Sarah Palin For President 2012

Sarah Palin says the emails will prove she is a hard working public servant who deserves to be President and that they will also prove she is not a nut wing Christian bimbo running on her good looks.

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Full coverage: Sarah Palin’s e-mails released

Sarah Palin e-mails released on Friday

By Dan Eggen and Robert O’Harrow Jr., Published: June 10

A cache of e-mails released Friday add vivid new color and fresh details to the complicated public portrait of Sarah Palin, who displayed many of the same strengths, and shortcomings, as Alaska governor that she would later bring to the national political stage.

Often blunt and frequently impatient, Palin derided “old school” politicians and bureaucrats and acted as a champion of populist interests on issues ranging from energy policy to women’s rights, the e-mails show. Her relations with fellow politicians, including many Republicans, were often strained, and she relied heavily on her husband, Todd, and a close-knit group of aides to help cope with crises and shape policies.

Alaska officials on Friday released thousands of pages of Sarah Palin's emails from her first 21 months as governor, giving a fresh glimpse at the time when she rose to national prominence and became the GOP vice presidential nominee. (June 10)

Palin felt passionately about issues of importance to her state, the documents show, and she waged battle with foes large and small. That included detractors on obscure government commissions as well as multinational conglomerates seeking access to Alaska’s vast oil and gas reserves. She twice refers to one major oil executive with a derogatory nickname and complains that phone calls with him did not go well.

Palin also devoted significant attention to the portrayal of her and her administration in the press, regularly decrying “untruths” in media reports and working feverishly to push back on negative assertions. Targets of her ire ranged from mainstream newspapers to commenters on local blogs.

In one e-mail in February 2007, Palin wrote that she “will try to carve out time in the day to more fully scan news clippings and try to catch some of the talk shows via internet, but so far I haven’t even found an extra minute to be able to tune into the shows unless I’m . . . driving in my car.” She told staffers: “i need folks to really help ramp up accurate counter comments to the misinformation that’s being spread out there.”

The e-mails — some 24,000 pages total — were released in response to public-information requests from media organizations, who first began asking for the records during Palin’s run as the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008. More than two years later, Palin has become a fixture in the conservative political firmament, a reality-TV celebrity and a barbed critic of President Obama who may, or may not, be pondering a run for the White House.

The promise of potential news about Palin drew a deluge of reporters and other media employees to Alaska’s picturesque, isolated capital of Juneau, where state officials Friday prepared six sealed boxes of printed messages for each news organization that paid for the documents. Reporters fought for elevators in a mad rush out of the building to begin converting the documents into electronic form for perusal and publication.

Palin, a broadly polarizing figure, has remained a magnet for attention since Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) made her his surprise pick for vice president in August 2008. The records released Friday spanned the dates from her start as Alaska governor in December 2006 to September 2008, after her first month as a national candidate.

Palin has been coy about her plans for 2012, hinting at a possible presidential run while refusing to take any of the steps that most any other White House candidate would take by this point in an election cycle.

Last week, Palin and her family concluded a hectic bus trip visiting tourist sites from Washington to Boston, with squads of baffled reporters trailing behind. Next month, a sympathetic film producer is also releasing a new movie, “The Undefeated,” about Palin’s political career.

The new documents, totaling more than 13,000 e-mails, bring alive the cozy and almost quaint nature of politics in a state as distant and sparsely populated as Alaska. Palin took major policy advice from confidants including her husband, who polled friends on wolf-hunting issues, and her brother, whose concern about state contracts is passed on to a gubernatorial aide. The governor also remained keenly interested in the goings-on in her tiny hometown of Wasilla and had unkind things to say about the mayor who succeeded her.

But Palin also grappled with politics on a national scale, meeting with fellow governors and other leaders in Washington and clashing with global energy firms over plans for a natural-gas pipeline and a hike in oil taxes.

“The thousands upon thousands of emails released today show a very engaged Governor Sarah Palin being the CEO of her state,” said Tim Crawford, treasurer of SarahPAC, Palin’s federal political action committee, in a statement. “The emails detail a Governor hard at work. Everyone should read them.”

The documents contain at least a few references to the man who would later become a target of criticism. In February 2007, an aide recommended that Palin meet with a top adviser for “some guy named Barack Obama” when she was in Washington for a conference. “I’m game to meet him,” Palin replied. The meeting never happened, Obama advisers said Friday.

Later, in August 2008, just before McCain picked her as his vice presidential candidate, Palin praised Obama for a “great speech” on energy policies, saying it included ideas that he “stole” from Alaska.

“Pretty cool,” she wrote to an aide, adding: “Wrong candidate.”

Palin, who since coined the phrase “Mama Grizzlies” to warmly describe female conservatives, wrote an impassioned e-mail to an aide in March 2008 about criticism of female politicians: “ ‘they’ said the same thing throughout my career — ‘too young’, ‘pregnant’, ‘kids’ . . . ‘She won’t be able to do it’ . . . This coming from good ol’ boys who don’t like change . . . And so far along in my career we’ve proved them wrong at each turn.”

Palin grappled frequently with the minutiae of expense reports and bristled at rules forbidding state payment for travel for her children. She complained that the day her son, Trig, was born in 2008 should have been counted as a workday because she did some state business from the hospital. “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),” she wrote.

The former governor’s reliance on her husband for counsel while governing the state is well known; Todd Palin played a key role in helping organize the controversial ouster of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan in September 2008, for example.

