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.

They’ve been released. (h/t Ben Smith.) I’ve generally avoided filing whenever possible, so these forms are a little alien to me, but one thing that jumps out at me is that the oil industry is clearly where you want to be. Most jobs that pay six figures are fairly full-time affairs, but - again, if I’m reading this right - Todd earned $102,716.90 working for BP in 2006, but still had time to take in $16,516 in snow machine racing winnings, and catch $31,566 worth of fish. By the way, it turns out that fishing is a cash business. The bottom line here is that they need to open up ANWR and give me a job.

As Sarah Palin gets ready to debate in St. Louis on Thursday, lawyers working on her behalf will be in court, attempting to halt the legislature’s investigation into Troopergate. That might not make the top five Palin stories of the day, but if the investigation is allowed to proceed, the results will be due on October 10th. The refusal of Palin’s aides to cooperate (for which they may be held in contempt of court) makes it unlikely that there will be much of anything new to report, but it could mean more bad press, and more akward questions for Palin to refuse to answer.

For my money, though, the withheld emails are still the issue the media should be pressuring Palin about.

I can now say with reasonable certainty that Andree McLeod’s current appeal will be denied. (If you’re not following me, catch up here and here.) This has nothing to with the merits of the argument, and everything to do with the fact that the appeal is being considered by… wait for it… Sarah Palin. The first recourse for someone whose request for public records is denied is an appeal to the agency that did the denying, asking them to reconsider. In this case, I’m guessing not too much deliberation will be required.

There is, of course, another level of appeal once this falls through, though I have not yet figured out what the details of that are. I’m also not certain how long Palin gets to pretend to deliberate before rejecting the appeal, but the time limit for responding to the initial request for documents is ten business days; if the limit for responding to an appeal is the same, she would have to say ‘no’ a week from Tuesday.

Kevin Drum has a copy of the appeal. Though I am by no means a legal expert, I haven’t found someone who is one talking about this, so I muddled my way through it and looked up some of the relevant laws. Here is a very rough outline of the argument:

1.) First off, the Freedom of Information Act isn’t directly involved at all. The documents were requested under an Alaskan law which serves the same purpose.

2.) As it turns out, there is nothing like executive privilege anywhere on the books in Alaska. There is, however, a list of exceptions included in the FOIA-like law, one of which is the following: “(4) records required to be kept confidential by a federal law or regulation or by state law”. An Alaskan court ruled that an executive privilege should be understood as assured by the seperation of powers embodied in Alaska’s constitution. A later ruling held that this ruling should be considered a state law for the purposes of (4) above. (This is unrelated, but note that the Alaskan courts did a nifty bit of legislating on the grounds of the seperation of powers. But don’t get me started.)

3.) There are apparently no relevant precedents in Alaskan law concerning executive privilege being invoked with regards to a document that was sent to a private citizen.

4.) The Alaska Supreme Court has ruled that federal rulings on executive privilege with regards to the FOIA are “instructive” as to how Alaska’s executive privilege non-law should be interpreted.

5.) There are relevant precedents in federal law. There, the courts have ruled that voluntarily granting access to someone who isn’t an employee of the executive constitutes waiving executive privilege.

QED. Or so it would seem. It would be great if someone were reporting on this in a substantive way, so that legal experts could evaluate this, but no one is, so that will have to do for now.

Or rather for the White House Communications Agency, which - according to Wikipedia - is responsible for coming up with Secret Service codenames. In any case, whoever does this is very, very good at his job, as evidenced by Dick Cheney’s codename, ‘Angler’. Well, they’ve done it again. Todd Palin will now be known as ‘Driller’, though Obama may still be on top with ‘Renegade’. Why there isn’t a viral video set to the Jay-Z/Eminem song of the same name has long puzzled me.

(h/t Ambinder - who seems to think the candidates themselves have a hand in choosing them, but doesn’t cite a source.)