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| Sarah Palin running at Musk Ox farm in 2003. |
The Alaska Supreme Court has upheld a lower court decision that does not forbid use of private email accounts for state officials conducting state business.
The case stemmed from emails sent during then-Gov. Sarah Palin's administration. Palin and members of her administration used private emails to conduct state business. Activist Andree McLeod submitted a records request for all emails sent to or from the private accounts of Palin and her husband, and also sued, seeking to have each email declared a public record.
The lower court interpreted public records as state agency records preserved or appropriate for preservation under the records management act.
The high court agreed, saying not every record a state employee creates is appropriate for preservation under the act.
You know I suffered a little blowback in May of 2011, when I suggested that Andree McLeod was perhaps getting in the way of drilling down into the truth about Sarah Palin and her e-mails.
I said then, and I believe now, that our best bet at seeing exactly what it was that Palin was hiding was to see the e-mails in Frank Bailey's possession. However due to McLeod's aggressive attempts to see those e-mails by going through the courts, Bailey ended up paying an almost $12,000 fine and then handing over the majority of his e-mails to the state, where we now learn they will remain locked up forever.
I begged and pleaded that Bailey release his e-mails through a Wiki-leaks type of program but, even though I had heard that something like that might be a possibility, it never happened.
The thing is that way back before Bailey ever signed on to do a book deal I received some information as to what those e-mails contained, and it was indeed explosive. However most of that NEVER found its way into "Blind Allegiance." So now that these e-mails are forever locked up, we will simply never have the opportunity to see the REAL truth that Palin worked so hard to hide from the Alaskan people.
I have said it before, but it is worth repeating, if you want to learn the truth about Sarah Palin in Alaska, going the traditional legal route is a complete waste of time.
Update: Perhaps this from the ADN will clarify things a little better:
The opinion also found that allowing employees to choose not to preserve a document "is not absurd because, as the State notes, 'each state agency has the best understanding of the preservation value of its own documents.'
"The court said it agrees with the state that use of private email accounts "is no more an obstruction of access to public records than communicating through paper letters. As the superior court noted, the law requires a state employee to retain records; whether the record exists in paper or electronic form does not change the analysis.
"Thus using private email accounts for conducting state business, alone, does not constitute an 'obstruction' of access to public records under the Public Records Act," the court said.
McLeod's attorney, Don Mitchell, said he disagrees with the court's position equating private email messages to letters that get placed in an office file. "There's no way to know whether these private emails exist at all," he said, adding that the private Palin emails came to light when McLeod, through a public records request, noticed a private email address for Palin.
And this:
He viewed the decision as a partial win for McLeod, and an "important step in the proper direction," clarifying the definition of a public record and the state's preservation obligations.
Like I said it does not appear that the courts have any intention of honoring Andree's request to force Palin to release to the public the emails from her "private" account, even though they were used to conduct state business. Therefore the only way we could have access to them is if Bailey were to release them on his own. And that also does not appear to be a possibility any longer.
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