Palin Must Save Her Yahoo E-Mails, Judge Rules
By Karl Vick
An Anchorage judge has ordered Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to preserve e-mails from private accounts she has used to conduct state business.
Superior Court Judge Craig Stowers on Friday also ordered Alaska's attorney general to recover messages from a Yahoo.com account of Palin's that was breached by hackers last month. That break-in prompted Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign to order closed at least one additional private account Palin maintained.
The judge issued the orders at the request of Andree McLeod, an Anchorage activist whose pursuit of Palin's e-mails revealed that the governor did considerable state business from a Yahoo e-mail address -- an arrangement that avoided the safeguards and accountability of the state's secure e-mail system.
Last month a second Yahoo account maintained by Palin was hacked and images of its inbox were posted publicly online. The inbox included e-mails with subject lines that seemed clearly to relate to legislation.
A Tennessee man was indicted Thursday on charges of illegally resetting Palin's password and posting several pages from
gov.palin@yahoo.com.
Yet another private address outside the Yahoo system came to light earlier this month, when The Washington Post reported that Palin, her husband and close aides established last spring e-mail accounts that were apparently known only to one another. The accounts were nested within an Internet domain maintained by a Wasilla computer company.
The company and the McCain campaign confirmed the existence of the accounts, although it was denied by Frank Bailey, the Palin aide who company officials said set up the accounts and had the authority to administer them.
The McCain campaign ordered those e-mail accounts for Palin and her husband frozen after the Yahoo hacking became known. The Yahoo breach also affected the functioning of state government.
"Until she was hacked, we were communicating just about daily," Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell told the Associated Press the following week. "Now I'm talking with her chief of staff."
Judge Stowers called the effort to recover and preserve Palin e-mails relating to state business "important" and noted that Alaska's public record law was last updated before the rise of the Internet.
"On one hand, I'm pleased that the judge saw fit to order the retrieval and preservation of these e-mails, to the extent of going to the providers to get them," said McLeod, a Republican who was formerly close to Palin. "But on the other hand, I'm amazed that I even have to go to court to get the governor to comply with Alaska's public record laws."
McLeod is also seeking the release by Palin of some 1,100 e-mails the governor held back from an earlier public records request, citing executive privilege. McLeod's lawyer asserts that Palin waived that privilege by routinely copying messages to her husband, Todd, who is not a state employee.
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