Sarah Palin emails - live coverage
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The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill and Ed Pilkington take delivery of Sarah Palin's emails in Juneau, Alaska. Photograph: guardian.co.ukThere are a number of emails in which Sarah Palin complains about bloggers, although she appears to use the term to include anyone writing anything on a website.
In this email from 28 January 2008, Palin muses about how a blogger got hold of a press release: "Why would a legit media person bother to be a regular blogger?" she wonders. Good question.
In April 2007 Sarah Palin sent the following email: "I just touched down in [Anchorage]. The Phoenix sun was sweet but there's no place like home."
Unrelated fact: in May 2011 Sarah Palin confirmed that she was buying a new house in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona.
So now she can have both?
My colleague James Walsh in London has been doing a great job with the readers' contributions. He tweets:
Receiving many angry emails from Palin supporters. Here's a gentle one: "Don't you bedwetting, childish, limeys have anything better to do?"
For light relief, here's an email from a woman calling herself "Veteran, Business Owner and obviously more highly educated than Alaskans" from February 2008 who seems to think Palin has endorsed Barack Obama:
Disappointed highly. With your endorsement of the Nation of Islam proponent Obama. I don't think I will ever travel there for fun and I now know that I will cut all business with any companies that do my jewelry and such.
Thank goodness the internet was invented.
Paging Andrew Sullivan and the other swivel-eyed Palin-birther conspiracy theorists: this should keep you going for a few years.
According to a 2 August 2008 email uncovered by the Washington Post, Palin argued that the day her fifth son, Trig, was born, should count as a work day:
How is it reflected in my TAS the couple of days I was 'off duty' when I had Trig? April 18, the day he was born, I signed a bill into law and conducted a few State actions (and that should be recorded for the record).
For the record: Trig is Sarah Palin's son.
Sarah Palin sought guidance from God – over Alaska's state budget, the Guardian's Ewen MacAskill reports from his latest find from the Palin-mail:
The email was written in March 2008 just five months before she was chosen by John McCain as his vice-presidential candidate.
Although the former Alaskan governor's deep religious beliefs have long been known, rarely has such a direct connection between her faith and policy-making been disclosed.
"I have been praying for wisdom on this ...... God will have to show me what to do on the people's budget because I don't yet know the right path ...... He will show me though," she says.
I'm no biblical scholar but wouldn't state budgets come under the category of "the things that are Caesar's" [Mark 12:17]?
CNN is on the case as well – and has perhaps the hardest-edged news story of the Palin emails to date:
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin moved quickly to link a key figure in a corruption scandal that rocked the state's political establishment to her defeated predecessor, newly released documents show.
"FYI – I've asked Frank Bailey to help me track down soem [sic] evidence of past administration's dealing with Bill Allen," Palin wrote on May 8, 2007, a day after Allen pleaded guilty to bribery, extortion and conspiracy.
The document is one of the roughly 24,000 pages of records from Palin's administration released by Alaska state officials on Friday.
Allen had been the CEO of the Alaska oilfield services company VECO, and federal prosecutors accused him of leading a scheme to bribe top lawmakers in exchange for favorable state action.
The day after Allen's guilty plea, Palin sent e-mails to staffers asking for information on his ties to her predecessor, Frank Murkowski. Palin had beaten Murkowski in 2006 in a primary battle in which she campaigned as a reformer and backed an unsuccessful 2010 challenge to Murkowski's daughter, US Senator Lisa Murkowski.
Good evening, or if you are in the Europe, welcome to Saturday. Here's a summary of what's happened so far:
• Six hours ago, 24,000 pages of emails from Sarah Palin's time as governor of Alaska were released to news organisations including the Guardian in the state capital Juneau
• The Guardian is scanning and posting copies of the emails, and is inviting readers to help trawl through the archive and flag up interesting entries
• The list of redacted emails itself runs to 189 pages, and Alaska state officials say they don't expect any "smoking guns" to be found within the email archive
• Palin's only official response has been a statement from her political action committee saying: "The emails detail a governor hard at work. Everyone should read them."
