Message to Kristan Cole: It's time to release the records of Sarah Palin's Alaska Fund Trust! - UPDATE!

John McCain recently had a great idea!

He put a running clock on his website, with the question:

"When will Hayworth release the names of his Secret Abramoff Trust Fund donors?"

Well, we don't know the answer either, and we don't really care who has donated to teabagger Hayworth.

But John inspired us and we thought that we at Palingates should have a clock, too!

Why? Because Sarah Palin's best friend Kristan Cheryl Cole is now 249 days overdue with disclosing "the contributions as well as the amounts and categories of expenses" of the "Alaska Fund Trust", Sarah's "legal defense fund". Kristan Cole is the trustee of this fund, and she is obliged to make the disclosure on a quarterly basis, according to the Trust Agreement -from the FAQ:

"8. Will there be any disclosure of contributions and expenses?

Yes. The Trustee will disclose on a quarterly basis the contributions as well as categories of expenses with amounts."

The Alaska Fund Trust was set up on April 22, 2009. The first report was therefore due on July 23, 2009. That's when we start our sweet clock:

Coincidentally, Kristan Cole made a public statement on July 22, 2009 - but this statement had nothing to do with her obligation to release the quarterly report.

Kristan Cole was forced to speak in public after the report of the attorney Thomas Daniel was leaked to the media. He was the investigator for the Alaska Personnel Board during the investigation of Kim Chatman's ethics complaint. Kristan Cole denied that Palin was "involved" in the Alaska Trust Fund. Sure! I think we believe in the Easter bunny as well! Back in July 2009, Mudflats published an excellent article questioning these statements of Kristan Cole.

Investigator Daniel reported that there is "probable cause to believe Palin used or attempted to use her official position for personal gain because she authorized the creation of the trust as the "official" legal defense fund." Download Daniel's original report HERE.

Since then - silence!

However, it's worth to take a closer look at the Alaska Trust Fund again.

It has been noted before that Sarah's practical "Legal Defense Fund" is in fact nothing more than a handy slush-fund for her and her family. The "Trust Agreement" leaves no open questions in this respect:

"3. Rights of Withdrawal

a) Each of the beneficiaries of this trust, shall, in each calendar year, have an absolute and unrestricted power to withdraw from this Trust up to the lesser of the total additions made to this Trust during each calendar year or an amount in cash or other property (including the cash value of life insurance policies, if no other cash or property is available) equal the lesser of the total additions made to this Trust during each calendar year, divided equally among such beneficiaries, or an amount in cash or other property (including the cash value of life insurance policies, if no other cash or property is available) equal to the maximum amount which qualifies for the Federal Gift Tax exclusion allowed by Section 2503(b) of the Code (currently $13,000 per donor, but such amount shall be adjusted to provide the maximum amount excludable) presuming that a donor's spouse, if any, has consented to treat any such eligible gifts as being made one-half by such donor and one-half by such donor's spouse. The holder(s) of such power are hereinafter referred to as "Donee". Except as otherwise provided herein, said power of withdrawal shall not be cumulative from year to year, must be exercised separately for each calendar year in which any such addition or additions are made, and shall be exercisable only by written notice to Trustee of the amount Donee wishes to withdraw, but no purpose for said withdrawal need be shown.

4. Beneficiary.

The beneficiaries of this Trust shall be SARAH PALIN. In addition, the class of potential beneficiaries shall include any "Covered Individual. For purposes hereof, a "Covered Individual shall be any other person determined by the Trustee, in the Trustee's sole and absolute discretion, to (i) hold a "covered staff' position within SARAH PALIN's administration and/or an employee in the office of the Governor of the State of Alaska; and (ii) hold a covered relationship with SARAH PALIN, including without limitation, a family member, such as a parent, spouse, child, grandchild, sibling and other close family relationship. Notwithstanding anything contained herein to the contrary, in no event shall anyone other than the Trustee exercise control over the Trust property and, in no event shall any beneficiary receive tangible or intangible benefit from the Trust other than such benefit that is incident to or may have arisen out of the defraying, payment, or satisfaction of expenses as provided herein."

