The hits just keep on coming for Sarah Palin. Just as word comes down that more investigations are on the Alaska horizon, an Anchorage judge orders her to hang on to her Yahoo account and emails used for state business.
One assumes the judge assumes there’s still some on there. The judge’s order applies to all private email accounts, including the Yahoo account famously hacked last month by a Tennessee legislator’s son. Also included is an account Palin set up through a Wasilla computer company to handle emails between Palin, her husband Todd, and her aides, also known as the “Palinistas.” The account was only known to these 15 or so individuals until a couple of insiders blew the whistle.
One of those insiders says the person who set up the account inquired about encrypting email, but balked at the cost of encryption.
The judge asked Alaska’s attorney general to retrieve messages from Palin’s Yahoo account in order to decide whether Palin had reason to skirt public record laws, or to invoke executive privilege by holding back 1,100 emails when responding to an open records request.
When asked about the private email, the McCain campaign issued the following statement:
“As a champion of government accountability and transparency, Governor Palin was exercising an abundance of caution to ensure that all state and personal business matters were being kept separate,” said Meghan Stapleton. “Governor Palin is committed to serving with the highest regard toward ethics.”
A couple of interesting things about that statement: it directly contradicts the Palin aide said to have been in charge of the account and to have asked about encryption, who denied the account was in use; it shows the McCain campaign may really be made up of regular, generally honest Joes and not 150 or so lobbyists because they sure can’t lie worth a damn.
It’s worth noting, at least, that statement was made before the Troopergate ruling. So maybe Stapleton really thought so, then.
