She's a warrior for transparency...except when it comes to herself:
Alaska state regulations require public officials to make public records available to the public within 10 days in most cases.
On Monday evening, Sarah Palin's former staff in the Alaska governor's office requested another delay in making public 25,000 e-mails exchanged by Palin, her husband and her senior aides.
The governor's office is asking the state's attorney general to approve a delay of five more months, until May 30, 2011.
At that point, the request filed by msnbc.com and other news organizations will have been pending for 986 days.
Sarah Palin was governor of Alaska for 966 days.
In other words, if the delay is granted, the wait for the e-mails will have lasted longer than the Palin administration.
David Corn adds:
Last June, the state did release to MSNBC.com and NBC News nearly 3,000 pages of emails Todd Palin had exchanged with state officials. (The documents showed how deeply involved the "First Dude" was in official affairs.) But Sarah Palin's emails remained behind a bureaucratic firewall.
The governor's office—after consolidating various media requests—did start working on the case in the fall of 2008. And it also began requesting extensions from the state attorney general. Over the past two years, the office has asked for over a dozen extensions, and the state AG always said yes.
By early December 2008, the governor's office had collected 25,700 emails it deemed responsive to the assorted requests. It told the state attorney general that it would require at least 33 working days to print them (using one or more interns to print 100 emails an hour). Only after the emails are in hard-copy form, the governor's office said, could the state Department of Law review each one "to ensure that protected interests of private or government persons or entities are not infringed."
The governor's office did try a faster alternative. It provided the emails to the Department of Law in electronic form, hoping that office could use software it had recently obtained to review the emails electronically. This would cut out the long printing process. But, according to a January 28, 2009, memo from the Department of Law, the lawyers "found no way to convert the e-mail records from the format provided to the portable document format (pdf) necessary to use the new software, without opening each individual message to convert it." The memo also noted, "We were unable to batch-print the e-mail records in the format provided." Though the governor's office had indicated nearly two months earlier that the printing process was underway, it appeared that the records were still not printed and, thus, not available for review by the state's lawyers. The Department of Law noted, "we can only guess how long it will take to review the records."
I can see a slight delay, but nearly three years without results? You've got to be kidding me. And the claim that there does not exist a software program to batch-convert email to PDF is blatantly false, an obvious attempt to delay progress in complying with the law. The only real question is what is Palin so eager to hide?