So: Sarah's whole family and other people can be granted to right to withdraw money - and "no purpose for the withdrawal need to be shown". How useful! A grifters dream. Regina published a detailed article about this topic on Palingates in July 2009 and about possible criminal consequences, which is worth to be revisited. Back then, Regina came to the conclusion:

"The website soliciting donations states that the money raised will be used only to pay certain legal expenses. The agreement says no such thing. The website states the money cannot be used for personal purposes. The agreement contains a clause that says otherwise."

So where are the quarterly reports? Kristan Cole doesn't need the permission of anybody else to release the reports, the "Trust Agreement" is clear in this respect:

"The Trustee is authorized and directed to release the amounts and categories of expenditures for the benefit of any beneficiary hereunder and the public on a quarterly basis."

Kristan Cheryl Cole: What are you waiting for?

Also: What happened to Kim Chatman's ethics complaint? Since July 2009, the public has heard nothing with regard to the outcome of the ethics complaint, despite the grave concerns of investigator Thomas Daniel. Do we need another clock?

Investigator Thomas Daniel expressed grave concerns in his report about the choice of Kristan Cole to become the Trustee:

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In addition, something else caught our eye.

In FAQ of the Trust, we also read:

"10. Where does the unspent money go?

Once the purposes of the Trust no longer exist, the Trustee, in her sole discretion, will donate unspent funds to qualified 501 (c)(3) organizations."

So, we asked ourselves: What exactly is a "501(c)(3) organization"?

Wikipedia knows - the general definition:

"Colloquially, a 501(c) organization or simply "a 501(c)" is a tax-exempt, nonprofit corporation or association. Section 501(c) of the United States Internal Revenue Code (26 U.S.C. § 501(c)), provides that 26 types of nonprofit organizations are exempt from some federal income taxes. Sections 503 through 505 set out the requirements for attaining such exemptions. Many states refer to Section 501(c) for definitions of organizations exempt from state taxation as well."

501(c)(3) in particular means: "Religious, Educational, Charitable, Scientific, Literary, Testing for Public Safety, to Foster National or International Amateur Sports Competition, or Prevention of Cruelty to Children or Animals Organizations"

We found this extremely interesting - and I will tell you why: We recently learned from a reliable source in Alaska that the Palins set up an educational fund for Tripp, and they are directing some of their income to this fund - for example the $ 100,000 that Bristol received for her cover story in "In Touch" magazine! Our information is that this fund is supposed to pay Tripp's college/university expenses in the future.

So - can it be that some of the money of the Alaskan Fund Trust will eventually go in the trust for Tripp or in similar channels that the Palins have created? After all, they are very creative regarding their money affairs, with the invaluable assistance of Sarah's busy lawyer Thomas Van Flein, who is the "registered agent" of Sarah's mystery company "Pie Spy" as well as of Bristol's mystery company "BSMP".

EDIT: We just learned that 501(c)(3) can only benefit an organization, therefore the theory that it could benefit Tripp's educational fund is apparently not valid. Many thanks to our reader "AuntieRuth"!

Our second theory is, by the way, that Sarah Palin will eventually set up her own charitable organization which will then receive the money. ;-)

Kristan Cole, publish the reports! After all, you have nothing to hide, right?

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UPDATE:

Our reader "mxm" has left a very interesting comment, which I would like to add to the post for the discussion. I would also like to point out that the Alaska Trust Fund is still accepting donations via PayPal (some of our readers made test donations today via PayPal - it worked!). Due to the lack of information and disclosure, we can only speculate what the current situation is with the Alaska Fund Trust. However, we do have Kristan Cole's own statement from July 22, 2009, in which she says:

"I am here to address the unusual letter that was leaked yesterday, the contents of which are unprecedented in the history of our country, suggesting that a legal defense fund could somehow be unethical. This is particularly notable, and concerning, in light of the fact that the Trust, on my instructions, has not paid even one penny to Gov. Palin or her lawyers. I issued that instruction because I was aware the Board was reviewing this matter."

