The Enlightened Despot

Readers who have been with us since the beginning will recall that the first topic the Despot really went crazy for was Sarah Palin’s refusal to release emails thought to be relevant to Troopergate. You can click some or all of those links if Alaskan politics are near and dear to your heart, but here’s a quick recap for the rest of you:

• Way back before John McCain reminded us all that we had a state stashed up somewhere near Canada, former Sarah Palin fan and long-time self-appointed corruption watchdog Andree McLeod requested a large quantity of emails from Palin’s office under Alaska’s version of the Freedom of Information Act. The governor complied, but with heavy redactions: over 1,000 were withheld entirely except for times, recipients, and subject headings, on the grounds of executive privilige or deliberative process.
• McCleod filed an appeal with the governor, and later in court, over the redactions. Particularly questionable were withheld emails sent by or to Palin’s husband Todd, who is not employed by the State of Alaska. While the relevant laws and precedents are (natch) complicated, one cannot generally claim privilege selectively - if something is not too sensitive to reveal to one private citizen, it’s not too sensitive to reveal to us all.
• On February 28th 2008, Palin aide Ivy Frye sent an email to a group including both Palins and aide Frank Bailey with the subject heading ‘PSEA’, which is the labor union representing Alaska’s State Troopers. The next morning, Sarah Palin replied to the same group of recipients. Shortly thereafter, Frank Bailey called Trooper Rodney Dial to discuss upcoming negotiations with PSEA. The focus of the call was to recruit Dial as a mole, passing internal union documents along to the governor’s office. This fun bit of corruption was foiled by the fact that Dial wasn’t actually a member of PSEA. Bailey then went on to ask about Trooper Walt Moneghan, the subject of Troopergate. This call was recorded, and was the most publicly understood piece of evidence against Sarah Palin, who repeatedly claimed she had no idea, before or after the fact, that Bailey and Dial had ever had the conversation.
• Shortly after the call, Bailey contacted Frye to tell her that Dial didn’t have access to “that stuff”, but would pass along anything he heard.

All of which is to say that there is a very good chance that emails which Palin is legally required to disclose very probably show that she was blatantly lying on the most straightforward question in the Troopergate investigation. McLeod’s appeal to uncover those emails is still going on. Meanwhile, Alaska’s Democratic Party has filed a seperate request for a wider group of emails. The governor’s office has delayed complying with this request for months, claiming technical difficulties. The request has to be read to be believed:

In the request, Alaska Democratic Party chairwoman Patti Higgins sought Palin’s schedules and calendars between Jan. 1, 2007, and Sept. 15, 2008. The Democrats also sought various categories of e-mails for about the same time period, including:

• All those between Palin and state Rep. John Coghill, R-North Pole, or between Palin and state Sen. Fred Dyson, R-Eagle River, with the words “abortion” or “AGIA,” which is short for the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act;

• All e-mails from Palin containing the following words: babysitter, childcare, McCain, Obama, Democrat, Huckabee, Wal-Mart, Eskimo, Natives, Kuwait, passport, Ruedrich, or Kopp;

• All e-mails between Palin and her husband, Todd, with any of the following words: vote, veto, budget, oil, Monegan, or Wooten; and

• All e-mails between Palin and her sister, Molly McCann, with the words Wooten or Monegan.

‘Kuwait’? ‘Eskimo’?  The PSEA emails will always be my Dead Sea Scrolls, but the Democrats seem to think there’s a lot more fun stuff where that came from. Which, after all, is about what you’d expect.

Tags: corruption, Palin, Todd Palin, troopergate

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under posts by Akhbar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.