By Patrick
+++Read the follow-up: Sarah Palin's team wants to "launch a pre-emptive strike" against Lisa Demer's investigations+++
+++Second follow-up: Bill McAllister wants to "cut the ADN off" because of Trig investigation, Pat Dougherty accuses McAllister of "malpractice" in return+++
We have a surprise: The latest batch of emails from Sarah Palin's administration which were released on Thursday proved to be far more interesting than expected. After the last large batch which was published in June last year, and which received huge media attention, some sort of "consensus" was reached in public that Palin's time as the Governor of Alaska now has been sufficiently examined, and that no more ink should be wasted. However, such a notion would seem to be premature, as this is an exciting new development.
The first surprise is the much higher number of emails which have been published now in comparison to the last batch: In June 2011, 24,199 pages have been released by the State of Alaska. This time, 34,820 pages have been released.
Note: The newly released emails are easily searchable on "documentcloud.org." Just type in the searchword in the searchbar after it says "Group: adn."
The second surprise: It turns out on close inspection that much fewer emails have been censored this time. On the website of msnbc.com, the privilege logs from the June 2011 batch can be found. For each batch, two lists exists: One with the "withheld" emails, one with the "redacted" emails. As we can see from the file made available by msnbc.com, in June 2011 we had 79 pages with "withheld" emails and 189 pages with "redacted" emails. With the newly released batch, similar lists with 80 pages containing the headers of the "withheld" emails and 165 pages with the headers of the "redacted" emails are being provided. Given the much higher number of released emails this time, it is apparent that the State of Alaska became more "relaxed" when it comes to censoring Sarah Palin emails.
This new approach, as I would call it, pays off for anyone who is interested in the truth about Sarah Palin. In addition, we have the emails which were published by Frank Bailey in "Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin", and they sometimes tie in nicely with the emails published by State of Alaska.
I can only cover some of the most important emails in this post. There is simply too much material, and we will have more time to report about the emails in the future. First of all, let's get one piece of disinformation out of the way, which is now being repeated again as a "mantra" by the Palinbots - and also uncritically being reported by large parts of the media:
It it simply untrue that Sarah Palin was forced to pay the costs for her legal defense against the ethics complaints herself, was forced to "bankrupt her family" and was subsequently driven out of office, as Palin herself claims in an email from January 2, 2009. This often repeated myth can easily be debunked with hard evidence.
When Sarah Palin's first legal defense fund, the "Alaska Fund Trust", was declared unethical by the state-assigned investigator Tim Petumenos in June 2010 after an ethics complaint by Kim Chatman, Petumenos published an extensive report, and for the first time the following was revealed in public: The State of Alaska offered to pay for the defense against the ethics complaints, and even entered into a contract for legal services with Palin's lawyers, for an amount "up to $ 100,000 at public expense." This would have given Sarah Palin enough resources to mount a solid defense, but as investigator Petumenos notes: "No invoices were submitted."
The reasons for this untypical behaviour by Sarah Palin are completely unclear. The lawyers claim that it would have been "too difficult to separate the functions of representing Governor Palin in her official capacity in the pending state-related matters, and representing her in other related campaign or partisan matters beyond the scope of the state contract." This explanation is nonsensical, as every lawyer knows who has ever invoiced billable hours.
Screenshot from the Petumenos report:
Sarah Palin instead choose to set up her unethical "Alaska Fund Trust."
The meme that Sarah Palin was forced to bankrupt herself is therefore pure propaganda. Furthermore, bloggers have in the past diligently examined the numbers which were thrown around by Palin's camp for the costs of the ethics complaints. The Henkimaa blog conducted an detailed analysis about the true costs of the ethics complaints for the State of Alaska and concluded that the true cost came close to $ 300,000 - and not $ 2 million as claimed previously by Sarah Palin (see also this related post at the Firedoglake blog). Nearly $ 190,000 of this amount were the costs of the Troopergate ethics investigation - with three complaints "lumped together", including the ethics complaint that Sarah Palin filed against herself for tactical reasons after being condemned for "abuse of power" in the bipartisan "Branchflower Report" by the Alaska legislature.
Let's now take a closer look at emails related to Sarah Palin's pregnancy with Trig - an issue which should now receive new attention in the media again, because the newly published emails prove again, more than ever, that Sarah Palin was unable to offer any proof for her pregnancy with Trig and that she and her camp resorted to stubborn stonewalling and even insults in order to suppress the investigation by ADN-journalist Lisa Demer in late 2008.