Here is the comment by "mxm":

Kristan Cole is the sole Trustee, and as such she made commitments to the donors to provide quarterly reports. Anything related to trust fund use is under the sole discretion of Trustee Cole. As she has not released any reports in the nearly 12 month duration of the the trust, one has to search out sources of information related to the AFT cash flow. This is what I have found, 2 critical pieces of information:

(1) The bots conducted a webathon for the fund, and reported raising in excess of $115,000.

"You have already achieved 23% of our goal to retire $500,000 in legal bills that Governor Palin is held personally responsible ..."

(2) SarahPAC paid some interesting legal invoices.

The Alaska legal firm Clapp, Peterson, Van Flein, Tiemessen submitted 3 invoices to the PAC.

12/08/2009
Legal Services, Political Services, June
$45,000

12/08/2009
Legal Services, September
$10,000

12/08/2009
Legal Services November
$10,000

Attorneys with Clapp, Peterson, Van Flein, and Tiemessen must have a greater degree of PAC and political experience than the consultants and specialized attorneys Sarah Palin paid to advise her PAC. The firm was paid $65,000 in December 2009.

Diane Cooley provided legal services to the PAC and was paid $4,060.

Baker & Hostetler provided legal services to the PAC and was paid $13,500.

From these two facts, I surmise that the AFT is either frozen or broke. If frozen, as a result of the yet unresolved ethics complaint, then it may hold at least $115,000. If the AFT is broke, and it was used to pay Palin's self-claimed legal bills of $500,000, then the PAC was tapped to pay some more personal legal bills.

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UPDATE 2:

In this post, we didn't mention so far that there were actually two ethics complaints filed against Sarah Palin because of the Alaska Fund Trust. It was not only Kim Chatman who filed a complaint, but Andree McLeod filed a second complaint in December 2009. You can download the full text of Andree's complaint HERE.

The outcome of the second complaint is unknown as well - nobody knows what's going on. No information has been given to the public.

Although Sarah Palin has "left the building", her hand-picked appointments like her chief of staff, Attorney General, and every commissioner have not. They are still playing fast and loose with the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act, and continue to protect and defend Palin’s political interests when it comes to complaints regarding her "legal defense fund".

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Sarah Palin's Dairygate : Kristan Cole's Mat-Maid Christmas giveaway - UPDATE

Dairygate is a very complicated topic. When I think I have finally made sense of the whole mess and have the complete picture, another piece of the puzzle appears from somewhere. I may not have the complete picture yet, but each time I add another piece, it becomes clearer... and uglier.

Thanks to our resourceful readers, a pdf of the minutes of one of the Board of Agriculture (BAC) and Conservation was posted, among other useful information, drawing my attention to something I had not yet realized: Sarah Palin's pal Kristan Cole and her gang call the shots in approving the loans made by the Agriculture Revolving Loan Fund.

It's a very neat arrangement. Kristan Cole, Franci Havemeister, Ray Nix and a few other cronies consider and approve loans made by the ARLF, including those to the new Matanuska Creamery, owned by Valley Dairy Inc., headed by Karen Olson, Kyle Beus and Bob Wells.

Kristan Cole is assisted on the legal front by an Anchorage attorney called Jon Givens who, by sheer coincidence, is the attorney for Sarah Palin's "legal" fund, The Alaska Fund Trust. Kristan Cole is the sole trustee of the fund and has not produced a single quarterly report as promised on the AFT's website.

Kristan Cole with Jon Givens

I will attempt to put Dairygate in a nutshell, including information contained in older posts, so anybody not familiar with the story can have a quick overview without the need to click on several different links.

The Alaska Creamery Board, a sub-committee of the BAC, which oversaw the dairy, then called Matanuska Maid Dairy (Mat-Maid for short), met in May and discussed privatizing or possibly closing the dairy. It subsequently voted to close it, and on June 13 the Board rejected Sarah Palin's public request that it keep the dairy open, saying it stood by its decision to close the dairy plant as of July 7.

