Alaska governors office releases 1000s of Sarah Palin emails
Alaska state officials released about 24,000 pages of e-mail from former Gov. Sarah Palin's administration Friday in response to requests from reporters dating back to her 2008 entry into the national spotlight.
The release follows Freedom of Information Act requests filed by CNN and five other news agencies made shortly after Palin was tapped to be Sen. John McCain's GOP vice presidential running mate.
Roughly three dozen reporters and photographers squeezed into the narrow hallways of a state office building in Juneau as clerks handed out six heavy boxes of papers to each news organization.
The documents were accompanied by a 189-page index that included a brief summary of their contents, including the senders, recipients and anyone copied on the messages.
"The thousands upon thousands of emails released today show a very engaged Governor Sarah Palin being the CEO of her state," said Tim Crawford, treasurer of Sarah PAC, Palin's political action committee.
"The e-mails detail a governor hard at work. Everyone should read them."
Among the material being made public are Palin's e-mails dealing with state business -- using both her official account as well as private accounts, according to Linda Perez, the administrative director for current Gov. Sean Parnell.
A search was done "in an effort to capture everything in the state e-mail system" that would comply with the request, Perez said.
Then lawyers within the state Department of Law recommended what should be released and what should be withheld under state requirements, and the final decision was made by the governor's office, Perez said.
Members of the media, including CNN, were informed last week in an e-mail from the governor's office that the release was imminent. The e-mail said some of the documents will be redacted and others will be withheld due to several legal privileges that are permissible under the state's disclosure law, including attorney-client and some executive deliberations.
Perez said 2,275 pages are not being released.
The documents being released cover requests from December 2006 through September 2008, when Palin was named the Republican vice presidential candidate.
E-mails for the remaining 10 months of her tenure, before her resignation, are not yet being released.
The e-mails will be reviewed by CNN, with some posted online at CNN.com.
As early as last week, Palin said she was not worried about what was in the e-mails.
"I think every rock in the Palin household that could ever be kicked over and uncovered anything, it's already been kicked over," Palin told Fox News Sunday.
Palin told Fox News Sunday that "those e-mails obviously weren't meant for public consumption," saying she was sure the material would be taken out of context.
"They'll never truly know what the context of each one of those e-mails was, or each one of the issues were that I was working on that day, or in what time period," she said.
Alaska Dispatch political columnist Amanda Coyne says all the attention is "for what I'm betting won't be much."
"There will be tidbits, but nothing that a few local reporters and bloggers couldn't cover quite nicely," Coyne wrote in a recent column.
Adult-us: I can't wait to hear some of the 'tidbits' that come out...