In a March 2008 e-mail, Sarah Palin makes clear that Todd also weighed in on how to deal with Alaska’s burgeoning wolf population, a topic of debate at the time among officials and environmental experts. The governor told her fish and game commissioner in blunt terms that she opposed using state helicopters to hunt wolves and preferred paying private hunters.

Her source of information? “Todd interviewed buddies who live out there,” she wrote. “Some confirmation that state intervention isn’t first choice w/the locals.”

O’Harrow reported from Juneau, Alaska. Staff writers Rachel Weiner in Juneau and Aaron Blake, David A. Fahrenthold, T.W. Farnam, Nia-Malika Henderson, Carol Leonnig, R. Jeffrey Smith and Sandhya Somashekhar and news researchers Alice Crites and Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.

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Sarah Palin's emails underscore polarizing effect

June 11, 2011

Reporting from Washington— Thousands of pages of Sarah Palin's emails while she was governor of Alaska provide an up-close view of her efforts to intensely monitor both state business and her portrayal in the media while stumping the country as part of the 2008 Republican presidential ticket.

Amid the 24,199 pages — released Friday by Alaska officials in response to media requests made in September 2008 — are also documents that reveal her fraught relationships with other statewide elected officials, whose criticism often infuriated Palin.

Palin's disgust with the media was apparent as soon as she was tapped to be Sen. John McCain's running mate — a decision that happened with a suddenness that seemed to take her and her aides by surprise as much as it did much of the country.

"Can you believe it!" Palin wrote to one aide who had sent her a congratulatory email. "He told me yesterday — it moved fast! Pray! I love you."

She was much less in love with the media swarm that came with the nomination. She and aides objected when a blizzard of questions from reporters included queries about her favorite poem and the tanning bed in the governor's mansion. "Arghhhh!" Palin responded, noting she had paid for the tanning bed and was "dismayed at the media."

The darker side of her newfound fame was evident too, as the governor fielded several vicious threats against her life — all of which she forwarded to her aides without comment.

At the other end of the spectrum, the messages include many adoring missives from supporters around the country who, even before she joined the 2008 presidential ticket, saw her as a rising star.

Before the release of the emails, Palin downplayed their significance, noting that she and her family had been intensely scrutinized. Tim Crawford, treasurer of her political action committee, said the materials showcased "a very engaged Gov. Sarah Palin being the CEO of her state."

"The emails detail a governor hard at work," he said in a statement. "Everyone should read them."

They also reveal the influence that Palin's husband, Todd, had on her administration. At times, his business concerns appeared to shape her agenda. On July 4, 2008, he complained in an email to her that the Peter Pan seafood operation to which he sold salmon from Bristol Bay was "plugged up" — meaning that the processor was at capacity and couldn't handle any more fish.

"Way to [sic] early to be on limits," he wrote. "Just venting."

The governor forwarded his email to acting chief of staff Michael Nizich, writing: "This will have to be another mission we get on."

A few days later, Cora Crome, Palin's fisheries policy adviser, sent a long note to Palin and Nizich saying she had "made it clear that we are disappointed with the way production is going in the bay and asked that they do everything in their power to increase production and lift limits as soon as possible." The regional supervisor from the Department of Fish and Game was "applying pressure to processors," she said.

"Thank you," Palin responded. "It's very, very disappointing that they left the fishermen high and dry again."

In her exchanges with aides, Palin's frustration with her opponents is evident, along with her unvarnished style — she called criticism of her state ethics proposal by the Republican speaker of the House "the most stupid comment I've heard all year."

She was particularly shaken after a blogger posted a rumor in July 2008 that she'd had an affair. "Guys, I may be pretty wimpy about this family stuff, but I feel like I'm at the breaking point with the hurtful gossip.... I hate this part of the job and many days I feel like it's not worth it."

Even as her name was floated as a potential national political figure, Palin maintained a combative stance against her own party. In early August 2008 — just weeks before she joined the GOP ticket — the governor cautioned her staff that "we need to remember the GOP, for the most part ... has not had any support or assistance provided our administration so our time and efforts will continue to be spent on serving Alaskans, not party politics."

The emails also reveal her tense relations with members of her home-state congressional delegation. Her suggestion that Alaska's then-Sen. Ted Stevens needed to explain his role in a corruption scandal upset other Republican leaders, including Rep. Don Young. In September 2008, upon hearing that Young wanted to talk to her, she wrote: "Pls find out what it's about. I don't want to get chewed out by him yet again, I'm not up for that."

A member of Palin's Washington staff at the time, Larry Persily, said in an interview that there was constant tension between Palin and Alaska's members of Congress.

"If you are governor you need to really make an effort to establish a relationship and get along with the congressional delegation," Persily said. "She didn't do it."

With her aides, however, Palin could be lavish in her praise.

"Oh you are awesome and encouraging," Palin wrote to staffer Ivy Frye in December 2007. "And congrats, also, on our first-most-awesome year in office together!"

"You are just great and I loooved the jacket you were wearing!" Frye responded.

The one significant internal controversy that rocked Palin's administration as governor — the firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan in an affair known as "Troopergate" — is the subject of dozens of feverish emails from inside her administration. The governor insisted that Monegan had "spoken untruthfully" when he said he had been pressured to fire Palin's former brother-in-law.

In a chaotic scramble to respond to Monegan's claims, Palin seemed increasingly frantic when the controversy refused to subside.

