Palin Sued for Private E-Mails About State Business

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/04/palin_sued_for_private_e-mails.html

This is a much larger issue than "Troopergate." Although we know that Palin fires people simply for disagreeing with her, it's not as serious a violation of the public trust as using private email for government business. Public business must be conducted under the gaze of the public!

If this is what Palin means by running an open government, she must have taken her lessons from Dick Cheney.

Deb

Palin Sued for Private E-Mails About State Business
By Matthew Mosk
ANCHORAGE -- In a lawsuit filed in Alaska Superior Court, a Republican activist seeks to force Gov. Sarah Palin to produce copies of official correspondence she sent and received on private e-mail accounts.

Andrée McLeod filed the suit Wednesday and publicized it in a news release today. "Rather than using her state e-mail account, throughout her two-year tenure as Governor of Alaska, defendant Sarah Palin, as a matter of routine, has used, and, on information and belief, continues to use, (at least) two private e-mail accounts... to conduct official business of the State of Alaska," the suit alleges.

The suit is the latest front in a battle McLeod is waging over Palin's e-mail. In June, she filed an open-records request and received four boxes of redacted e-mails. But more than 1,100 others were withheld, an action Palin justified by claiming executive privilege. McLeod appealed that claim last month before going to court last week.

McLeod has questioned whether Palin was using private e-mail accounts to conduct state business in a manner that would skirt open-records laws. In one notable e-mail, a Palin aide apologized for discussing state business on a public account. "Whoops!" Palin aide Frank Bailey wrote, after addressing an e-mail to the governor's official state address. "Frank, this is not the Governor's personal account," a secretary reminded him.

A spokeswoman for the McCain-Palin campaign has acknowledged the use of private accounts. "As a champion of government accountability and transparency, Governor Palin was exercising an abundance of caution to ensure that all state and personal business matters were being kept separate," Meghan Stapleton said recently. "Governor Palin is committed to serving with the highest regard toward ethics."

But McLeod said she believes the Palin administration fostered a "culture of corruption" in Alaska where neither she nor her top aides were accountable to rules of transparency in government.

"The extent of the use of these private e-mail accounts demonstrates the extent of deception that the governor is operating under," McLeod said in an interview today. "The process is corrupt. The overall question now becomes, how did it become so broken that nobody could tell her, 'Don't do that.' That's why I'm going to the courts."

Palin had routinely used a Yahoo e-mail address until abruptly abandoning it after hackers penetrated the account on Sept. 17 and posted screen-captures from its inbox on the Internet.

Last week, The Washington Post reported that Palin maintained an additional private e-mail account, which she used to communicate with a small circle of staff members outside the state government's secure official e-mail system, according to sources at the Wasilla company that established the system.

McLeod, a former state employee who once was close to Palin, has also filed an ethics complaint against the governor and others, citing e-mail traffic that appeared to show that her office improperly helped a Palin fundraiser obtain a civil service position.