The former Alaska public safety commissioner who refused to fire a state trooper embroiled in a domestic dispute with Gov. Sarah Palin's sister says he holds no grudge, but still believes the GOP vice presidential nominee is too thin-skinned for the job she hopes to fill.

"She apparently has difficulty compartmentalizing personal feelings from official acts," said Walter Monegan, who spent 33 years in the Anchorage Police Department - five years as chief - before Palin named him as the state public safety commissioner late in 2006.

Monegan says that - contrary to the governor's assertions - he believes his own firing by Palin in July was the result of his refusal to bow to pressure from her and her family to get rid of the trooper, Palin's ex-brother-in-law Mike Wooten.

"It's the biggest factor, if not the only factor," Monegan said during a telephone interview from his Alaska home.

Monegan remains at the center of a controversy about whether the Alaska governor and members of her administration tried to pressure him into firing Wooten, who is still on the job. At the time, Palin's younger sister, Molly, was involved in a bitter divorce and custody dispute with Wooten.

The Alaska Legislature is investigating the matter and may subpoena Palin's husband, Todd. It has also shown interest in having the governor herself talk to investigators, though not under subpoena. Monegan had his turn Wednesday, spending nearly the whole day telling his side.

Monegan said he knew nothing about Wooten until he was summoned to the governor's office in January 2007, after only a month on the job, for a face-to-face meeting with Palin's husband.

Monegan says Todd Palin laid out a list of grievances against Wooten, including his allegedly threatening to kill Palin's father, drinking in his squad car, Tasering his 10-year-old stepson and killing a moose without a permit.

"He was insistent" that something be done, Monegan said.

Monegan said the previous administration had already investigated every allegation and disciplined Wooten, and he saw nothing new to warrant further action.

Still, he said, he agreed to ask his staff to conduct a "page-by-page" review to see if the Public Safety Department had missed anything.

Monegan says a couple of days later he reported back to Todd Palin that there was no new evidence against Wooten. The governor's husband was upset with his answer, Monegan said, and pointed to the killing of the moose as a criminal act.

Monegan says he explained that it was "more a letter of the law than the spirit of the law" violation, because the trooper's wife - the governor's sister - had a permit for the hunt and had been with him at the time.

"She just didn't want to kill it - it was like looking at Bambi," Monegan said.

What's more, he said, after Wooten killed the moose, he and Molly took it to the home of Sarah Palin's parents, who "butchered it up and gave it back."

In other words, Monegan said, the parents and sister might also have to answer for their actions if he were to pursue a case against the trooper.

"I got a phone call from the governor about two days later," he said. "She reiterated the same frustration (over Wooten), the same passion that her husband had."

Palin has repeatedly denied pressuring Monegan to fire her former brother-in-law, but has acknowledged that her aides made as many as two dozen inquiries with state officials about Wooten.

Rick Gorka, a spokesman for the John McCain campaign, said Palin is fully cooperating with the investigation and called Monegan's allegations sour grapes.

"I think people have had their feathers ruffled by Palin because of her willingness to shake things up," he said. "She is not going to win the Miss Congeniality contest."

Shortly before McCain picked her as his running mate, Palin herself said she had fired Monegan because he wasn't filling vacant trooper jobs quickly enough, wasn't dealing with alcohol abuse among troopers and "did not turn out to be a team player on budgeting issues."

No matter how it plays out, Monegan says that as far as he's concerned, the trooper case has highlighted a character flaw in the would-be veep.

"Inside all of us, we have our likes and dislikes," he said. "But when it comes time for doing official business, you put those back in the personal corner.

"Your motivator may be your heart, but your rudder should be your mind."

North to Alaska: It turns out that well before he was jettisoned for what he says was his refusal to fire trooper Wooten at the behest of Sarah Palin, Monegan had his own share of domestic troubles - some of them spilling all the way down to the Bay Area.

In October 1994, Monegan's estranged wife, who had moved from Alaska to the Peninsula with the couple's two daughters after more than 10 years of marriage, sought a temporary restraining order against him - accusing Monegan of threatening to kill her, waving a gun at her and dislocating her shoulder, according to her declaration on file in Santa Clara County Superior Court.

In an interview last week, Georgene Moldovan said Monegan had threatened several times to throw her body in an Alaska river.

Monegan, 57, who has since remarried, vigorously denied Moldovan's allegations, both in court papers filed at the time and in an interview with us last week. "I'm not a door slammer - I don't punch walls," he said.

Monegan admitted to dislocating Moldovan's shoulder, but said it was an accident that had happened before they were married, while they "were wrestling and tickling."

Moldovan was an emergency room doctor and professor at Stanford and shuttled back and forth from Alaska to the Peninsula the last seven years of their marriage. Monegan asked her for a divorce in 1993, but snapped when he learned he might lose the couple's house, she says.

One day in April 1993, she said in her court filing, "he pulled out his gun and waved it at me outside my home and yelled he would kill me if I stopped him."

In the interview, Moldovan said Monegan "would show up unannounced and break into my apartment and do threatening things. I was forced to get a restraining order because I was really fearful he was going to harm me."

Monegan denounced the allegations as "either half-truths or pure fabrications." He points out that Moldovan made her accusations in the midst of a bitter fight over who would get the couple's daughters.

If any of the allegations had been documented, he said, he would have been fired from his Anchorage police job and never been hired by Palin as Alaska's top cop in 2006.

As for whether any of his own troubles might have clouded his judgment in dealing with Palin's ex-brother-in-law amid his messy divorce, Monegan says no.

"In a nutshell, I never have and I never will condone domestic violence," he said.

And while Monegan hasn't spoken to his ex-wife in years, he says, he is still on very good terms with her first husband - Alaska's U.S. attorney, Nelson Cohen.

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