"I'm seriously about ready to lose it," Palin wrote on July 21, 2008, 10 days after firing Monegan. "I have been on the phone for two solid tonight on this alone. It's ridiculus [sic]."

The correspondence spans the period from the beginning of Palin's term in December 2006 through Sept. 30, 2008, when the state began its search in response to requests. Palin remained in office until July 2009.

Before releasing the emails, the state redacted more than 2,200 pages worth of materials, citing exemptions to public records laws.

matea.gold@latimes.com

tom.hamburger@latimes.com

Robin Abcarian in Los Angeles, Kim Murphy in Seattle and Melanie Mason, Christine Mai-Duc and Kim Geiger in Washington contributed to this report.

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Palin emails from 2008 show she had her eye on VP slot months before being named to GOP ticket

BECKY BOHRER The Associated Press

5:35 a.m. CDT, June 11, 2011

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — Much of the country was taken by surprise when Sarah Palin became the Republican vice presidential candidate in August 2008, but newly released emails make it clear that the little-known Alaska governor was angling for the slot months before Sen. John McCain asked her to join him on the GOP ticket.

Earlier that summer, Palin and her staff began pushing to find a larger audience for the governor, wedging her into national conversations and nudging the McCain campaign to notice her.

Palin and her staff talked excitedly on June 19 about plans to repeal Alaska's fuel tax. Ivy Frye, a longtime Palin aide and friend, said she would send details to McCain staffers when they became available.

"They're going to love it!" Frye wrote. "More vp talk is never a bad thing, whether you're considering vp or not. I still say President Palin sounds better tho..."

The glimpse into Palin came in more than 24,000 pages of emails released Friday from her first 21 months as governor. They showed a Palin involved closely in the day-to-day business of the state while trying to cope with the increasing pressures that came with her rise from small-town mayor to governor to national prominence.

They also revealed that Palin, as the newly minted Republican vice presidential nominee, was dismayed by the sudden onslaught of questions from reporters, especially one about whether she believed dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time. She also dealt with death threats, and at least once, she prayed for strength.

The emails cover the period from the time she took office in December 2006 to her ascension to GOP vice presidential candidate in August and September 2008. They were first requested during the 2008White House race by citizens and news organizations, including The Associated Press, as they vetted a nominee whose political experience included less than one term as governor and a term as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

The emails provided details about how Palin was involved in various gubernatorial duties, including priorities like a natural gas pipeline from far northern Alaska to ship natural gas to the Lower 48.

But some of the more intriguing details centered on her rise to the national stage.

Random supporters around the country began suggesting Palin as a potential vice presidential candidate as early as April. Then, after she appeared onGlenn Beck's program in early June, she received a string of flattering emails from conservatives looking for a fresh face to run alongside McCain.

"You would make an excellent president (forget being VP!!!)," a Virginia woman wrote that same day. "It is so refreshing to hear someone speak in a common sense manner."

A Cooperstown, N.Y., wrote, "You are what this country needs. ... McCain is old and maybe not be in the best of health so you would be taking on alot (sic)."

Later that month, Palin and her team were making final preparations on a letter about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She told one aide to make sure the letter was sent to newspapers across the country. Then she added in a follow-up email: "Pls also send to McCain and Obama's camps. Thanks."

Also in June, spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton sent Palin a draft of an op-ed piece carrying the governor's name that would be pitched to national publications "beginning withthe New York Times." Palin responded the following day, writing: "Pls print."

But many reporters were already paying attention. A deputy press secretary told Palin in early June that she was fielding interview requests "on everything from polar bears to the VP buzz" from national media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal.

Three years later, Palin is among the top tier of potential 2012 presidential candidates in polls of Republican voters. Her recent bus tour of the Northeast fueled speculation about her national ambitions. She has said she has not yet decided whether she will run.

Within minutes of the emails' release on Friday, Palin tweeted a link to the website for "The Undefeated," adocumentary about her time as governor and her arrival on the national political stage.

Her supporters, meanwhile, encouraged everyone to read the messages. "The emails detail a Governor hard at work," said Tim Crawford, the treasurer of her political action committee, Sarah PAC, in a prepared statement.

The nearly three-year delay in releasing the material has been attributed largely to the sheer volume. The emails were packed into six boxes, weighing 250 pounds in all, stacked in a small office in a complex of buildings near the state capitol in Juneau.

Lawyers went through every page to redact sensitive government information. Emails that remained portrayed her as most fierce when the subject was defending her record or her family.

"Will ktuu (an Anchorage TV station) and adn (Anchorage Daily News) be corrected re: the "internal investigation"? I did not request it, as they are both reporting," she wrote to an aide in Aug. 13, 2008.

As news organizations began vetting her record, Palin was accused of essentially turning over questions about her gubernatorial record to McCain's campaign managers, part of an ambitious GOP strategy to limit any embarrassing disclosures and carefully shape her image for voters in the rest of the country.

On Sept. 13, 2008, her then-spokesman, Bill McAllister, wrote to Palin at her government account: "Governor, Got your message just now; didn't quite understand. Mike said yesterday to refer most things to the campaign. That pretty much has been the practice lately."

On Sept. 15, 2008, Palin responded to a host of news media questions presented to her by McAllister. Among them was one about a tanning bed at the governor's mansion and whether it was her "belief that dinosaurs and humans co-existed at one time?"