• The emails reveal debates within Palin's administration into issues such as Troopergate and decisions to allow oil exploration in previously protected areas of Alaska
For readers wanting to delve into the trove of emails, the Guardian's guide is here.
Sarah Palin speaks at the Republican National Convention in 2008. Photograph: Paul Sancya/AP
The Los Angeles Times has a collection of the congratulatory emails Palin received after being named as the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008:
"Wow governor! Just watched you on TV!" wrote budget director Karen Rehfeld. "You knocked their socks off!"
"Can you believe it!" Palin replied. "He told me yesterday -- it moved fast! Pray! I love you."
Vice President Dick Cheney called the governor's office requesting a call back.
"Talked to him. Thank you – you rock – i love you!!!" Palin wrote to Janice Mason, her scheduler and executive secretary.
"You sure knew how to wake me up from a dead sleep this morning!" wrote staffer Mindy Rowland. "You must have been busting at the seams wanting to tell us all...Tell Piper that she did great and that her hairstyle shows really good on TV :)."
"I'm telling Piper that right now!" Palin replied. "Thank you, I love you guys!"
Now here's an interesting email from January 2008, in which Sarah Palin is trying to make contact with the McCain campaign prior to Alaska's presidential primary on Super Tuesday on 5 February 2008.
She also speculates about getting an invitation to speak at the Republican convention (presumably) on her own terms:
And if I'm asked to speak at any convention, I only will if I get to put together a candid, blunt *change your ways GOP* speech that demands changes in leadership or folks are going to bail.
Hat-tip to spotter @Peterfine
Further to the mysteriously redacted email with the subject "Bullets". Exciting, right? No. A sharp tweeter @GidsG has seen a later reply to the "Bullets" email and the bullets refered to are ... bullet points. D'oh.
Like most people, Sarah Palin has typical, everyday problems. Like where to put the tanning bed.
How has the crowdsourcing being going? It's early days but here's a round-up of what readers have found and told us about.
And a picture emerges of Sarah Palin's governorship of being a hard-working governor:
And just to reassure those of you sending us abusive emails, one reader found this. "I know this isn't really what you're looking for but it appears that she's a pretty stand up person. This is really nice, good on her."
Maybe she'll come out of this smelling of roses?
Sarah Palin poem Photograph: guardian.co.uk
One of the joys of the email haul is some of the fulsome emails Palin receives from supporters. Including this poem, spotted by caiiyte and posted in the comments below:
Her beauty's said to mesmerize
It clouds the brains of all the guys.
The chicks say that's a bunch of bunk,
But First Dude... He's a Super HUNK!
A view so fresh that none would try,
'Less they went to Wasilla High!
Her style of playing Politics
Is sort of like a Braxton Hicks....
It fakes you out and hurts like hell...
But in the end, it comes out well.
Until her term comes to an end,
There is nothing that she can't transcend.Sarah Palin on the media: "Arghhhh!" The Los Angeles Times – which took the canny decision to scan in the emails backwards from September 2008 and so has the most recent up first – has a dialogue between Palin on the campaign trail and her media staff back in Alaska fielding press queries.
One email is from Bill McAllister, who asks:
Is it your belief that dinosaurs and humans co-existed at one time? I said I have never spoken to you about this.
Palin responds:
Arghhhh! I am so sorry that the office is swamped like this! Dinosaurs even?!
One email shows Palin concerned about reassuring Vogue magazine about "negative coverage" of a photoshoot and profile she did for the magazine in September 2007.
Palin reports getting a thank-you note from a Vogue staffer who mentioned the "negative experience," and tells an aide:
I jotted her a quick note back saying it was awesome and a once in a lifetime experience but if you could call her/them and reiterate that it was an honour to participate in this, maybe that could undo some damage. Thanks!