Sarah Palin made a big show regarding a visit to the Mat-Maid plant in Anchorage on June 13, knowing perfectly well that the management was holding a meeting in downtown Anchorage to decide the fate of the state run dairy business. Meg Stapleton was at the Westmark Hotel , monitoring the movements of the CEO, Mr Joe Van Treeck. Without his presence at Mat-Maid, the visit could not go ahead. Two of Todd Palin's cousins, Nick and Roger Voorhees, kept Meg informed about how things were developing at the dairy, where Sarah Palin and her entourage were huffing and puffing for the benefit of every TV camera in town. The media had been invited to cover the pre-planned non-event, known to just about everybody, except for the dairy's CEO. By the time Mr Van Treeck managed to leave the Westmark and headed to plant, about eight minutes away, the Palin circus had been tipped-off by Todd's cousins and left before Van Treeck could park his car upon his arrival at the dairy.

On June 18, Palin fired the entire membership of the BAC, and replaced them with an assortment of Mat-Su Valley residents, all without any experience in running a dairy, but with family or business connections with the Valley's milk producers, which then installed itself as the Creamery Board, removing a whole tier in the management chain.

The new management quickly announced profits of $60,000, showing how efficient they were in putting the business back in the black. In August, it was revealed that the dairy had in fact sustained record losses of $300,000.

On August 29, 2007, Palin announced that the business could not be made profitable and would be offered for sale. She said that the board could use $600,000 of state money to help with the transition to a private operator.

On December 7, with a required minimum bid of $3.35 million for the dairy, no bids were received and all dairy operations were scheduled to close later that month. Two of the Valley's dairy farmers came forward and offered to lease the equipment to start their own dairy and a further loan of $200,000 was made available to them, provided they started production at the now renamed Matanuska Creamery by the end of December. They only started operations in March 2008, but received the money anyway.

Matanuska Creamery is owned by one of the biggest milk farmers in the area, Kyle Beus, and Robert Wells, a Mat-Su Borough Assemblyman, who is also president of Alaska Farmers and Stockgrowers Inc. The CEO, Karen Olson, doubles as CFO, which enables her to write fat checks backed by several generous "loans" from the ARLF to herself...

Kristan Cole, forever helpful to her valley friends, offered them a nice Christmas present, worth close to $1,000,000!



Joey Austerman went to school with Sarah Palin. Donna was the Company Controller, second in command at the old Matanuska Maid, and they didn't want her to see what was going out of the door. The crates alone were worth $5 each and there were thousands of them. They wanted to appear to be thrifty by recycling the crates and yet they failed to turn a profit. This Christmas pillage happened before the equipment of the old Matanuska Maid was officially auctioned!

For the details of what exactly went missing in this "Christmas pillage", see the update 2 below!

On top of the two loans provided by the state, Ted Stevens arranged a $634,000 USDA grant for Beus and Wells' new venture, Matanuska Creamery, in March of 2008.

Between September and November 2008 Matanuska Creamery applied for a further loan from the state. After much wrangling over personal guarantees, which were removed in a meeting on November 21, the Board, which is comprised of Governor Palin's appointed friends and neighbours, ended up voting to give the Mat-Su Valley business a $630,000 loan. The BAC approved the unsecured operating loan in the full knowledge that the business did not have the cash flow to make the payments.

Matanuska Creamery didn't have a very good start. 30,000 pounds of cheese in their cold storage, which had already been sold in "cheese futures" deals without insurance, were found to be contaminated with e.coli, listeria and staph and had to be thrown away. Matanuska Creamery made a loss of $250,000.

These are some of the main characters in this farce:



Photo 1, Kristan Cole, chairwoman of the Board of Agriculture and chairwoman of the Creamery Corporation Board. Daughter of Cheryl Mosely convicted felon... caught embezzling over $700,000 from two trust funds in Canada and Iowa, Sole Trustee of the Alaska Fund Trust and best friend to Sarah Palin.

Photo 2, Franci Havemeister, Director of Agriculture, previous soccer mom, had a basket business and loved cows as a child. Her father-in-law is Bob Havemeister, who owns the largest dairy farm. Went to high school with Sarah and now makes $95,000 a year

Photo 3, Kyle Beus, co-owner of the new Matanuska Creamery, previous dairy farmer who defaulted on a $2,000,000 dairy loan with the state

Photo 4, Karen Olson, CEO and CFO, co-owner of Matanuska Creamery. Previous dairy farmer who also defaulted on a $2,000,000 dairy loan in the past. She said on KTVA that they are now selling all they produce, so if that is the case and they have not been able to pay the farmers all they are owed for the milk, how are things going to get any better?