"I am so sorry that the office is swamped like this! Dinosaurs even?! I'll try to run through some of these in my head before responding," Palin wrote. "And the old, used tanning bed that my girls have used handful of times in Juneau? Yes, we paid for it ourselves. I, too, will continue to be dismayed at the media."

On Sept. 17, 2008, Palin forwarded a profanity-laced email from a man claiming to be a Juneau resident from her government account to two aides.

"You need to be shot from one of the planes that shoot th (sic) very wolves that you ordered," according to the email. "I own guns, and will fight any gun owner hands down witha (sic) simple throwing knife, how about you palin ,,,want to go hunting for wolves still? lets make you run in your heels ..."

The emails also showed the support that national political figures gave Palin on a variety of issues.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich offered advice to a McCain-Palin campaign manager on how to blunt the impact of a September 2008 Washington Post report that she accepted $17,000 in per diem payments for time she spent at her Wasilla home.

Gingrich said the campaign should elaborate on its initial defense that Palin didn't charge the state for money she could have collected to spend on her kids.

The voluminous nature of Friday's release, the isolation of Juneau and the limited bandwidth in the city of 30,000 people has forced media outlets to come up with creative ways to transmit the information. The AP plans to scan the paper copies to make searchable files available to its members and clients.

Mike Oreskes, the AP's senior managing editor for national news, said the news cooperative requested the emails when Palin rose out of relative obscurity.

Oreskes said public records requests are a common tool that the news organization uses to research candidates, with more than 1,500 requests filed across the country in 2009 and an additional 1,000 in 2010.

"Palin is one of many officeholders whose public record and leadership the AP has sought to illuminate by obtaining emails, memos and other documents," he said. "She's maintained a sizable profile in the current political scene and may run for president. We are pressing to obtain the records of other presidential contenders in the months ahead."

The emails were sent and received by Palin's personal and state email accounts, and the ones being released were deemed state business-related. Palin and top aides were known to communicate using private email accounts.

Once the state reviewed the records, it gave Palin's attorneys an opportunity to see if they had any privacy concerns with what was being released. No emails were withheld or redacted as a result of that, said Linda Perez, Parnell's administrative director in charge of coordinating the release.

Another 2,275 pages are being withheld for reasons including attorney-client, work product or executive privilege; an additional 140 pages were deemed to be "non-records," or unrelated to state business.

The release of the emails generated widespread interest online.

Many news organizations, including The New York Times, theLos Angeles Times and msnbc.com, began scanning and posting the emails on their websites throughout the day. The New York Times asked readers to join reporters in reviewing the documents. Tidbits of the emails were featured on blogs and Twitter.

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13,000 Palin e-mails made public

by Robert O'Harrow and Rachel Weiner - Jun. 11, 2011 12:00 AM

Washington Post

JUNEAU, Alaska - Alaska on Friday released more than 13,000 e-mails that shed light on Sarah Palin's tenure as governor - before she became a vice-presidential candidate, a reality-TV star and an undeclared heavyweight in the 2012 race for the White House.

Many of the e-mails dealt with the mundane matters of running an office and a state: speech preparations, gubernatorial appointments, even office softball games. Others, however, provide a look at Palin's political persona before she was catapulted into the national spotlight.

In one e-mail, written weeks before Palin was chosen as a running mate by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Palin praised a speech by the man who would be McCain's opponent in the 2008 presidential race.

Then-Sen. Barack Obama "gave a great speech this morn in Michigan - mentioned Alaska," Palin wrote to aides. In a speech in Lansing, Mich., Obama had spoken of the need to complete the Alaska natural-gas pipeline and open more oil and gas drilling in Alaska. "So . . . we need to take advantage of this and write a statement saying he's right on."

Other e-mails show that Palin relied on her husband, Todd Palin, for advice on policy issues. In a March 2008 e-mail, for instance, the governor made clear that he also weighed in on how to deal with Alaska's burgeoning wolf population, a topic of debate at the time among officials and environmental experts.

The governor told her fish-and-game commissioner in blunt terms that she opposed using state helicopters to hunt wolves and preferred paying private hunters.

"We have to act quickly on this as predators are acting quickly and rural families face ridiculous situation of being forced to import more beef instead of feeding their families our healthy staple of alaskan game. Nonsense. Unacceptable - and not on my watch," she said.

Her source of information? "Todd interviewed buddies who live out there. . . . Some confirmation that state intervention isn't first choice w/the locals," Palin said. "We need to incentivize here," including providing money for trappers.

The e-mails also reveal Palin's sensitivity to the way she was portrayed in the media, even at a time when the coverage came mainly from local outlets in Alaska.

In 2008, for instance, one of Palin's media aides sent her an essay about Jane Swift, onetime governor of Massachusetts who raised young children while in office. Palin responded with a barb about a recent column from a writer at the Anchorage Daily News.

"Pls remind Julia Omalley that 'they' said the same thing throughout my career - 'too young,' 'pregnant,' 'kids' . . . 'She won't be able to do it,' " Palin wrote. "This coming from good ol' boys who don't like change. . . . And so far along in my career we've proved them wrong at each turn."

The e-mails also show Palin dealing with the management of the governor's mansion. Though it was a ceremonial and government-owned residence, the e-mails show that the Palin home had the same kind of mundane concerns that others do.

One example: As a mother of two teens, Palin was concerned about the alcohol stored in the liquor cabinet in the governor's mansion and suggested that it be stowed away in boxes.