It should actually come as a surprise to the readers of the Anchorage Daily News that Lisa Demer was trying to do a thorough job when it came to investigating the fake pregnancy rumours in late 2008 - because the readers of the ADN were never told about this in any detail.
As it now turns out, Lisa Demer was asking the right questions, and addressed them to the right people - and received a furious response from the Palin camp.
In December 16, 2008, Lisa Demer wrote a surprisingly straighforward email to the Governor's office and said:
Exactly, Lisa! Did Cathy-Baldwin Johnson deliver Trig? If not, who did? Who is Trig Palin's biological mother? What does his birth certificate say? Why was Cathy-Baldwin Johnson's statement released so late on Election Eve? Can we have a definitive statement from Palin's doctor, please?
Aren't these simple, easy questions? The matter could be settled within a day, and we could all forget about it!
We "Trig Truthers" have never asked for anything else - and have never ever received an answer!
Lisa Demer, as it turns out, never received an answer either.
Instead, Sarah Palin's spokesman Bill McAllister replies to Lisa and starts to insult her - in an apparent attempt to fob her off and shut her up, and ends with saying that he expects a "sweeping apology" from her as the only possible reply:
The inquiries "are hereby permanently rejected" - problem solved!
Sarah Palin also wonders what to do now - after all, the birth certificate couldn't be presented, as it wouldn't show what it's supposed to show, and medical records or other hard evidence are also not available, so what else is there left to do to suppress the inquiry by the ADN?
Sarah Palin writes on December 17, 2008 to her staff:
Bristol "took photos of me having Trig"...? We never heard this before - or afterwards. This is an obvious lie, a desperate claim by Sarah Palin in order to convince also her inner circle that there is nothing suspicious about her pregnancy with Trig. Interestingly, Sarah Palin made a similar desperate false claim in December 2009 when she suddenly claimed on a radio show in December 2009 that has "provided Trig's birth certificate" - despite the fact that nobody can be found who has seen it. Lisa Demer certainly hasn't seen it!
In the same email exchange, Bill McAllister (who later also attacked journalism professor Brad Scharlott due to his claims that Trig is not Sarah's biological child) went off the rails again and wrote:
"We are not going to let this evil stand."
Well, yes, Bill, you have to let this evil stand, because you cannot present any proof that Sarah Palin is Trig's biological mother - so the only way out would be smears, attacks, threats and propaganda, as it seems, and that's exactly the route that the Palin camp chose.
Unfortunately, the propaganda worked, because even distinguished liberal websites like "Salon" swallowed the propaganda and "debunked" the fake pregnancy rumours in one of their most shameful moments ever in an article by Justin Elliott, who relied on "tainted" witnesses, as I explained in detail in a previous post .
The published emails also contain the complete exchange between Sarah Palin and ADN-editor Pat Dougherty, which he had published on his Editors Blog at the ADN in January 2009. This exchange is always worth to be revisited. Despite that fact that none of Lisa Demer's question were answered, the Anchorage Daily News dropped the matter. I discussed the obvious reason for this decision in a post at Palingates in September 2009 - the ADN receives huge sums for advertising and printing from the State of Alaska each year. The ADN simply couldn't afford to annoy such an important customer, especially one with such a sensitive "boss" like Sarah Palin, who also unashamedly hinted to the ongoing financial troubles of the ADN in the email exchange with Pat Dougherty.
These days, Pat Dougherty is keen to claim that "the story of persistent rumors does not interest him any more than President Obama’s birth certificate conspiracy." However, with the decision to let Sarah Palin off the hook despite not having answered the questions by Lisa Demer, Pat Dougherty put the reputation of his newspaper at risk, and it's safe to say that this reputation remains permanently damaged. We have seen too many emails by Sarah Palin and her staff stonewalling all questions about Sarah Palin's pregnancy, also in the book "Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin" by Frank Bailey (even more in the leaked manuscript of the book), when even immediately before and after the official birth on April 18, 2008, Sarah Palin freaked out about the faked pregnancy allegations and the allegations that Trig is Bristol's child, but could provide no proof to the contrary.
When it comes to the ADN, one also shouldn't forget the memorable interview that ADN-columnist and former editor Michael Carey gave on September 2, 2008 - explaining that the faked pregnancy issue was intensively discussed within the ADN and that he has a friend, a "smart lawyer", who told him that the rumour about Palin's faked pregnancy was "the absolute truth":
There will be more to add to this in the future, but right now I would like conclude this post with a very surprising "personal" discovery, because in the published emails, a few of my very own emails are included as well. This brings memories back from a time "long gone", when Kathleen and I were members of the Palindeception research team. A lot has happened since that time, and I had pretty much forgotten about these emails, but the "reactions" I caused and didn't know about until yesterday are still very relevant.
