Palin Emails: Coming Friday

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D-Day for the Sarah Palin email release is Friday.

The state of Alaska has informed media representatives that on this day it will be handing out the 24,000-plus pages of Palin’s gubernatorial emails it is releasing in response to a request I initiated in September 2008, shortly after John McCain tapped the first-term Alaska governor to be his running mate. The material will be made available at 9:00 a.m., which will be Friday afternoon on the East Coast, the traditional time for a dump of government documents. But it could have been worse: the state could have opted to release the records on Friday afternoon, Alaska time.

Here’s the last update we’ve posted on this long-running saga:

During the 2008 presidential campaign, I filed a request under Alaska’s open records law, for all—yes, all—of Palin’s gubernatorial emails. Other journalists and citizen activists later did the same. And after many delays—see here and here—the state is finally preparing to release those emails, probably within the next week or so.

But not all of the emails from Palin’s half-term as governor will be made public. In a letter that was recently sent to me and other requesters, the state says it will be disclosing 24,199 pages of records. But it notes, “We withheld and redacted some records that are responsive to your request.” Previously the state said that it had located and/or recovered 26,552 pages of emails. This suggests that state of Alaska is withholding 2,353 pages. And there’s no telling how heavily the remainder of the emails will be redacted.

The state has a history of making liberal use of exemptions to hold back gubernatorial records. Months before Palin was tapped by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the GOP presidential nominee, to be his running mate in 2008, her office declined to release 1,100 emails from two Palin aides in response to an open records request filed by citizen activist Andrée McLeod. The state claimed that these emails were exempt because they concerned confidential policy matters. Yet a list of the subject headings of the withheld emails referred to non-policy and political matters, suggesting that the state had taken a decidedly expansive interpretation of the available exemptions.

Also, because Palin used a personal email account for many of her official communications—perhaps improperly—this new trove will not be comprehensive. The state’s IT crew did recover the emails from her official account, and it also located emails that passed between Palin’s personal account and the official accounts of several dozen state employees, including her top aides. But emails that sent to and from her personal account to other people—even if they involved state business—will not be part of this collection, nor will emails that Palin sent from her personal account to the personal accounts of aides and other state officials. By using a personal account for official business, Palin was able to evade, in part, the open records rules of her state.

When the records are released, Mother Jones will partner up with msnbc.com and ProPublica to create an online archive of the Palin emails. This database will be searchable and fully open to the public. The plan is for it to be up and running about a week after the papers are handed over to us. By that point, several media outfits—including Mother Jones—will have combed through the records. Yet any reader who wants to sit in a cozy chair with an iPad or laptop and spend hours upon hours absorbing Palin’s e-correspondence—looking for missed nuggets or merely seeking further insight into Palin’s governorship—will be able to do so, courtesy of those of us who spent the past two-and-a-half years pushing these records into the open. Here comes some real summer reading.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

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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