"Here's my thinking: with so many kids and teens coming and going in that house, esp during this season of celebrations for young people - proms, graduations, etc. I want to send the msg that we can be - and 'the People's House' needs to be - alcohol-free," she wrote to Erika Fagerstrom, executive residence manager, on May 6, 2007.

At 9 a.m. Alaska time, 24,199 pages of printed-out e-mails that Palin either sent or received on her official account became public. The e-mails cover her first 21 months as governor, from December 2006 to September 2008. The remaining 10 months' worth could be released later.

News organizations first requested the e-mails after McCain made Palin his surprise choice for a running mate in the 2008 presidential race.

After about 1,000 days of delay, the e-mails were distributed in a set of five 55-pound boxes, with sensitive information redacted. The copying fees come to $725.97 for each news outlet. The Washington Post will post the e-mails online.

On Friday morning, the boxes containing the e-mails were stacked chest-high in a state office building in Juneau, marked for news organizations like the Post, MSNBC and the Associated Press.

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Emails show criticism put Palin on defensive

By SEAN COCKERHAM and ERIKA BOLSTAD

Anchorage Daily News

Published: June 10th, 2011 11:20 PM

A massive trove of emails released Friday from Sarah Palin's time as governor show a chief executive who was engrossed with countering her critics and increasingly upset at news coverage as she vaulted into international celebrity.

The state of Alaska released 24,199 printed pages of emails that Palin sent or received as governor. They show Palin coming into office preoccupied with making appointments and filling staff positions, like any governor, but also pledging to be open and transparent.

"I've asked that you all share your opinions, speak freely to the press, public, one another, etc...I have great faith that we're on the right path going a new direction here with freedom in information sharing," Palin wrote in an email to commissioners and top staff members early in 2007, about a month after taking office.

But as Palin took public relations hits, whether it be in news stories, talk radio, letters to the editor or just anonymous comments on blogs, she appeared to become increasingly focused on counterpunching. At one point in 2008, Palin ghost-wrote a letter to the editor, quoting herself, apparently feeling the need to counter an earlier letter to the editor that had criticized Palin for failing to show up at that year's Miss Alaska pageant. Palin prepared the response and asked her aides to find someone to submit it to the Daily News under their own name.

Palin was particularly sensitive to comments on the Daily News' politics blog. At one point she asked that Alaska State Troopers check out one of the most critical commentators, Sherry Whitstine of Wasilla.

"I think our security guys should check into her because the times she's blogged about Todd's schedule and what we drive have really infringed on our privacy rights and potential safety when psychos know when Todd's out of town," she wrote.

In another email Palin speculated on the identity of "rfn," another person who left comments on the Daily News blog. "He started off as a big supporter, now he's a critic who picks and chooses what issues to support us on," Palin wrote, and wondered if the commenter was a member of the media.

She wrote in a different email to officials working on her natural gas pipeline project that she was fascinated by how another person who left anonymous comments on the Daily News blog had turned "from his support of the administration to his slamming of us the past few weeks."

Palin suggested that the commenter was lobbyist Paul Fuhs ("he told us his pen name months ago"), and attributed his turnaround to Palin's dismissal of his friend John Bitney as her legislative liaison. She lamented that another commenter had inside information about her administration, calling it a sign of an internal problem.

Palin's team was also focused on countering criticism.

One example, from April 24, 2008, is an email from Palin communications director Roseanne Hughes to the top members of the governor's staff. "Now. About the blogs. As you know, our boss is getting pounded. Let's take action. TODAY."

"Frank and Ivy, if you could get the word out to your contacts - grassroots supporters who love our boss - we need to get them out there FLOODING that Anchorage Daily News Alaska politics blog. I mean FLOODING," Hughes wrote.

She offered ideas of what people could say, including "quoting Newt Gingrich that Governor Palin is one of the most aggressive reformers in the country."

EARLY OPENNESS

Emails from early in her term demonstrate Palin's openness to answering questions from the press. She picked favorites among reporters and tried to spin stories to her advantage, like anyone in politics, but expressed a desire to engage.

She became increasingly frustrated with the questions she was being asked, however.

She expressed incredulity that a reporter was working on a story about the state paying for her daughter, Piper, to join her on a trip to Barrow. As Palin did repeatedly in the emails, she said people should take a look at what her predecessor as governor, Frank Murkowski, did in office.

"Huh? Is he writing a story on the First Family's invitation to attend a native celebration?..And we didnt even spend the night so no hotel! And my travel is 1/4 what Murk's was, despite having a large family that's always invited to all these Alaskan first family events," Palin wrote her top staffers from her gov.sarah@yahoo.com private email account.

Just days before McCain picked her in 2008, she lamented questions about her family travel: "Amazing, the scrutiny we are under..."

Another email string shows Palin chief of staff Mike Nizich giving Palin advice in how to handle a reporter asking about Palin accepting state per diem payments for nights she spent in her own Wasilla home. It includes talking points like "State of Alaska rented an apartment in Anchorage for Governor Murkowski" and "Governor Murkowski's travel in 2006 totaled $525,392."

On the campaign trail she expressed astonishment that the governor's office was being asked questions like whether she believed dinosaurs and humans had walked the Earth together. "Arghhhh!" she wrote. "I am so sorry that the office is swamped like this! Dinosaurs even?!"