So how did my emails end up in this batch? Well, the funny things is that I didn't even directly write to the State of Alaska - but to "factcheck.org" in the first place. I complained to them about an article by factcheck.org which is still online, called "Muting the Mommy Melodrama." In this article, factcheck.org tries to debunk the fake pregnancy rumours with a piece of evidence which mysteriously appeared on August 31, 2008, right at the start of Palin's VP campaign: A picture uploaded by an anonymous user called "erik99559" to flickr. This picture was apparently taken on April 13, 2008, just five days before the "official birth", and shows a pregnant looking Sarah Palin.
This photo - click on it for high resolution:
There was much speculation about this picture in our research team as well as on the Palindeception Blog.
Audrey from the Palindeception Blog, who ran this website which has been dormant since summer 2009 and started the public investigation into Sarah Palin's pregnancy with Trig, instructed a photo forensics expert to make an examination of the so-called "Gusty picture", which had mysteriously appeared on flickr on August 31, 2008 (and was online for about one year, before it was deleted from flickr).
This forensic report can also be found in full in the published emails, as I attached it to my email.
This picture was hugely important for us, because it turned out not just factcheck.org, but also for example the Huffington Post regarded this picture as "final evidence" for the fact that Sarah Palin was in fact pregnant with Trig (the article in Huffington Post was written by Lee Stranahan, who now works for Andrew Breitbart).
This was my original email to factcheck, as it can be found in the emails published by the State of Alaska:
By the way, I never received a response from factcheck.org. They don't seem to bother much about facts at all, and the thought that a person who fakes a pregnancy HAS to look pregnant AT SOME POINT obviously never occurred to them.
This report found it's way into Sarah Palin's email imbox, because I copied Andrea Gusty's station in (11 News KTVA), who actually received the email and then later replied to tell me that KTVA will broadcast a TV-report about these pictures. This report:
KTVA even published the full original broadcast of the programme in which this footage from April 13, 2008 was used - which has been preserved HERE.
For the record: I don't believe any more that the photo from April 13, 2008 is "fake", and that the report from the forensics expert is accurate. The report was severely impeded by the fact that the original digital picture was not available. The photo was bad quality. Digital photo forensics are a very tricky business, and for years already I have been convinced that the picture was indeed taken on April 13, 2008.
The only thing what really matters in the great scheme of things is the fact that this picture was conveniently uploaded on August 31, 2008 to flickr by the photographer Daniel Erik Carpenter from Bethel ("erik99559", with 99559 being Bethel's post code) - who even identified himself in one of the pictures. It was the public "proof" for the pregnancy that Sarah Palin desperately needed - and it served its purpose. No further proof was needed, certainly not a birth certificate - because suddenly, there was the pregnant looking Governor, right in front of our eyes...
As you can see in the email exchange, I then answered Andrea Gusty again, and I was cheeky, because I also copied in Bill McAllister in. I guess I wanted to annoy him a bit. Little did I know that I also managed to annoy the Queen herself!
Not just one, but two responses by Sarah Palin have been recorded, after she received the email exchange from Bill McAllister:
First response:
Second response:
"Just fyi, I guess. Our press office has to deal w this again today? Geez."
She had no proof, but that didn't stop her from joking about the issue, because she knew she was safe - after all, the liberal media had long decided that that issue of Palin's pregnancy couldn't be touched, for purely political reasons.
But there is another important point to make about this email exchange. As you can see from the headers depicted above, Sarah Palin also forward this email to Talis Colberg, who was the Alaskan Attorney General at the time.
I wrote in my email from January 13, 2009, which ended up on Sarah Palin's desk:
That is a strong claim - and Sarah Palin saw it, the Alaskan Attorney General saw it, Bill McAllister and all the others saw it - already in January 2009. Despite this fact no lawyer EVER contacted the "Trig Truthers" and asked for a retractions of this serious claim. We repeated this claim many times in our posts, and there was just a big, long silence.
But we know the reason for this, we know it already for a long time. Sarah Palin has no evidence to prove that she is Trig's biological mother - because she isn't. From excellent inside information coming from the "upper echelons of society" in Alaska as well as a mountain of evidence we know that Sarah Palin is not the mother. We knew this already in January 2009, and that's why I felt perfectly safe to make this claim in my email. I am a lawyer myself and have worked as a trial lawyer in Germany in the past, I do know that it would be a bad idea to carelessly libel a public figure. But we never libelled anyone. We just write the plain truth, and in return, the liberal media loves to call us "conspiracy theorists."
But we are not conspiracy theorists. We know that Sarah Palin is not the biological mother of Trig, and that she has no proof for her pregnancy. She is a liar, and a very successful one, who has the benefit of being surrounded by a team of people whose main purpose apparently is to spread propaganda and cover up her lies.
How long do we citizen bloggers have to spend our precious time writing blog posts like these, because the media refuses to do their jobs and cannot separate between fact and fiction?
+++
Special thanks to our readers Older_Wiser, KAO, Hope in America and all the other readers who searched through the emails!
+++
I tweeted a lot, please re-tweet: Note: The newly released emails are easily searchable on "documentcloud.org." Just type in the searchword in the searchbar after it says "Group: adn."
The second surprise: It turns out on close inspection that much fewer emails have been censored this time. On the website of msnbc.com, the privilege logs from the June 2011 batch can be found. For each batch, two lists exists: One with the "withheld" emails, one with the "redacted" emails. As we can see from the file made available by msnbc.com, in June 2011 we had 79 pages with "withheld" emails and 189 pages with "redacted" emails. With the newly released batch, similar lists with 80 pages containing the headers of the "withheld" emails and 165 pages with the headers of the "redacted" emails are being provided. Given the much higher number of released emails this time, it is apparent that the State of Alaska became more "relaxed" when it comes to censoring Sarah Palin emails.
This new approach, as I would call it, pays off for anyone who is interested in the truth about Sarah Palin. In addition, we have the emails which were published by Frank Bailey in "Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin", and they sometimes tie in nicely with the emails published by State of Alaska.
I can only cover some of the most important emails in this post. There is simply too much material, and we will have more time to report about the emails in the future. First of all, let's get one piece of disinformation out of the way, which is now being repeated again as a "mantra" by the Palinbots - and also uncritically being reported by large parts of the media:
It it simply untrue that Sarah Palin was forced to pay the costs for her legal defense against the ethics complaints herself, was forced to "bankrupt her family" and was subsequently driven out of office, as Palin herself claims in an email from January 2, 2009. This often repeated myth can easily be debunked with hard evidence.
When Sarah Palin's first legal defense fund, the "Alaska Fund Trust", was declared unethical by the state-assigned investigator Tim Petumenos in June 2010 after an ethics complaint by Kim Chatman, Petumenos published an extensive report, and for the first time the following was revealed in public: The State of Alaska offered to pay for the defense against the ethics complaints, and even entered into a contract for legal services with Palin's lawyers, for an amount "up to $ 100,000 at public expense." This would have given Sarah Palin enough resources to mount a solid defense, but as investigator Petumenos notes: "No invoices were submitted."
The reasons for this untypical behaviour by Sarah Palin are completely unclear. The lawyers claim that it would have been "too difficult to separate the functions of representing Governor Palin in her official capacity in the pending state-related matters, and representing her in other related campaign or partisan matters beyond the scope of the state contract." This explanation is nonsensical, as every lawyer knows who has ever invoiced billable hours.
Screenshot from the Petumenos report:
Sarah Palin instead choose to set up her unethical "Alaska Fund Trust."
The meme that Sarah Palin was forced to bankrupt herself is therefore pure propaganda. Furthermore, bloggers have in the past diligently examined the numbers which were thrown around by Palin's camp for the costs of the ethics complaints. The Henkimaa blog conducted an detailed analysis about the true costs of the ethics complaints for the State of Alaska and concluded that the true cost came close to $ 300,000 - and not $ 2 million as claimed previously by Sarah Palin (see also this related post at the Firedoglake blog). Nearly $ 190,000 of this amount were the costs of the Troopergate ethics investigation - with three complaints "lumped together", including the ethics complaint that Sarah Palin filed against herself for tactical reasons after being condemned for "abuse of power" in the bipartisan "Branchflower Report" by the Alaska legislature.
Let's now take a closer look at emails related to Sarah Palin's pregnancy with Trig - an issue which should now receive new attention in the media again, because the newly published emails prove again, more than ever, that Sarah Palin was unable to offer any proof for her pregnancy with Trig and that she and her camp resorted to stubborn stonewalling and even insults in order to suppress the investigation by ADN-journalist Lisa Demer in late 2008.
