Frank Bailey has agreed to pay civil penalties totaling $11,900

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 21, 2012

Anchorage, Alaska: Sarah Palin’s top aide Frank Bailey has agreed to pay civil penalties totaling $11,900 to resolve an ethics complaint. The complaint was filed on September, 2010 by Andrée McLeod when she learned that Bailey misused confidential documents and emails he had acquired while he worked for Palin.



“Justice has yet to be served. I have called on the Attorney General to reveal all the public’s documents and emails that Bailey confiscated and shared with others when he left state employment.”



McLeod and members of the media have requested all of Palin’s email communications for the time she was Alaska’s governor. Although some have been revealed, many couldn’t be located because of Palin’s rampant use of private email accounts for official business, and thousands more remain undisclosed as Alaska’s governor’s office cites executive privileges and other delay tactics.



“Every one of those confidential and still undisclosed public documents that were in Bailey’s possession must be made public, immediately, as Bailey broke the chain of custody when he illegally shared them with his co-authors Jeanne Devon and Ken Morris,” McLeod said.



“This is the second time that Sarah’s go-to guy has been found to have crossed the line. The first was back in November of 2008 when I filed another complaint against Sarahand her staff, including Bailey,” McLeod said.



McLeod continues, “This agreement proves, yet again, that Sarah Palin's account of her role in reforming Alaska’s government while governor is truly the only real ‘false narrative’ being bandied about.”


NOTE: The settlement agreement from the AK. Department of Law is attached, and is also available upon request.

The initial September, 2010 McLeod complaint is attached, and is also available upon request.

Using the absurd to demonstrate the absurd tactics of Palin's Administration

Hackers say they have gained access to U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo account and published some of its contents on the Wikileaks Web site. That site seems to have been taken down. Gawker has many of the subject titles and content of Palin's yahoo email account gov.palin@yahoo.com.

I think the secret service had something to do with that and they requested all documents to be handed over. However, I heard on a local news source that AP refused......

On Wednesday, Wikileaks published several screen shots of Yahoo e-mail messages, e-mail addresses of Palin family members and associates, and other data that hackers claim to have obtained from Palin's private Yahoo account.

One e-mail message appears to be from Alaska Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell, complaining to Palin about an interview by Alaska radio show host Dan Fagan. "Arghhh! He is so inconsistent and purposefully misleading," Palin apparently writes in response. The potential Veep is in a bit of trouble for conducting state business using her personal, unarchived email address (gov.sarah@yahoo.com) instead of her official account (which is, of course, subject to laws requiring the retention of government records). Emails from that Yahoo account are already being sought in connection with the Troopergate investigation.

Andrée McLeod, the activist who filed a FOIA request, said Wednesday evening that Palin should have known better than to conduct state business using an unsecured e-mail account.
"If this woman is so careless as to conduct state business on a private e-mail account that has been hacked into, what in the world is she going to do when she has access to information that is vital to our national security interests?" she asked.

Washington Post

Alaska state business done on the Yahoo mail server.

IF THE QUESTION is whether personal e-mail accounts should be used for state business by Gov. Sarah Palin and her staff the answer is obvious.

And that answer is no. Such a practice does not ensure that public information will be saved and appears to be a neat way around Alaska’s public records law.

Her spokesman, Bill McAllister says, according to the Daily News’s front-page story by Lisa Demer this morning, that he does not hear any “public clamor for access to internal communications of the governor’s office.” Unfortuntely, who cares what he has heard or not heard?

Those communications, unless properly classified as protected by executive privilege, if sent on state equipment, on state time, by a state employee, belong not to the governor’s office or McAllister, but to the people of Alaska.

The idea of the law is to make as much information as possible available about government to average person, not to make such information unavailable.

Unfortunately, it appears this administration for some time has been trying to keep the public in the dark by mixing public and private e-mail accounts to cover its tracks, and there is no telling how long, or if, those messages are being saved. So much for any pretense of “clear and transparent.”

“And I don’t think the public expects us to inundate them, flood them, with all kinds of communications that they don’t need, when in fact, the final decisions will be public, will be documented, will be substantiated, and they always have been.”

Trust us, he seems to say, we’re from the government and we know what you need to see.”

Alaskans deserve better.

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