Rare photograph of journalists performing actual work: Guardian reporters Ewen MacAskill and Simon Jeffery do heavy lifting in Juneau. Photograph: Brian Wallace/AP
The Guardian's team in Alaska, Ewen MacAskill and Ed Pilkington, file their latest news coverage of the Palin archive:
The emails, produced by the Alaska governor's office after a three-year media push under freedom of information laws, show Palin facing a maelstrom of events from the time she became the state's first female governor in 2006 through to being propelled on to the national scene as John McCain's vice-presidential choice in 2008.
The emails are peppered with the folksy language that have become her trademark, such as "unflippinbelievable", "holy....", "ugh" and "thank the lord".
They offer insights into a series of rows from Troopergate to her decision to allow oil exploration in previously protected areas of Alaska. They also cover more trivial issues, such as her attempt to secretly install a tanning bed in the governor's mansion in Juneau.
Hey, guess who Sarah Palin used to take political advice from? According to the LA Times, Newt Gingrich.
Not any more.
We've all been here: Sarah Palin can't get her computer to work.
Some examples from readers who are less enthusiastic about the Palin email dump, hoisted from comments.
I can't stand Palin. But I do wonder, when everyone's getting outraged about hacking into people's personal phone calls, etc how exactly going through her emails is any better. If this were the president or PM I could see the public interest angle - as it is, it just seems like prurience. And that's nasty whoever it is.
SueS has a different argument but the same conclusion:
What is it about Sarah Palin that merits so much coverage? She is an ex-governor of a small-population state who had a failed run as VP a couple of years ago. She currently holds no elected office and is solely a media gadfly.
I have to admire the way she gets people all worked up. That is a talent in itself, considering how little she has actually done. There is no way that Sarah Palin is ever going to become President of the United States. She'll be a public speaker and a kingmaker in the Republican primaries, perhaps. That's it. Someone once called her the Jesse Jackson of flyover country and I think that's about right.
I think the answer to both these points is that if Sarah Palin was not a serious political figure then no one would be interested. There is a non-negligible chance that she could be the Republican nominee in 2012. And that's it.
An "anonymous tip" sent to "the feds"? Sounds interesting, based on this mysterious email to Sarah Palin on 6 December 2006 (two days after she was sworn in as governor).
Sadly, Sarah can only respond: "Can u open for me or print"
Looking in the comments below, many readers are asking why the Guardian is devoting resources to Sarah Palin. Ian Katz responds:
Readers have asked versions of the question "why all the fuss about the Palin mails?". And it's true we haven't seen any earth shattering – or even earth-nudging – stories in the small portion of the email trove our team has managed to look at so far. But to suggest that thousands of emails to and from one of the most controversial figures in US politics are not worthy of coverage seems a bit perverse.
At the very least they will provide us with a flavour of how Palin ran Alaska, which I'd have thought is pretty salient to forming a view of how she might run somewhere bigger – like the US. And for those who think the media's interest in these mails is intrusive I'd point out that these haven't been hacked or leaked: they have been released by the state government under it's freedom of information laws after more than two years of negotiation and redaction, and of course the holding back of more than 2,000 pages of mails. Of course if the collective efforts of our correspondents and readers haven't turned up anything interesting by tomorrow morning we'll scale back our coverage.
But for now, if you're not interested I recommend the "Palin-free version" button on the top right corner of our home page.
The Los Angeles Times seems to be posting the emails backwards, from most recent to oldest, which makes sense.
Looking through the later ones from September 2008, with the election campaign in full swing... Palin certainly received some exceedingly vicious hatemail. Regardless of what you think about Sarah Palin, no one deserves that. Well, Hitler maybe. But not Sarah Palin.
What people email the governor about in Alaska: regulations forcing moose hunters to be "bringing out the entire head, hide, cutting the antlers in half etc. What a bunch of nonsense! Not to mention the mess it left in dumpsters..."