It should actually come as a surprise to the readers of the Anchorage Daily News that Lisa Demer was trying to do a thorough job when it came to investigating the fake pregnancy rumours in late 2008 - because the readers of the ADN were never told about this in any detail.
As it now turns out, Lisa Demer was asking the right questions, and addressed them to the right people - and received a furious response from the Palin camp.
In December 16, 2008, Lisa Demer wrote a surprisingly straighforward email to the Governor's office and said:
From: Demer, Lisa
To: Leighow, Sharon W (GOV)
Cc: McAIlister, William D (GOV)
Sent: Tue Dec 16 19:13:46 2008
Subject: RE: Governor Palin
Hi Sharon,
Thanks for getting back with me so quickly.
Could you ask the governor if the family will send an announcement to the Daily News when Bristol’s baby is born? That would be helpful. There has been worldwide attention on this pregnancy, which Gov. Palin herself announced. This is the next chapter in the story. There’s a spot on the governor’s official Web site about Trig. Is this that different? Regarding the questions about Trig, it is within the governor’s power to put this to rest for most people. Maybe not all but certainly most reasonable people would accept a definitive statement from her doctor. If Cathy Baldwin-Johnson were given written consent to talk to me one more time about the birth, the questions that I keep hearing could be answered. The questions for the doctor: Did you deliver Trig? If not, who did? Who is Trig Palin’s biological mom and how do you know that?
Here’s one more request that might help. Would the governor make available a copy of Trig’s birth certificate? We could mention in our story what the birth certificate says.
We’re also looking for explanation about the earlier medical history statement. That statement wasn’t direct enough for some people. There also is a side issue related to it. A simple explanation of how it came together, who wrote it, and why it was released so late on Election Eve would be helpful. Dr. Baldwin-Johnson could help on some of that. But that’s less important than the issue of Trig.
Thanks for whatever you can do.
Regards, Lisa
Exactly, Lisa! Did Cathy-Baldwin Johnson deliver Trig? If not, who did? Who is Trig Palin's biological mother? What does his birth certificate say? Why was Cathy-Baldwin Johnson's statement released so late on Election Eve? Can we have a definitive statement from Palin's doctor, please?
Aren't these simple, easy questions? The matter could be settled within a day, and we could all forget about it!
We "Trig Truthers" have never asked for anything else - and have never ever received an answer!
Lisa Demer, as it turns out, never received an answer either.
Instead, Sarah Palin's spokesman Bill McAllister replies to Lisa and starts to insult her - in an apparent attempt to fob her off and shut her up, and ends with saying that he expects a "sweeping apology" from her as the only possible reply:
From: McAllister, William D (GOV)
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 7:35 PM
To: ’LDemer@adn.com’; Leighow, Sharon W (GOV); ’dhulen@adn.com’; Nizich, Michael A (GOV)
Subject: Re: Governor Palin
Lisa,
Allow me to intervene in a completely off-the-record way: I never anticipated the depths of sleaze that your paper would come to countenance. That the governor would have to prove maternity to you is perhaps the most despicable idea ever peddled by an organization that once had Pulitzer Prize status (and that now won’t even staff the legislative session). This is a disgrace, an outrage and a damnable injustice. Stop forcing us to spend state time to respond to this trash. We will not participate in your continued self-debasement as a news professional. Your inquiries about this are hereby permanently rejected, and your arrogance will have us discussing if we want to have anything to do with the ADN at all. Do not reply, unless it’s to offer a sweeping apology.
Off the record,
Bill
The inquiries "are hereby permanently rejected" - problem solved!
Sarah Palin also wonders what to do now - after all, the birth certificate couldn't be presented, as it wouldn't show what it's supposed to show, and medical records or other hard evidence are also not available, so what else is there left to do to suppress the inquiry by the ADN?
Sarah Palin writes on December 17, 2008 to her staff:
..... Original Message .....
From: Palin, Sarah (GOV sponsored)
To: McAllister, William D (GOV); Leighow, Sharon W (GOV)
Cc: Nizich, Michael A (GOV); Perry, Kristina Y (GOV)
Sent: WedDec 17 19:05:21 2008
Subject: Baby
Flippin ridiculous. My doctor (CBJ, she delivered Trig and served on our Health Care Council and was named America’s Top Family Physician a few yrs ago) called Todd to give me a message requesting that I call her tomorrow - to discuss "a phone call she received from Lisa Demer at the ADN"! Sheeeesh, this is one busy doctor and she has to continually be bugged by media about this ridiculous issue?
