Finding Sarah Palin's Contract

Photo: RICH PEDRONCELLI / Associated Press

Caption: California State University, Stanislaus, students Alicia Lewis, left, and Ashli Briggs move papers – intact and shredded, found in a campus trash bin – Tuesday in the Capitol. They say the papers include part of Sarah Palin's contract to speak at the school in June.





Brilliant! Just brilliant! I bow down before Alicia Lewis, Ashli Briggs, et al.!:

The controversy surrounding Sarah Palin's upcoming speech at CSU Stanislaus took a bizarre turn Tuesday when two students said they had found part of her confidential contract in a campus Dumpster.

..."I mean, who expected to go into a Dumpster and find, intact, the Sarah Palin contract? No one expected that," said Ashli Briggs, a 23-year-old student who presented the document at a Capitol news conference Tuesday.

...The hot question – how much the foundation is paying Palin for her speech – is not answered in the pages the students found. Palin reportedly receives up to $100,000 per appearance.

The students uncovered what appear to be the last six pages of a nine-page contract, none of which mentions Palin by name. But the pages say the speaker requests "round-trip, first-class commercial air travel for two between Anchorage, Alaska, and event city." The customer can instead provide a private plane, the contract says, if it is "a Lear 60 or larger."

The contract is dated March 16 and printed on letterhead from the Washington Speakers Bureau, which represents Palin. It says the customer must provide the speaker and her party with a "one-bedroom suite and two single rooms in a deluxe hotel."

Media coverage must be tightly controlled, according to the contract. It's up to the speaker to approve any recording, and photography is limited to the first three minutes of the speech and a highly orchestrated photo-op for audience members to have their picture taken with the speaker. The contract includes a diagram showing how furniture should be arranged for the photo shoot with audience members.

During her speech, the speaker requests two bottles of water and bendable straws.

The contract pages were presented at a news conference called by state Sen. Leland Yee, a San Francisco Democrat, along with two garbage bags of shredded documents the students said they also found in the trash container Friday.

It was a furlough day for the campus, and Briggs – who has appeared on Fox News objecting to Palin's visit – said she got a tip that some unusual activity was taking place. She said she and a few other students went to investigate and found people carrying bags of garbage out of the administration building.

Yee says the timing is suspicious. Earlier in the week, in response to a Public Records Act request he had sent the university asking for Palin's contract, officials told him they didn't have it.

"It is truly shocking and a gross violation of the public trust that such documents would be thrown away and destroyed during a pending investigation," Yee said Tuesday in a statement.