PICK WAS A SURPRISE

Palin didn't seem to be expecting a vice-presidential run. In an Aug. 5, 2008, email, Palin asks staff to find a place in "already-booked-up" Minneapolis-St. Paul, site of the 2008 Republican convention, and where it eventually turned out that she'd make her debut as a national political figure.

But her staff was speculating about her political future right before McCain chose her, with Palin spokesman Bill McAllister telling a staff member and the governor in an Aug. 22, 2008, email that conservative commentator Laura Ingraham was talking up Palin on Fox as a good vice presidential pick.

Palin herself had been intent on meeting McCain at a National Governor's Association conference that February. She asked if Nick Ayers, the executive director of the Republican Governor's Association, could make it happen. "Can Ayers find us another way to get in touch with McCain? He obviously doesn't need Alaska, but it'd still be good to talk to him before too long," Palin emailed to Kris Perry, one of her top aides.

Well-wishers and haters alike emailed the governors official account after McCain chose her. Some called for Palin to be shot from a plane like an Alaska wolf, others asked Palin to appear at charity runs or hold fundraisers in their home state.

RELEASE WAS FORCED

Friday's release of Palin emails comes as she says she's considering making her own run for president in 2012.

The release, which came as a result of public records request first filed in 2008, caused a media sensation. The volume of the material released was huge, and Palin supporters complained it was over the top.

Reporters descended on Juneau on Friday to collect their six boxes of emails, and media organizations went to extreme lengths to get the printed pages scanned and posted on their websites within hours.

More than 20 reporters and photographers crammed into an office near the Capitol building to load the emails up on hand trucks and cart them away.

MSNBC.com set up shop at Juneau's Centennial Hall and shared a set of records with volunteers from the League of Women Voters and the Retired Public Employees of Alaska, who the news website said would be "chewing through bagels and the stacks of documents." A Pittsburgh-based document company called Crivella West was in the same room scanning another set of the documents to be posted online.

The emails that were released on Friday show Palin involved in state issues, from bringing up the natural gas pipeline to appointments, to putting together speeches and attending public events.

"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," said a statement from Tim Crawford, treasurer of Palin's political action committee.

The emails released cover from when Palin took office at the end of 2006 until the end of September 2008, in the heat of the vice presidential campaign. What they don't cover are the tumultuous final months of Palin's term, when she returned to Alaska after the McCain-Palin loss until her abrupt resignation in July 2009.

Other records requests have been filed for those emails; the state isn't saying when they'll be released.

The state is withholding more than 2,000 pages of Palin's 2006-2008 emails, having deemed them exempt from Alaska's public disclosure law. The state's lawyers made recommendations for what to withhold and the final decision was made by the governor's office, which includes holdovers from the Palin administration. A set of the emails to be released was also previously sent for review to Palin's lawyer, John Tiemessen of Fairbanks. The state says that the Palin team made no requests to redact or withhold any of those records.

The withheld emails include subjects like "communications w. Sen Stevens" (Palin had a sometimes rocky relationship with Ted Stevens) and strategies for responding to Palin critics like radio talk show host Dan Fagan and former legislator/blogger Andrew Halcro. Most of them were withheld for the reasoning of "Executive/Deliberative Process," a broad exemption to the Alaska records law that covers internal discussions of policy before a decision is made.

Daily News reporters Kyle Hopkins and Richard Mauer contributed to this story.

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This article in the Anchorage Daily News publishes copies of all the emails released by Alaska.

The Los Angeles Times is posting it's copies of the Sarah Palin emails at this URL.

The Washington Post is putting it's copies of the Sarah Palin e-mails at this URL.

The New York Times is posting their copies of Sarah Palin's emails at this URL and this URL.

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In E-Mails, a Glimpse From Inside Palin’s Rise

By JIM RUTENBERG and WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: June 10, 2011

JUNEAU, Alaska — Few could have been more surprised than Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska when Senator John McCain picked her as his running mate in 2008.

“Can you believe it!” she wrote in response to a staff member’s “Wow governor” message that Friday in late August when the choice was announced. “He told me yesterday — it moved fast! Pray! I love you.”

Not two days earlier, Ms. Palin had been dealing with the sometimes mundane matters of one of the nation’s least populous states: a ballot initiative on mining, thorny personnel issues involving her ex-brother-in-law, and her personal request for “Alaska pins and governor pencils (or pens) to drop off at gladys wood elem school today after my afl cio speech.”

A scan of Ms. Palin’s e-mails in the weeks just before and after she was chosen as Mr. McCain’s running mate on the Republican ticket — among some 24,000 pages of them released by the State of Alaska on Friday — show in minute detail how she went overnight from being a small-state governor who was midway through her first term to a dominant figure in Republican politics.

One moment she was immersed in board appointments and the Miss Alaska beauty pageant, the next she was receiving advice from the likes of Newt Gingrich and fielding questions from the national news media, including whether she believed that dinosaurs and humans had walked the earth together.

“Arghhhh!” she wrote in one message. “I am so sorry that the office is swamped like this! Dinosaurs even?!”

The release here of Ms. Palin’s e-mails — which are sprinkled with mentions of God and Palinisms like “flippin” as a G-rated exclamation — were an extraordinary event in their own right, providing the sort of intimate look into a governor’s day-to-day interactions that is rarely available to the public. But the intense media coverage of the e-mails was also criticized by Ms. Palin’s supporters as overzealous.

