if she would
testify.

A person briefed on the campaign activities in Anchorage also said
that outside lawyers in coordination with the campaign have
volunteered legal advice to Ms. Palin’s lawyer. One volunteer left
Anchorage on Tuesday and one or two others have been here to plot
legal strategy over the past few weeks, the source said. Taylor
Griffin, a campaign spokesman, declined to identify the lawyers by
name.

Meanwhile, in a separate lawsuit also filed Tuesday, a group of
private Alaskan citizens, many of whom contribute to Republican
candidates, sought to have the investigation thrown out, citing their
right as taxpayers to be free of “unauthorized, wasteful and unlawful
government spending.”
from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/us...l?ref=politics