The Guardian's archive of Sarah Palin emails now has about 700 pages online – and is now fully up and running.
It now includes a tool that allows you to rate each email, on a scale ranging from "Not very interesting" to "Palingate!"
I just looked at one with the subject line: "Bullets". The whole thing was redacted. Bah.
MSNBC has posted the full list of 2,200 email redactions as a PDF. Warning: it's a big 189 pages long.
MSNBC's bloggers comment about what's on the redacted list:
Among those emails withheld from the public were those detailing potential state appointees, judicial candidates and others having to do with legal advice, settlements and staffing issues. Others appeared to have nothing to do with state business, such as one message about "children, dinner, and prayer."
Others removed from public view include several having to do with newspapers and editorials, including two citing a "response to Juneau Empire article." Another two related to a "child custody matter," and a meeting with "W. Monegan," who had served as the Alaska public safety commissioner until being dismissed in July 2008 in connection with the scandal known as "Troopergate."
At the time, Palin had reassigned commissioner Monegan because of performance-related issues. Monegan said his forced resignation may have been tied to his reluctance to fire Mike Wooten, an Alaska State trooper, who is also Palin's ex-brother-in-law and at the time was embroiled with Palin's sister, Molly McCann, in a contentious child custody dispute.
A note on the emails from my colleague Simon Rogers:
We've had a few messages complaining that the emails reveal personal details of senders such as email addresses etc. One thing people need to be really clear about is that this is not a leak; it's not Wikileaks. This is an official release of nearly 24,199 documents, handed over by the State of Alaska - following freedom of information requests - printed on paper (the least accessible form possible). Some 2,275 have been witheld - and some of the ones we've received have been redacted. We're just making them accessible - and we need our readers' help to go through them.
In other words, these are from official sources, legally available under Alaska state legislation. The Alaska state government has already decided to withhold personal and commercially sensitive emails.
You can read our crowdsourcing guide here.
As you'd expect the New York Times is doing a great job with its online archive. Here's one from 1 August 2008:
To: Janice Mason; Mike Nizich; Govemor Sarah Palin
Subject: President Bush/Fairbanks stopoverI have just heard from the White House. The President will stop to refuel at Eielson AFB on August 4th between 13:30 and 4:30, local time.
The Governor is invited to greet the President at Elelson. Todd and Track are invited as well. The White House recognizes that Track may have military obligations that will preclude his involvement. However, in the inimitable way of the White House, they now want to know as soon as possible whether Todd and/or Track will attend.
Sarah Palin was happy to be a reference for her employee when asked by a landlord.
"I guess a guy couldn't ask for a more prestigious reference than the Governor of Alaska! :-)" emails the landlord. (Again with the emoticons?)
Here's an email where Palin shows that her thin skin to media criticism goes way back.
On 26 November 2007 Palin emailed the then deputy governor Sean Parnell to complain about conservative radio host Dan Fagan:
I turned it on to listen to the news on my drive to Wasilla - two bad I caught his two minutes before the news. He slammed RTL, the dinner and especially my "horrible" speech. Yuck.
Parnell replied to placate Palin:
You did great and you were clear in your position! Why do you think people stood up and applauded multiple times ? :)
The smiley emoticon was a nice touch.
Our fantastic readers are really starting to get into this pile of emails. Would you like to join them? Here's our how-to guide.
And you can access the cache of emails as they are scanned right here. New emails are being added constantly by our crack team in Juneau, so keep looking.
Here's the first interesting email spotted by a Guardian reader. It's from a 7 December 2007 email from Palin to aides and Todd Palin, in response to an article with comments from Alaska's then Republican speaker of the house John Harris:
In the email, Palin says "sheesh, Harris is saying some very foolish things in there," and in another reply says:
I think that's the most stupid comment I've heard all year … his statement says it all re: his beliefs: 'What the hell can we do…?' Nice talk Mr Speaker, Reflects well on your commitment to ethical leadership
What did Ronald Reagan say about the 11th commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican?
