Sarah Palin's Retirement Story Just Doesn't Hold Up

Posted by Jed Lewison, Daily Kos at 1:31 PM on July 11, 2009.

In a nutshell, Sarah Palin claims that through June 23, 2009, the state had spent $1,963,840 defending her from ethics complaints. However, as Green and the ADN showed, there are several problems with that claim:

• The document is remarkably devoid of details. For example, three line items total just over $1 million without offering any explanation. One of those line items is for the "Personnel Reivew (sic) Board" at a comfortably round $560,800.
• In cases where it does offer detail, as Palin's own office admits, some of the numbers on the 2-page document are internally inconsistent.
• According to the document, less than 20 minutes of work was billed at an hourly rate of $30,000. In addition, one line item shows 119 hours of work costing $14,564, while a set of lines elsewhere total 13 hours of work at nearly identical cost of $14,565.

Perhaps the nail in the coffin of these numbers is that before Palin invented her retirement explanation, the state was reporting the cost of her ethics inquiries was $296.042. Green broke down those costs in this handy pie chart:

In addition to Greg Sargent's reporting that none of these costs were incremental (they would have been incurred with or without Palin's ethics inquiries), it's clear from this chart that Palin's claim that her ethics complaint problems stem from her spot on the GOP's national ticket -- almost all of the costs were allocated to investigations launched in 2008, before she became a national figure.

This is worth repeating: in all, 94% of these funds were allocated to investigations from 2008. Two-thirds of that was from troopergate, in which the state found she had abused her power as governor.

Meanwhile, just 6% were from 2009 investigations. Sarah Palin claimed her retirement was due to a flood of new ethics complaints that were costing the state hundreds of thousands.

According to the state's own numbers, however, Palin's claim was false. Only a nominal sum was spent defending her from new ethics complaints.

Still, Palin was undaunted by the truth, offering up her own fictional narrative, repeated ad nauseum by a credulous press corps when the story was "hot."

Now that the dust has settled and her lies have been revealed, the few media outlets that have documented them are finding themselves in lonely company.

Tagged as: conservatives, retirement, palin, alaksa