Palin's Husband Receives Summons in State Trooper Investigation

Alaska's legislators shook up the presidential race yesterday with a vote to subpoena Todd Palin, the husband of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, to question him about whether she sacked the state's police chief in order to settle a personal score.

The demand to interview Todd Palin was the latest move in a state senate investigation into accusations that Sarah Palin dismissed state public safety commissioner Walter Monegan because he refused to sack a state trooper caught in a messy divorce with Palin's sister. Palin maintains she let Monegan go over a budget dispute.

If the investigation finds that Palin used her influence as governor to further a family matter, it could threaten McCain's bid for the presidency. The Republican party has sought to portray Palin, Alaska's governor since December 2006, as a corruption fighter.

Stephen Branchflower, the former prosecutor conducting the inquiry for the state senate, did not seek to subpoena the governor but has said he would like to interview her. Todd Palin was one of 13 people the panel voted to subpoena. The state senate panel rejected efforts by two of its Republican members to delay the matter until after the November 4 election. Their report is due next month. The investigation began in the weeks before McCain selected Palin as his running mate . The Republicans say the inquiry is politically motivated.

Monegan says that Palin, her aides and her husband, a commercial fisherman and oilfield worker, approached him and complained that trooper Mike Wooten was still employed by the department. Palin fired Monegan in July, and Monegan has publicly said he believes the firing was connected with his refusal to remove Wooten.

Sarah Palin's sister Molly married Wooten in 2001 in April 2005 filed for divorce. The Palin family has said Wooten threatened to kill Sarah Palin's father and has lodged more than two dozen official complaints about him with the public safety department. An investigation found that Wooten illegally killed a moose, drank beer in a patrol car and demonstrated a Taser on his 10-year-old stepson. He remains on the force.

Earlier, Palin gave voters a further glimpse of her views in a series of three interviews with ABC television that exposed gaps on climate change."I'm attributing some of man's activities to potentially causing some of the changes in the climate right now," she told ABC's Charlie Gibson.

The statement contradicted her past assertions that she did not believe global warming was a result of human activity. She denied expressing such doubts in her ABC interview, but she told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner last December: "I'm not an Al Gore, doom-and-gloom environmentalist blaming the changes in our climate on human activity." She also told ABC that Washington should not intervene if Israel attacked Iran's nuclear facilities and adopted a more hawkish posture towards Russia than George Bush.

At a military ceremony on Thursday, Palin linked the Iraq war to al-Qaida and 9/11. The Washington Post said she told troops deploying to Iraq, including her son, Track, that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans".