Celebrity

Sarah Palin Aims to Set Record Straight on Resignation

The departing Alaska governor takes to Twitter to address her critics

Published on July 6, 2009 07:30 AM

While her resignation Friday from Alaska’s highest office 18 months ahead of schedule continues to be dissected, Sarah Palin is lashing out at her critics – some of whom are her fellow Republicans, puzzled by her move – while also asking her supporters to remain just that, supportive.

“Critics are spinning, so hang in there as they feed false info on the right decision made as I enter last yr (sic) in office to not run again,” Palin, whose future political plans, if any, have yet to be announced, wrote on her Twitter page Sunday – one of 10 messages she dispatched into the blogosphere this weekend.

Some of the messages were of a personal nature, including those about her husband Todd, whom, she Tweeted, had gone to work the family’s commercial fishing grounds, “slaying salmon and working the kids. Anxious to join ’em.”

Other messages were political, including one that addressed allegations making the rounds on blogs about a rumored investigation, reports The Washington Post. Late Friday night, Palin Tweeted, “See letter from my attorney [Thomas V. Van Flein] on baseless allegations of past 24hrs.”

In the lawyer’s letter to which Palin points her followers – and which has been posted on the FOX News Web site – he writes: “Several unscrupulous people have asserted false and defamatory allegations that the ‘real’ reasons for Governor Palin’s resignation stem from an alleged criminal investigation pertaining to the construction of the Wasilla Sports Complex. This canard was first floated by Democrat operatives in September 2008 during the national campaign and followed up by sympathetic Democratic writers. It was easily rebutted then as one of many fabrications about Sarah Palin.”

The attorney further states, “Just as power abhors a vacuum, modern journalism apparently abhors any type of due diligence and fact checking before scurrilous allegations are repeated as fact.” Threatening legal action against those who might continue to promote these allegations, Van Flein adds, “The Palins will not allow them to propagate defamatory material without answering to this in a court of law.”

• Reporting by LORENZO BENET