Maybe we can be clever about this and use the opportunity to point out how wacko some media outlets have become. If you can think of anything clever, let me know.., we’ll do it. I’ll even do a press avail on it, if need be.
Short of producing the photos that Bristol took of me having Trig (and it’ll be over my dead body that they’re released without major photoshopping done first), I don’t know how else to prove I gave birth to Trig. CBJ has testified, she’s released my health records summary.., what else does it take.
Bristol "took photos of me having Trig"...? We never heard this before - or afterwards. This is an obvious lie, a desperate claim by Sarah Palin in order to convince also her inner circle that there is nothing suspicious about her pregnancy with Trig. Interestingly, Sarah Palin made a similar desperate false claim in December 2009 when she suddenly claimed on a radio show in December 2009 that has "provided Trig's birth certificate" - despite the fact that nobody can be found who has seen it. Lisa Demer certainly hasn't seen it!
In the same email exchange, Bill McAllister (who later also attacked journalism professor Brad Scharlott due to his claims that Trig is not Sarah's biological child) went off the rails again and wrote:
..... Original Message .....
From: McAllister, William D (GOV)
To: Palin, Sarah (GOV sponsored); Leighow, Sharon W (GOV)
Cc: Nizich, Michael A (GOV); Perry, Kristina Y (GOV)
Sent: WedDec 17 19:23:28 2008
Subject: Re: Baby
How about I call a press availability tomorrow and on your behalf say we won’t dignify these questions and call out by name the reporters pursuing them? We can talk about the doctor being harassed, AP trying to implicate you re: racist e-mails by a few state employees, and much other garbage. And we could announce the new website critiquing the media. Will this make them back off? No, at least not entirely. But right now we’re in an ax fight without an ax. Let’s at least demonstrate publicly our pride and honor that we’re not going to let this evil stand.
Now, we could go sarcastic, with a presser in which we acknowledge that Bigfoot is a member of your Cabinet who has counseled predator control and that you are really the descendant of Anastasia, who survived the execution of the czar, s family, proving that not only can you see Russia but that you’re actually from there, and that you’ve got all of Imelda Marcos’ shoes plus Michael Jackson’s white glove. And then we can ask the ADN reporter why they’re not covering session.
There are a number of ways we can handle this. But let’s go.get ’em.
"We are not going to let this evil stand."
Well, yes, Bill, you have to let this evil stand, because you cannot present any proof that Sarah Palin is Trig's biological mother - so the only way out would be smears, attacks, threats and propaganda, as it seems, and that's exactly the route that the Palin camp chose.
Unfortunately, the propaganda worked, because even distinguished liberal websites like "Salon" swallowed the propaganda and "debunked" the fake pregnancy rumours in one of their most shameful moments ever in an article by Justin Elliott, who relied on "tainted" witnesses, as I explained in detail in a previous post .
The published emails also contain the complete exchange between Sarah Palin and ADN-editor Pat Dougherty, which he had published on his Editors Blog at the ADN in January 2009. This exchange is always worth to be revisited. Despite that fact that none of Lisa Demer's question were answered, the Anchorage Daily News dropped the matter. I discussed the obvious reason for this decision in a post at Palingates in September 2009 - the ADN receives huge sums for advertising and printing from the State of Alaska each year. The ADN simply couldn't afford to annoy such an important customer, especially one with such a sensitive "boss" like Sarah Palin, who also unashamedly hinted to the ongoing financial troubles of the ADN in the email exchange with Pat Dougherty.
These days, Pat Dougherty is keen to claim that "the story of persistent rumors does not interest him any more than President Obama’s birth certificate conspiracy." However, with the decision to let Sarah Palin off the hook despite not having answered the questions by Lisa Demer, Pat Dougherty put the reputation of his newspaper at risk, and it's safe to say that this reputation remains permanently damaged. We have seen too many emails by Sarah Palin and her staff stonewalling all questions about Sarah Palin's pregnancy, also in the book "Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin" by Frank Bailey (even more in the leaked manuscript of the book), when even immediately before and after the official birth on April 18, 2008, Sarah Palin freaked out about the faked pregnancy allegations and the allegations that Trig is Bristol's child, but could provide no proof to the contrary.
