Legal News

An Open Letter From Sarah Palin?s Lawyer, Thomas Van Flein

By Ashby Jones

On Monday, in the wake of news that Sarah Palin was stepping down as Alaska’s governor, we did a post on her legal fees. The post was titled: “Are Legal Fees at the Root of Palin’s Departure?” and in it we mentioned statements made by Sunday by Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell indicating that she owed some $500,000 in lawyer fees.

Well, early this morning, a note from Sarah Palin’s personal lawyer, Thomas Van Flein, landed in our in-box. We’re typically not ones for reprinting emails in full, but we thought Van Flein’s note worthy of making an exception. Feel free, as always, to note your comments, thoughts, responses below.

It reads:

Dear Mr. Jones:

I probably have some additional insight for your readers.

Governor Palin championed ethics reform in Alaska and the current law was enacted at her initiative. Our state has had, unfortunately, some problems with legislative ethics, with several legislators convicted under federal law (notwithstanding subsequent events that may require re-trials–the subject of another story). Thus, Alaska needs strong ethics laws, and ethical people to serve in government.

During and after Governor Palin’s national campaign last fall, the Executive Branch Ethics Act was essentially hijacked by motivated partisans who saw fit to file one complaint after another for such monumental “ethics violations” as: wearing a jacket; giving interviews to reporters, traveling out of state to give a speech, having her official portrait used for a state sponsored seafood marketing program, and on and on. The abuse of the Act has in all likelihood caused a loss in public confidence of a very important law that was intended to address real ethics issues. All complaints ruled on so far (15) have concluded that Governor Palin has not violated any law, in letter or spirit. There is still one complaint pending regarding her legal trust fund to help pay her legal fees. The complainant has asserted that such a legal defense fund is itself unethical.

Because an ethics complaint by definition involves an allegation that a public official abused state office by promoting a personal gain over state interests, when such a complaint is filed, the subject of the complaint cannot use state attorneys for their personal defense. Indeed, doing so would likely result in a meritorious ethics complaint. That does not mean the state could not indemnify a state employee after the investigation and results are completed if it is determined that there was no merit to the complaint and the costs were incurred as a result state service. But initially the subject of the complaint, if he or she desires representation, must retain personal counsel. This is all the more imperative for the Governor, where the Attorney General is barred as a matter of law from any involvement in a complaint against the Governor and the matter is handled by an independent Personnel Board and special counsel.

Because of the abuse of the Ethics Act and the seemingly endless assembly line of questionable complaints, in addition to the fees incurred during the Troopergate investigation, the Governor has incurred substantial attorney’s fees in the range of $500,000. I recognize that by New York standards this is a modest legal bill, but it is substantial up here. The Personnel Board released information that it has spent about $300,000 in legal fees on its side of the aisle. As the lawyers reading this know, while it is easy to file a complaint, it takes research and fact investigation to address the allegations and rebut them with analytical precision.

As for those reading this who want to know if there were legal problems pending that served as a catalyst for the resignation, the answer is “no.” Indeed, speculation about alleged embezzlement, kickbacks, and imminent federal indictments were so wide spread, and were crossing over into the mainstream media, that we took the calculated risk of actually addressing the issue, and the FBI took the unprecedented step of confirming that there never was any such investigation, there is no such investigation, and that there were no plans for any investigation. I continue to maintain hope that political discourse will return to issues that are the subject of fair and vigorous debate, as opposed to false implications of serious criminality, jokes about raping a teenage girl, or abusive legal machinations intended to create headlines and impose personal financial costs. I say that relative to all public servants, Democrat or Republican, that they be judged on their actions in office, not on the clothes they supposedly purchased, the shoes they wore, the actions of their family, the statements of their preacher, or other essentially irrelevant matters.

Governor Palin determined that she had accomplished her major goals in the first two and half years of her administration (which is true, she enacted ethics reform, ear mark reform, pushed through a revised petroleum tax structure highly beneficial to the state, reached consensus with oil producers that resulted in new oil well drilling at Point Thomson, and was the only governor in the last 30 years to take concrete action on getting a major gas pipeline built as opposed to the prior administrations who did much to talk about it, but otherwise took no real action.) The Governor has created a new political reality and is changing the battlefield to pursue her goals of energy independence for America, rational tax policies, improved national security and more efficient and smaller government. I suspect you may see her in the future.

Thank you for the opportunity to discuss this with your readers.

Thomas V. Van Flein, Esq.
Clapp, Peterson, Van Flein,
Tiemessen & Thorsness, LLC

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 07, 2009 (boomark / email).