Timothy Crawford, the treasurer of Ms. Palin’s political action committee, said the messages “show a very engaged Gov. Sarah Palin being the C.E.O. of her state.” But noting that the e-mails could show only the partial story — given how much state business takes place over the phone, in person and in old-fashioned correspondence — he said that the messages “are only one aspect of communication in any office.”

The state shared the e-mails in response to requests from news media and local activists that were filed under Alaska’s open records law at the start of Ms. Palin’s run for vice president — when the rush was on among journalists, Democrats and even Mr. McCain’s own staff to illuminate and define the record of the then-obscure Alaska governor.

Released in hard copy and covering most of Ms. Palin’s months in office, the vast trove will take days to read and decipher.

But a close look at the crucial period when she rocketed onto the national stage shows that there was almost no warning of what was about to happen to Ms. Palin. And, as many asserted at the time, the vetting process of the vice-presidential candidate appears to have taken just a few scant days.

As governor, the e-mails show that Mr. Palin was intensely involved in certain issues, like as an energy rebate for all Alaskans, labor talks, and a ballot initiative regarding mining in the fragile ecosystem of Bristol Bay, home to one of the world’s largest salmon runs.

But she also showed flashes of resentment at the way she was being treated by her opponents in Alaska and the local news media, whose characterizations became part of her national political persona. Venting that she was being criticized for speaking out on the ballot initiative in a way that her predecessor would not have, she wrote to a staff member, “The double standard we face in so many areas is almost comical.”

Speculation that Ms. Palin could emerge as a dark horse vice-presidential candidate had been simmering for months, given her popularity among some highly placed Washington conservatives. But it was considered such a long shot that she did not seem to take it seriously.

In one e-mail in early August, in which she described a short visit with President George W. Bush, she wrote, “He also spoke about (and we joked about) VP buzz.” Days before the Republican convention, her office was focused on her speech, which had been scheduled earlier in the proceedings, with one aide asking her to try to shoehorn in a meeting with Mr. McCain “or his people” to discuss a drilling issue.

It is not until Aug. 24 that the e-mails between Ms. Palin and her senior staff members and advisers indicate that something is afoot. That is when she asked her office in Juneau to send two years of her financial disclosure forms to Anchorage for unspecified purposes.

From the start, she tried to straddle the dual roles of sitting governor and vice-presidential candidate, writing to her chief of staff, Mike Nizich, “As often as possible we’ll need to have announcements come under my name in these next weeks.” She added: “Remember we talked about having almost daily announcements coming from our office w my name on it so Alaskans know that still my #1 priority is serving them as Gov.”

But the incoming soon became overwhelming.

When her spokesman, Bill McAllister, forwarded reporters’ requests for information, including details about a tanning bed in the Governor’s Mansion here in Juneau, she wrote, “Yes, we paid for it ourselves.”

“I, too, will continue to be dismayed at the media and am thankful you and Sharon are not part of the stange going’s-on in the media world of today,” she said, misspellings included.

Just a few weeks earlier, Ms. Palin had seemed happy to have any national attention. In early August, when Barack Obama, then a senator from Illinois and the leading Democratic candidate for president, mentioned a natural gas pipeline that was proposed for Alaska, Ms. Palin complimented his “great speech” and asked that her staff “take advantage of this” by publicizing it.

“Pretty cool,” she said in a follow-up note. “Wrong candidate.”

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Palin closely guarded her public image, emails show

By Matea Gold and Robin Abcarian, Los Angeles Times

June 11, 2011, 8:13 p.m.

Reporting from Washington and Los Angeles— On a Saturday in July 2008, a letter to the editor on page B5 of the Anchorage Daily News caught Sarah Palin's eye. The writer, Judy Spry, complained that the governor "didn't even take the time to stop by" the annual Miss Alaska pageant held earlier in the month.

That morning, Palin sent her aides a draft letter to the editor defending her absence due to official business and noting that her husband, Todd, "left commercial fishing early this season to keep his commitment [to] judge" the pageant.

"I'm looking for someone to correct the letter writer's goofy comments, but don't want the letter to ADN in response to come from me," she wrote her aides, suggesting they find someone else to forward it.

Such attention to defending herself against even the slightest criticism was a hallmark of Palin's tenure as governor of Alaska, according to a newly released cache of her official emails. The thousands of pages of correspondence portray a governor engrossed in shaping how she was seen by others — whether in a story about her family's travel arrangements or coverage of complex policy initiatives.

After a reporter filed a public records request in July 2008 for the details of her family's state-paid travel, Palin urged her staff to remind him of all the steps she had taken to save the state money by not having a chef or an apartment in Anchorage and by reducing her security detail. She suggested that her staff pull the travel records of previous governors, who she said took vacations with state security.

"We have to be proactive on this so pls let me know if you need any further info," Palin wrote.

In the 24,199 pages of messages released Friday by the state of Alaska, Palin and her aides engage in extensive discussions about media tactics and the need to get out her side of the story. But there are few exchanges about the substance of the matters that came before her.

Gaining a full sense of Palin's focus is difficult because the state heavily redacted her correspondence, particularly emails regarding policy discussions with her Washington staff. Many of those exchanges are stamped "privileged or personal."

What emerges repeatedly in the materials, however, are episodes in which the governor pushed her staff to demand corrections from reporters and fretted that her emails were being leaked.

