Almost a month’s worth of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s emails are missing from the documents given to news outlets last week, according to the Anchorage Daily News.
The records do not include emails between Dec. 8, 2006 and Dec. 29, right after she first took office as governor. If the record is accurate, that means Palin did not receive or send any emails about state business during a time when she was making the first big decisions for her new administration.
Linda Perez, the administrative director for current Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell, could not explain the gap in emails.
“I don’t have any information on the missing documents,” Perez told the Daily News. “I forwarded all that off to (state technology services) and asked them if they would search their search criteria and see if they can explain or come up with any reason for this.”
Palin began her term as governor on December 4, 2006, and the only emails that the state provided dating from then and Dec. 8, aside from an exchange between Palin and a constituent, was from a deputy commissioner in the Department of Natural Resources, Marty Rutherford.
On Dec. 8, one of Palin’s staffers told Rutherford to use a different account.
(John Ziegler: “The Sarah Palin I Know”)
“Marty, I wanted to let you know that this is a ‘public’ address for the Governor, it is not one that she has access to. I check this account daily, and can forward things on, but I am worried that emails might get missed as there are times when I am unable to check it for hours,” constituent relations director Michelle Fabrello wrote to Rutherford.
“Thank you so much!!I have the Governor’s personal email as well, so I’ll just use that for awhile,” Rutherford replied.
From that point on, the email record was dormant for three weeks.
Palin’s records, released by the state Friday, included 24,199 pages of emails. The state kept another 2,415 pages, justifying “Executive/Deliberative Process,” an exemption to the Alaska records law that covers internal discussions of policy before a move is made.