Another Sarah Palin Email Controversy?

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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.

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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