The Enlightened Despot

Whatever the Legislative Council releases today will almost certainly be the most visible Palin story of the day. But unless that report found much more than it was expected to, the more important story is this:

A lawsuit aimed at forcing Gov. Sarah Palin to preserve any private e-mails she wrote involving state business hits the courtroom today.

Former state employee Andree McLeod filed the suit a week ago. The goal, she said, is to make Palin retrieve e-mails from her private accounts that involve state business and make them part of the state’s public records.

The Despot has long argued that these emails are the most likely place to find a smoking gun in Palin’s past. A one sentence summary: based on the times and subject headings of emails Palin has withheld on the grounds of executive privilege, there is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that Palin knew about, or perhaps even ordered, the phone call from Frank Bailey to Rodney Dial that has been the most damning piece of evidence in the scandal so far. If anything of the sort is in those emails, and the court rules that they be made public before the election, it would be a complete disaster for John McCain.

As usual with this story, the coverage is pretty slim. In fact, if you follow the link above to the story at the (excellent) ADN, you’ll see that it is only a few paragraphs above a longer story about Ted Stevens’ “Neck and Neck” reelection campaign. This is what makes Alaskan politics so fun to read about: electoral victory is never guarunteed, even with a slogan like “I Definitely Won’t be in Prison for Corruption on Election Day!”