Charges added in Palin e-mail case
Kernell had faced a single-count indictment charging him with illegally accessing Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account while she was the Republican vice presidential candidate in last year’s election. The new indictment cites many of the same underlying allegations as the first — that Kernell essentially guessed the answers to Palin’s security question, reset her password, looked through her e-mail in search of politically damaging information and, finding none, posted the new password on a Web site which allowed at least one person to also peruse Palin’s e-mail.
But the newest indictment does add three charges — identity theft for allegedly using Palin’s birth date to gain access to the e-mail account, wire fraud for allegedly cooking up a plan to get inside her e-mail account and obstruction of justice for allegedly zapping off his computer evidence of his alleged crimes “in contemplation” of a federal probe.