When it comes to the ADN, one also shouldn't forget the memorable interview that ADN-columnist and former editor Michael Carey gave on September 2, 2008 - explaining that the faked pregnancy issue was intensively discussed within the ADN and that he has a friend, a "smart lawyer", who told him that the rumour about Palin's faked pregnancy was "the absolute truth":
There will be more to add to this in the future, but right now I would like conclude this post with a very surprising "personal" discovery, because in the published emails, a few of my very own emails are included as well. This brings memories back from a time "long gone", when Kathleen and I were members of the Palindeception research team. A lot has happened since that time, and I had pretty much forgotten about these emails, but the "reactions" I caused and didn't know about until yesterday are still very relevant.
So how did my emails end up in this batch? Well, the funny things is that I didn't even directly write to the State of Alaska - but to "factcheck.org" in the first place. I complained to them about an article by factcheck.org which is still online, called "Muting the Mommy Melodrama." In this article, factcheck.org tries to debunk the fake pregnancy rumours with a piece of evidence which mysteriously appeared on August 31, 2008, right at the start of Palin's VP campaign: A picture uploaded by an anonymous user called "erik99559" to flickr. This picture was apparently taken on April 13, 2008, just five days before the "official birth", and shows a pregnant looking Sarah Palin.
This photo - click on it for high resolution:
There was much speculation about this picture in our research team as well as on the Palindeception Blog.
Audrey from the Palindeception Blog, who ran this website which has been dormant since summer 2009 and started the public investigation into Sarah Palin's pregnancy with Trig, instructed a photo forensics expert to make an examination of the so-called "Gusty picture", which had mysteriously appeared on flickr on August 31, 2008 (and was online for about one year, before it was deleted from flickr).
This forensic report can also be found in full in the published emails, as I attached it to my email.
This picture was hugely important for us, because it turned out not just factcheck.org, but also for example the Huffington Post regarded this picture as "final evidence" for the fact that Sarah Palin was in fact pregnant with Trig (the article in Huffington Post was written by Lee Stranahan, who now works for Andrew Breitbart).
This was my original email to factcheck, as it can be found in the emails published by the State of Alaska:
By the way, I never received a response from factcheck.org. They don't seem to bother much about facts at all, and the thought that a person who fakes a pregnancy HAS to look pregnant AT SOME POINT obviously never occurred to them.
This report found it's way into Sarah Palin's email imbox, because I copied Andrea Gusty's station in (11 News KTVA), who actually received the email and then later replied to tell me that KTVA will broadcast a TV-report about these pictures. This report:
KTVA even published the full original broadcast of the programme in which this footage from April 13, 2008 was used - which has been preserved HERE.
For the record: I don't believe any more that the photo from April 13, 2008 is "fake", and that the report from the forensics expert is accurate. The report was severely impeded by the fact that the original digital picture was not available. The photo was bad quality. Digital photo forensics are a very tricky business, and for years already I have been convinced that the picture was indeed taken on April 13, 2008.
The only thing what really matters in the great scheme of things is the fact that this picture was conveniently uploaded on August 31, 2008 to flickr by the photographer Daniel Erik Carpenter from Bethel ("erik99559", with 99559 being Bethel's post code) - who even identified himself in one of the pictures. It was the public "proof" for the pregnancy that Sarah Palin desperately needed - and it served its purpose. No further proof was needed, certainly not a birth certificate - because suddenly, there was the pregnant looking Governor, right in front of our eyes...
As you can see in the email exchange, I then answered Andrea Gusty again, and I was cheeky, because I also copied in Bill McAllister in. I guess I wanted to annoy him a bit. Little did I know that I also managed to annoy the Queen herself!
Not just one, but two responses by Sarah Palin have been recorded, after she received the email exchange from Bill McAllister:
First response:
"OK, my new attitude on this is "I love it"!!! This proves the nuts are still at it!
Gotta' embrace it at this point."
Second response:
This "new" attitude, "gotta' embrace it", is actually exactly the approach Sarah Palin displayed later in several speeches when she mocked the "Trig Truthers" (after we still didn't shut up), for example a speech in Waco, Texas on September 14, 2010 (a speech in which she suddenly discovered that she "had the baby in Anchorage"):
She had no proof, but that didn't stop her from joking about the issue, because she knew she was safe - after all, the liberal media had long decided that that issue of Palin's pregnancy couldn't be touched, for purely political reasons.
But there is another important point to make about this email exchange. As you can see from the headers depicted above, Sarah Palin also forward this email to Talis Colberg, who was the Alaskan Attorney General at the time.