Photo 5, Rob Wells, previous Director of Agriculture, currently wearing an ankle bracelet for hitting a young boy on a snow machine and leaving the scene of the accident. Was involved with cranking out 30,000 lbs of cheese that had listeria and e. coli.

The latest instalment in this saga is the approval of yet another loan from the ARLF for $200,000, which Ms Olson said is going to be used to repay a previous loan and the milk suppliers.

Andrew Halcro gives us an insight into their business practices:

There is no question that the Valley Dairy is being run by people with a track record of defaulting on government loans. Between Kyle Beus and Karen Olson, they've defaulted on $4 million in loans.

This past fall, after discovering that Beus had made a draw of $15,000 from the dairy's account, Olson was heard by her former office administrator saying, "we're all f--ked...probably doing some jail time," as she paced the floor.

According to the former Milk Room Supervisor, the dairy has continued to dump milk in their septic system as well as spilling milk behind the dairy, after promising DEC that it would be cleaned up before it drains into the Wasilla Creek.

Beus has been seen by employees making cash sales to customers in the ice cream room and pocketing the money, as well as paying employees in cash.

The ARLF page on the State of Alaska website has clear rules regarding their loans:



Let's have a look at the total received from the state so far:

$600,000 - August 2007
$200,000 - December 2007
$630,000 - September/ November 2008
$200,000 - March 2009

The initial $600,000 loan was very likely written off as a loss when the dairy was still run by the state, so we can't officially consider it when calculating whether they are over the limit. The latest loan does take them above the limit, but all they have to do is repay $30,000 and go on their merry way, producing sub-standard over-priced products that cause food poisoning, paying the farmers twice what their milk is worth, until they have an itch to apply for another loan from their chums at the ARLF, in an endless loop.

The rules regarding ARLF loans are clearly laid out here. Pay particular attention to item (f).



Whatever equipment escaped the Christmas pillage was leased to them for $1,900 a month. Halcro touches on how they met these payments:

After less than a year in business, the Valley Dairy has successfully produced 30,000 pounds of contaminated cheese, failed to pay lease and tax payments promptly, mishandled milk waste around the Wasilla Creek and obtained state loans through fraudulent information and insider dealings on behalf of the Director of Agriculture and the Chair of the Agriculture Board.

The people involved in this private enterprise obviously don't know the first thing about the dairy business. Despite the $2,264,000 poured into it, they still haven't got their act together. Their track record makes them much more suitable to run a laundry business.

Sarah Palin's proud announcement when she quit as governor puts the cherry on the cake:

"We took government out of the dairy business and put it back into private-sector hands - where it should be."

Look at her face after she finished her quitting speech:

Sarah Palin looks like the cat who got the cream...

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UPDATE:

We are grateful that our readers have posted so many additional investigative details in the comments and would like to encourage everyone to keep digging. However, today we can only add a short update. More will follow in due course.

We have created a compilation of links which are connected to Dairygate - you can download them HERE.

Alaska Dispatch has reported on this story.

Note: Although this post has some new revelations, the bulk of it is simply an easy to follow overview of Dairygate. It would have been impossible to write it without referring to Andrew Halcro's blog, where a vast number of well researched, all sourced posts can be found. To read a lot more about Dairygate, please search Mat-Maid on Andrew's blog and let your heads spin!

UPDATE 2:

As a nice way to close this post, I'm going to share a comment on Andrew Halcro's blog with you. Somebody had a fairly accurate idea of what Santa-Kristan Cole-Claus put under her valley friends' Christmas trees:

Why on the Division of Ag website is # 4 under "Mat Maid Disposal" been DEACTIVATED? It was the complete list of inventory. Why was that removed a week ago? They don't want anyone to know what is missing???

They can't have it both ways...either they are a State Agency or a Private Corp.......they need to pick....they go back and forth almost weekly.

Auctioneers should be interested to know that the homogenizer, pasteurizer, gallon filler, stainless steel tanks, 3,000 linear feet of stainless piping, 15,000 milk cases, forklifts, all laboratory equipment numerous trucks and trailers, all the cheese equipment are all gone. They will not be available for the auction. All this is in the hands of the new Valley Dairy in Wasilla.

