Where The Sun Doesn't Shine

“Frank, This not the Governor’s personal account,” reads a February 7 email from Governor Palin’s official government email account, written by an aide named Donna to Frank Bailey, the Director of Boards and Commissions for the governor’s office. (Bailey was recently suspended, for his role in the Wootengate affair, but ultimately reinstated.)

“Whoops~!” Bailey wrote back.

The email Bailey was trying to send to Palin, revealed after self-described ethics watchdog and registered Republican Andrée McLeod filed a records request this summer, was a tally of the ethnic backgrounds of Palin’s appointees, noting that of those who had declared an ethnic background, some 10 percent were Alaska Native.

At the time, the governor was under fire because when she had the opportunity to nominate three appointees to the seven-member Board of Game, there were no Alaska Natives amongs her choices. This would have meant that, for the first time since its inception in 1976, the Game Board wouldn’t have had any Native members.

One of the three appointees, Teresa Sager-Albaugh, withdrew her name after lawmakers expressed outrage, and the day after Bailey’s email, Palin appointed Craig Fleener, an Athabascan, to the board.

When new stories revealed that the governor used at least two Yahoo accounts—gov.sarah@yahoo.com and gov.palin@yahoo.com—for state business, McLeod, a former ally of Palin’s, wondered what other state business had been conducted on the private email accounts.

“It appears from at least a couple of these emails that Andrée got in response to her first request that they were doing it purposefully, in order to keep this email traffic out of the state system, to keep it away from members of the public, and that’s really very disturbing,” says Donald Craig Mitchell, an Anchorage attorney representing McLeod in a recently filed lawsuit attempting to preserve any emails on private accounts pertaining to state business.

The state of Alaska requires public records of all public agencies to be open to inspection by the public, with few exceptions—this and laws like it in other states are known as Sunshine Laws.