Washington, July 12: Sarah Palin has indirectly blamed some members of President Barack Obama’s administration for her decision to quit her post as governor of Alaska, a report says.
The former running mate of defeated presidential candidate John McCain announced her resignation earlier this month.
She complained in her resignation speech that she was being hounded constantly by “frivolous” ethics complaints, The Sunday Times reported.
Her spokeswoman Meg Stapleton told Time magazine last week, “A lot of this comes from Washington DC. The trail is pretty direct and obvious to us.”
Palin and her advisers were referring to the “Trooper-gate” case during the 2008 presidential campaign when Palin was accused of abusing her power to get her former brother-in-law Mike Wooten sacked as an Alaskan state trooper.
A month before the election, the Alaskan legislative council found Palin guilty of abusing her power after an investigator concluded that “impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda.”
Palin relates the case to Kim Elton, the Alaskan state senator who chaired the legislative council, and a friend of Peter Rouse, Obama’s former Senate chief of staff, who used to live in Juneau, the capital of Alaska.
Rouse now serves as a senior adviser to Obama at the White House and Elton was appointed Director of Alaska Affairs at the US Department of the Interior in March, said the Times.
Palin later announced that Elton “pledged his allegiance to Obama last summer.” She is convinced Obama’s team had a hand in the Trooper-gate case.
This is while the White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “The charge is ridiculous. From my vantage point a lot of the criticism she seems to be getting is from self-inflicted wounds.”
—–Agencies