No one was given the opportunity to bid on any of this. In three days flat it was all hacked out of Mat Maid and delivered to three private individuals, Kyle Beus and Karen Lee Olson (defunct dairy farmers) and Rob Wells.

Sarah Palin knows how to cover her tracks and always assigns other people to do the dirty work. But if we put the pressure on her school friends appointed to high positions in her administration, I wonder... would these people be prepared to serve time in other government institutions for her?

(Andrew Halcro's article "The Valley Dairy: Got Fraud?" also appeared on Alaska Free Press.)
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Sarah Palin's Dairygate - Business 101

Dairygate rears its head again...

As in all Dairygate things, it makes your head spin. The creamery, whatever they call themselves these days, have just received another loan of $200,000 from the state, which they're going to use to pay an older loan and the milk producers.

I don't have a head for business and my ideas may be naive, but the way I understand it, a business pays the suppliers with money classed as profits, no? If a business has to borrow money to get started, they invest it in the business, produce whatever their industry is about, sell their product, make some profit and pay their debts, be it loans or what they owe their suppliers.

Our Dairygate friends are in a different business. It appears to me that the only purpose of this industry is to raise money, then more money, and just in case they didn't raise enough of it, they ask for some more money.

They get their money from the Agriculture Revolving Loan Fund. It's revolving alright.

re·volv·ing (r-vlvng) adj.
1. Tending to revolve or happen repeatedly.
2. Available at regular intervals.

Here's a breakdown of all the money received by this thriving business so far:

$600,000 - August 2007
$200,000 - December 2007
$624,000 - March 2008 (this money was juicy pork from uncle Ted Stevens)
$630,000 - September/ November 2008
$200,000 - March 2009

Sarah Palin is very proud on her achievement in privatizing a failing state business, as she stated in her quitting speech:

"We took government out of the dairy business and put it back into private-sector hands - where it should be."

Yes, she put it right into the greedy hands of her cronies.



Please read the previous Dairygate posts. Two of them, written on 26 February and 18 July 2009 give the names of these highly competent business people and will help you understand the background to this sorry saga.

(H/T to so_many_unanswered_questions)
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GRIFTER WATCH - 1) What happened to Sarah Palin's "legal" fund? - 2) Teabaggers latest - UPDATE

Kristan Cole is a close friend of Sarah Palin and acts as a spokesperson and fundraiser for the family. She created the Alaska Fund Trust, together with a website where things are explained to the gullible people she invites to donate money to Sarah Palin and her family.

The website uses the terms "open and transparent" frequently:

"I joined with fellow Alaskans in forming the Alaska Fund Trust to help alleviate Sarah's legal debt incurred while performing her job as well as eliminate the incentive for future attacks by her opponents. In doing so, we have created one of the most restrictive and transparent legal funds in history."

"Thank you for your interest in the Alaska Fund Trust. In the spirit of complete openness and transparency, the signed Alaska Fund Trust Agreement can be downloaded here."

"Halfway through her first term as Alaska's Governor, Sarah Palin has done so much for her state and her nation. She has been a champion for much needed transparency and accountability in government."

In the FAQs section of the website, we can see this question:

Q. Will there be any disclosure of contributions and expenses?

A. Yes. The Trustee will disclose on a quarterly basis the contributions as well as categories of expenses with amounts.

The fund was started on April 22, 2009 and nobody has seen any of the promised quarterly reports.

OK, Kristan, for the sake of so much openness, accountability and transparency, please show us the money!

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Here's Kristan acting as spokesperson, although she doesn't mention the fund. This video has some footage of Sarah Palin carrying Trig in her inimitable style.



One of the many accomplishments of Sarah Palin during her short stint in office was to appoint Kristan Cole and other grifters to positions where they could supervise the money grabbing operations of the revamped Mat-Su Creamery. Many good people endured heavy financial losses and had their reputations dragged through the mud while the grifters lined their pockets with federal and state money. Kristan Cole features heavily in the Dairygate fiasco.