You can help find more like this at Sarah Palin emails: the documents
By my calculation the Guardian was the first to get Palin emails online, but the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times were a close second and third.
Still waiting on MSNBC, which is promising a searchable database. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is getting to grips with this new thing called "the internet".
So what's Sarah Palin's reaction to the release of the emails? Here's the official statement from her SarahPac political action committee:
The thousands upon thousands of emails released today show a very engaged Governor Sarah Palin being the CEO of her state. The emails detail a governor hard at work. Everyone should read them.
That's from the treasurer of SarahPAC, Tim Crawford.
The first Palin emails have been scanned are are now live on the Guardian's site here: Sarah Palin emails: the documents
The ratings feature isn't working yet but if you see anything interesting then send us an email at palin.emails@guardian.co.uk - or tweet our special Twitter account @gdnpalin
The Guardian's Simon Jeffery scanning the Sarah Palin emails
In a hotel room in Juneau, the Guardian's Simon Jeffery is shoving the pages of emails into a high-tech scanner capable of getting through 25 sheets a minutes. Remembering that there's 24,000 pages, that should take a mere 16 hours to get the entire cache online. Fingers crossed.
MSNBC's Michael Isikoff is going through the email stash and on the cable channel he shows a page with most of the details redacted.
The list of redactions alone runs to 189 pages – which suggests a lot of the good stuff is being kept under wraps.
The Los Angeles Times is part of the media scrum gathered in Juneau, and posts this snapshot of the scene in Juneau this morning:
About 30 journalists, along with three camera crews, had been crammed into a small space in a state administrative building in Juneau, Alaska Friday, waiting for the release of boxes filled with 25,000 printed emails stemming from Sarah Palin's tenure as governor.
The boxes were stacked up and waiting for the 20 or so news organizations to grab them and take them from the building in a scene that promised to be fairly chaotic.
"It could be fun," said the Los Angeles Times' Ken Schwenke, who was part of the scrum waiting to rush the room where boxes upon boxes were stacked. The state of Alaska is releasing the emails in paper form, which means that news organizations will have to scan them to turn them into electronic, searchable documents. Each organization was to be given six boxes.
The Guardian's Ed Pilkington has better news as he begins the massive task of trawling through the Palin email archive:
Second #sarahpalin email: 'what the hell has happened to the leadership positions of our great states?'
Good point. What the hell has happened? She emails it like she sees it.
Reporters load boxes containing Palin's email records in Juneau. Photograph: Brian Wallace/AP
So far the US press are keeping mum on the Palin emails, although MSNBC are going large both on screen and online.
The Washington Post has a live Twitter feed here @palinemails and of course the Guardian is doing the same at @gdnpalin
My colleague Ed Pilkington tweets the very first Palin email from Juneau:
First #sarahpalin email _ world exclusive - says: 'Click has recommended the appointment of redacted to fill a vacancy on the safet council'
Pulitzer prize committee, your work this year is already done.
The Associated Press has a quick snap on the email release – no content yet though:
Alaska officials have released thousands of pages of emails sent and received by Sarah Palin during her first 21 months as governor.
Reporters and photographers crowded into a small office Friday morning to pick up boxes of emails — hundreds of pounds of paper — to begin poring over them.
The request dates to September 2008, shortly after Palin was picked as the GOP vice presidential nominee. State officials cited a flood of records request following Palin's rise to national prominence, along with the sheer volume of the email request, for the delay.
Requests also have been made for Palin's final 10 months in office. State officials haven't begun reviewing those records yet. Palin resigned partway through her first term, in July 2009.
And the Palin emails go live at 9am Alaska time in ... three ... two ...one... go!
And the first email is Nigerian 419 spam. Just kidding.
