Sarah Palin Selling Hollywood-Style Mansion For $800K Profit As ‘SarahPAC’ Pleads For More Cash

Sarah Palin, who once made a salary of $125,000 as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, purchased a six-bedroom, six-and-half-bath mansion fit for a Hollywood movie star just over four years ago, in 2011. Palin bought the lavish Scottsdale, Arizona, estate just two years after quitting as Alaska governor halfway through her 4-year-term to pursue the various financial and publicity opportunities that became available to her after her failed run for vice-president on the Republican ticket in 2008.

She paid a healthy $1.695 million for the estate, which features a pool, spa, and lighted, pro-quality basketball court, as well as private movie theater, six-car garage, wine cellar, and built-in barbecue grill.

But as of December, Palin had put the mansion and its surrounding grounds on the market — at a price just shy of $2.5 million, meaning that once the property sells, the fired Fox News pundit will pocket a nifty profit of more than $800,000.

That sum, as Raw Story blogger Thomas Boggioni noted on Saturday, is still less than the $1.3 million in overruns that Palin cost her town of Wasilla when, as mayor, she botched a deal to construct a small hockey rink and indoor sports complex.

Within less than a year of resigning the Alaska governor’s office, Palin had added to her personal bank account to the tune of $12 million, according to an ABC News report. Most of that money came from multimillion dollar book deals and her six-figure speaking engagement fees, a reality TV show for which she was paid a reported $250,000 per episode, and a multi-year contract to serve as a commentator for the behemoth conservative media outlet, Fox News.

Last year, however, Fox News terminated Palin’s contract, leaving her without an over-the-air TV outlet that would pay her to deliver her often-colorful political screeds. At the same time, according to a report on the online magazine Slate, her political action committee, SarahPAC, showed its lowest total of cash on hand since she founded it in 2009.

Watch a recent Sarah Palin appearance on Fox News, in which she explains her support for Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, in the video below.

While the $562,000 on hand was “better than what most political committees could boast,” the Slate article noted, the total marked the first time that the fund, supposedly earmarked for political candidates and causes supported by Palin, dipped below the $800,000 plateau, and had typically seen more than $1 million in cash on its ledgers.

In addition, the Slate investigation revealed, not much of the SarahPAC cash actually went to political activities, with large amounts paid to the PAC’s own administrators as well as for Palin’s personal travel expenses — including a bill for more than $4,500 at New York’s plush Waldorf Astoria Hotel and a nearly $3,900 limousine ride after her appearance on the 40th anniversary Saturday Night Live TV special in New York.

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Nonetheless, SarahPAC — even as Palin markets her palatial estate 4.9 acre, which is touted in sales material as offering “opulence at its finest” — continues to solicit funds from individual conservative donors across the country, promising to use the cash to oppose “liberals like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders,” and to “defund and investigate Planned Parenthood,” among other causes dear to the conservative movement that lionizes Palin.

The mansion was purchased by a company called Safari Investments LLC in 2011, a company of which Sarah Palin was a member, according to CBS News. But as “opulent” as the mansion may be, it was purchased as simply a “second home” for Palin and her family, according to real estate agent Richard Barker, who is in charge of selling the home for the former vice-presidential hopeful.

Sarah Palin is not the only member of the Palin family to have profited from her public standing in the six years since she resigned as Alaska governor. Her 25-year-old daughter has been paid “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” The International Business Times reported, to give speeches advocating sexual abstinence — though she, herself, is the mother of two children from two different relationships without having been married.

[Photo By Mark Wilson/Getty Images]