I wrote in my email from January 13, 2009, which ended up on Sarah Palin's desk:
"It is true, however, that we claim that it is not Sarah Palin
who is the biological mother of Trig."
That is a strong claim - and Sarah Palin saw it, the Alaskan Attorney General saw it, Bill McAllister and all the others saw it - already in January 2009. Despite this fact no lawyer EVER contacted the "Trig Truthers" and asked for a retractions of this serious claim. We repeated this claim many times in our posts, and there was just a big, long silence.
But we know the reason for this, we know it already for a long time. Sarah Palin has no evidence to prove that she is Trig's biological mother - because she isn't. From excellent inside information coming from the "upper echelons of society" in Alaska as well as a mountain of evidence we know that Sarah Palin is not the mother. We knew this already in January 2009, and that's why I felt perfectly safe to make this claim in my email. I am a lawyer myself and have worked as a trial lawyer in Germany in the past, I do know that it would be a bad idea to carelessly libel a public figure. But we never libelled anyone. We just write the plain truth, and in return, the liberal media loves to call us "conspiracy theorists."
But we are not conspiracy theorists. We know that Sarah Palin is not the biological mother of Trig, and that she has no proof for her pregnancy. She is a liar, and a very successful one, who has the benefit of being surrounded by a team of people whose main purpose apparently is to spread propaganda and cover up her lies.
How long do we citizen bloggers have to spend our precious time writing blog posts like these, because the media refuses to do their jobs and cannot separate between fact and fiction?
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Special thanks to our readers Older_Wiser, KAO, Hope in America and all the other readers who searched through the emails!
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https://twitter.com/#%21/politicalgates
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UPDATE:
Our reader silver_desert discovered a highly, highly suspicious email, which proves that Sarah Palin made stuff up again about the pregnancy.
On March 4, 2008, her close aide Sharon Leighow just heard the news about Sarah Palin's pregnancy (one day before the official public announcement). Sharon Leighow has an appropriate response to the news and writes to Sarah:
"And kudos on being a master of disguise!"
However, Sarah Palin is not happy at all about this remark, and writes back, providing the most ridiculous statement ever about her pregnancy (just next to her statements "Bristol took pictures while I delivered" and "I provided Trig's birth certificate"):
"Thanks! And "master of disguise"?! Ugh- I’m big as a house. But glad about it!"
KTUU - Original story about Trig Palin's birth, published on April 18, 2008
Now let's take a look at Sarah Palin's "pregnancy progression."
This is what a "normal" pregnancy usually looks like:
However, Sarah Palin's pregnancy with Trig was "somewhat different."
February 5, 2008 ("Super-Tuesday"), a bit more than two months away from giving birth:
Sarah Palin at the National Governor's Association meeting on 25 February, 2008 - exactly 8 days before she wrote the email to Sharon Leighow! Click HERE for the complete high-resolution picture.
Close-up of Sarah Palin:
Look what Sarah could do on March 1, 2008 - the birth just 1 1/2 month away (the photographer took a few similar pictures):
March 14, 2008 - 10 days after Sarah Palin wrote the above email to Sharon Leighow! Click here for news report and for larger picture:
Now we move on to our "favourite" day - March 26, 2008, not even four weeks before Trig was officially born.
This picture which was taken on March 26, 2008 was already discovered at the end of 2008 (large size HERE):
This and some other pictures were discovered only recently:
Wow, they have rather small houses in Alaska these days!
Well, it also turned out that Sarah Palin had the "speediest"pregnancy of all times - because just three weeks earlier, she looked very, very different, take a close look:
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"Babygate" has been covered in more detail in previous posts. You can find all this information here:
Read all posts at Politicalgates about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy with Trig - FOR THE COLLECTION, CLICK HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE,HERE AND HERE.
Download the research paper regarding Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy and the role of the media, written by Brad Scharlott, Associate Professor for Journalism at Northern Kentucky University - CLICK HERE.
Brad Scharlott's revised version of the paper has also been published by "Business Insider."
Read the old post at Palingates about the faked pregnancy with the pictures still intact in hardcopy HERE.
Read the old posts at Palingates online HERE (useful also for watching the video clips which were published with the posts).
In addition, please don't hesitate to watch the excellent video-documentaries about "babygate" which our reader Lidia17 created - HERE, HERE and HERE.
We break the "Spiral of Silence" - Read the details about the "biggest hoax in American political history!"
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