Is Alaska Governor Sarah Palin taking I.T. tips from Dick Cheney and Karl Rove?
As Mother Jones first reported, her office, responding to an open records act request, refused to release about 1100 emails involving Palin and her aides, citing what seems to be an iffy claim of executive privilege. And now another email issue has emerged: Palin’s use of a private email account for her official duties.
Emails obtained by Andrée McLeod, the independent government watchdog in Alaska who filed that opens records request, indicate that Palin, who is running along side John McCain to replace Cheney, has used a gov.sarah@yahoo.com account–rather than an Alaska state email account–for official business. As McLeod, a registered Republican, points out, this raises at least two potential problems. One is security. Is Palin conducting state business outside of secured Alaska state servers? Another is transparency. Can her emails on this private account be properly maintained and archived? Can they be reviewed in response to, say, an open records act request?
To date, nether Palin nor her spokespeople have had anything to say about the withheld emails or her use of a private email address for state business.
