24,199 pages of Palin e-mails to be released Friday morning
The long-delayed release of public records in Alaska, 24,199 pages of emails sent between former Gov. Sarah Palin (and her husband) and state officials, will happen in Juneau at 9 a.m. Friday, the Alaska governor’s office announced Monday.
News organizations and citizens requested the emails under the state public records law back in 2008, when the relatively unknown Palin burst onto the national scene, and when it became known that she and her staff were using personal Yahoo accounts to conduct state business outside the usual reach of public records requests.
The records to be released include emails that went between the Yahoo accounts of Palin or her husband, Todd Palin, and about 50 top state officials. When one side of those email discussions passed through the state mail computers, it became a public record. (A legal challenge now in the state Supreme Court addresses the broader question of whether all the governor’s emails about state business, even if conducted between Yahoo accounts without passing through state computers, should also be considered a public record.)
The state at first quoted prices as high as $15 million for the records, but the price is now down to 3 cents a page, or $725.97 for a set of the records. The state plans to release the documents at the door to the governor’s office, and to provide handtrucks to help the reporters and citizens get the documents to the car. Other copies are being shipped to Anchorage and elsewhere.