The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill takes delivery of Sarah Palin emails in Juneau
My Guardian colleagues Ewen MacAskill and Ed Pilkington are in Juneau and are taking delivery of the 24,000 pages of Palin emails.
Here's Ewen's earlier report on the email dump today:
In all the state of Alaska handed over 24,199 pages of printed emails to the Guardian and other media organisations that had applied for copies. Guardian reporters are sifting the documents for stories. A team of data journalists will be publishing thousands of the raw emails as quickly as possible to allow readers to scan them for interesting material. Readers are being asked to tag unread mails according to the subjects they cover and how interesting they are, and alert our editors to those which warrant further investigation.
Rachel Weiner, a reporter for the Washington Post, has tweeted a photograph of a stack of boxes in Juneau. Inside these boxes may be Sarah Palin's email trail.
Mother Jones's David Corn has an excellent piece in today's Guardian explaining his role in the legal background to the release of Sarah Palin's emails:
As journalists scurried to Alaska and searched for any titbit, I headed to the website for the Alaska state government and discovered the state had a decent open records law. A week after Palin hit the headlines, I sent a request to the governor's office on behalf of Mother Jones, my magazine, asking for all "emails written by her, emails sent to her, and emails cc-ed to her".
The state had previously released emails from her office in response to narrow requests – though it had withheld a lot of material under questionable justifications. Still, I was not sure that this request, which covered a lot of records, could be processed before the November election. Other media outfits in subsequent weeks submitted related requests for particular emails, such as all of Palin's emails to and from her husband. But I had been the one to ask for the whole pile.
The Guardian is only one of the many media organisations in Juneau today. The Associated Press, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Mother Jones and others are in town waiting to get the Palin email dump – and they all have plans to release them to the public in one form or another.
So what are we expecting to find in the Sarah Palin email dump? What's being published are emails from Palin's term as governor of Alaska: starting in December 2006 through to September 2008.
Expect lots of detail about internal Alaska state politics, not to mention Palin's unhappy "Troopergate" affair. There's also the negotiations over the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which Palin often mentions as her biggest success as governor.
But most interest will initially focus on the period when John McCain nominated her to be his presidential running mate in 2008.
But who knows what else is in there?
[Update: I originally said the email records went up to Palin's resignation in July 2009 – but that's not the case, and the emails only go until September 2008, when the original requests were made. The later emails are the subject of a seperate request.]
Sarah Palin's final speech as Alaska governor on 26 July 2009. Photograph: Eric Engman/Getty Images
It's the Alaska gold rush of 2011: after a tortuous process, thousands of emails from Sarah Palin's time as Alaskan governor are released publically today – and the hard work of trawling through the 24,000 pages of emails begins.
Follow our live blog of the key developments as the Guardian attempts to identify and collate the most interesting emails with your help.
Guardian journalists in Juneau, Alaska, will be combing through thousands of Palin emails as fast as they can read. And Ian Katz explains how the Guardian plans to post the entire cache of emails, allowing readers to take part by reading through them:
Given the size of the cache, we reckon the collective eyes of thousands of you will find the juicy bits more quickly, so we'll be publishing the raw mails on our website as quickly as we can and asking you to tell us which ones are interesting and why.
They'll be pretty rough and ready – no headlines or details of what they're about – but we hope you'll help us by using our simple system to tag them according to what subjects they cover, and how interesting they are.
We'd love it if you'd alert our editors, via a button on each email, or Tweet us at @gdnpalin, about any emails that you think our reporters should be examining. Remember that each numbered document represents a single page, so you have to click to previous and subsequent pages to see a full email. Now, as Ms Palin once exhorted: "Drill, baby, drill!"
Stay tuned with our full Palin email coverage on the site – and on Twitter follow the latest developments at our special feed @gdnpalin.
And of course we'll be following all the latest developments from the US media and around the web right here. As always, you can take part by leaving your comments below. I'll be tweeting at @RichardA.
Saturday, 11 June 2011
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