Gov. Sarah Palin’s decision to resign was mainly prompted by the personal legal costs of the ethics investigations against her according to Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell of Alaska. Sarah Palin announced on Friday that she will resign near the end of the month and turn the reins of state government over to Sean Parnell, who like the governor is a Republican.
During the news conference, Palin cited numerous reasons for quitting, including more than $500,000 in legal fees that she and her husband, Todd, have incurred because of 15 ethics complaints filed against her during her two and a half years as governor. She said all of the complaints had been dismissed, but she still had to pay lawyers to defend her.
According to Sean Parnell, Gov. Sarah Palin called him into her office on Wednesday night to tell him she was resigning. On his interview on Fox News Sunday, Parnell said:
“I think what I heard from the governor, it really had to do with the weight on her, the concern she had for the cost of all the ethics investigations and the like — the way that that weighed on her with respect to her inability to just move forward Alaska’s agenda on behalf of Alaskans in the current context of the environment. So that’s what I saw.”
Lt. Gov. Parnell, who is scheduled to take over for Gov. Sarah Palin on July 26, said it was costing the State of Alaska about $2 million just to pay for the staff to deal with the records requests from the ethics complaints.
“That was just over the top, and I think she used the word insane in her remarks,” Parnell said.
Sarah Palin, who was Senator John McCain’s running mate on last year’s Republican presidential ticket, is leaving office 18 months before the end of her first term as governor. In her comments on Friday, she acknowledged the toll that the ethics investigations had taken on her and her family.
But in the often-rambling announcement, Palin also sounded at one point as though she was quitting politics entirely and at another as though she had an eye on higher office, which immediately led to renewed speculation about the possibility of her running for president in 2012. She promised supporters that in the coming days, she would provide details on her social networking Facebook and Twitter sites on her reasons for leaving the governorship so abruptly.
In a posting on Sarah Palin Facebook page on Saturday, Sarah Palin appeared to indicate that she would seek a larger, national role citing what she said was a “higher calling” to push for conservative causes nationally.
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