After the local media reported on email sent in May 2008 by the executive director of the state's energy agency to its commissioners, Palin urged a staffer in the Department of Administration to track down the source of the leak: "This was an internal email from steve to all commissioners. It ended up in reporters' hands. Not good, again."

Palin and her aides also agonized over how to contain rumors that her eldest daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, which cropped up in the spring of 2008, after Palin had announced her own pregnancy. The governor considered contacting Sheila Toomey, the political gossip columnist for the Anchorage Daily News, to put the rumors to rest. "She can handle it light-heartedly, knowing her column … and maybe it would go a long way," Palin wrote. (Bristol gave birth to a son on Dec. 27, 2008.)

The vast majority of Palin's emails went to a half a dozen of her close aides and her husband, Todd, indicating that she largely was cocooned within an insular circle of advisors on whom she relied for frequent updates. Based on the emails that were made public, she appeared to have limited direct contact with other Alaska lawmakers, even when major issues were before the state Legislature.

That approach was in keeping with the go-it-alone posture that defined Palin when she entered national politics, one that would probably persist if she jumped in the 2012 race for the presidency. (She has said she is considering an "unconventional and nontraditional" bid.)

Though her outsider stance brought her into sharp conflict with other lawmakers at times, Palin can point to significant accomplishments as governor. Perhaps most important was the 2007 passage of a tax increase on profits that oil companies paid to the state. Major oil companies strongly opposed her proposal, but Palin persevered after forming alliances with Democratic legislators. Passage of the tax led to a rebate check for Alaska residents during a year of high gas prices.

The emails showed that Palin and her staff sought to use policy victories to burnish her political image.

In June 2008, when it appeared lawmakers would take up her push for a temporary repeal of the state's fuel tax, her jubilant staff crowed that the move would boost her standing as a possible vice presidential pick for Sen. John McCain.

"I'll send to McCain's camp after the presser or bill comes out," staffer Ivy Frye wrote to Palin on June 19, 2008. "They're going to love it! … More vp talk is never a bad thing, whether you're considering vp or not. I still say President Palin sounds better tho ..."

"Hee hee ..." the governor responded.

Even as Palin portrayed herself as anti-establishment, the emails reveal that the realities of governing were sometimes at odds with the political image she was crafting.

Palin won national applause for her 2008 vice presidential acceptance speech by telling the GOP nominating convention that she had told Congress, "Thanks but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere."

In fact, as the emails reveal, Palin had an enormously complicated relationship with the $398-million Gravina Island Bridge project, which was to be funded mostly by $223 million in federal funds, as well as other projects financed by congressional earmarks. The bridge would have connected the city of Ketchikan with Gravina Island, home to the area's airport and a few dozen people.

When she ran for governor in 2006, she gave a carefully honed answer about the Gravina project in a broadcast debate, saying that she would not stand in the way of the Alaska congressional delegation's efforts to secure the funding.

Privately, however, she was not thrilled. In addition to the federal funds, tens of millions of dollars in state money would be needed to pay for the bridge. In 2007, she wrote to her chief of staff, Mike Tibbles, "I am very disappointed to hear that funds are still being spent on Gravina. The project does not have my support because of the funding issues long term." But she did not propose returning the earmarked funds to the U.S. Treasury.

Though Palin wanted to be known nationally as a fiscal tightwad, back home "she did not want to be perceived as being against locally popular projects," said Larry Persily, who worked as an aide in her Washington office.

In an April 2008 email to the state's top lobbyist in Washington, Palin acknowledged that she welcomed federal funds for controversial public works projects. "Amazing that some still want to claim we'd essentially turn down federal dollars if they came via earmarked projects," she wrote in an email to John Katz, who had sent the governor a newsletter article about the declining politically potency of earmarking.

matea.gold@latimes.com

robin.abcarian@latimes.com.

Gold reported from Washington and Abcarian from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Kim Murphy in Seattle and Tom Hamburger, Kathleen Hennessey, Kim Geiger, Christine Mai-Duc and Melanie Mason in the Washington bureau also contributed to this report.

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Sarah Palin emails: Flippin' out over a critical newspaper column

June 11, 2011, 5:52 p.m.

Like any elected official, Sarah Palin paid close attention to her detractors, particularly those with large audiences. Radio personality and newspaper columnist Dan Fagan, a former supporter-turned-consistent Palin critic, was especially annoying.

In July 2008, Fagan claimed in the Anchorage Daily News that Palin and her staff had erased the contributions of Sen. Ted Stevens in a book created by the Alaska Statehood Celebration Commission commemorating Alaska’s first 50 years.

“What is surprising is Palin would attempt to erase the legacy of the longest serving Republican in the U.S. Senate,” wrote Fagan. “You would think it would be beneath even her. You would think.”

Palin hit the roof.

Who was Fagan’s editor, she asked her staff. “I need to call whomever it is bc ADN’s credibility plummets in my mind with this morning’s garbage. I’d like to tell the editors that.”

Someone, she said, needs “to write something for public consumption that calls him on his lies. Whoever wrote the flippin book could add to the explanation too.”

What ensued was a public battle, fought on the pages of Alaska’s largest daily newspaper.

First, Palin’s assistant, Kris Perry, wrote an indignant response.

“To accuse the governor and the administration of intentionally manipulating the book’s contents to slight Sen. Stevens ignores the inconvenient truth that its production, and editorial control of its content, was contracted out,” wrote Perry. She said the work was done by the Florida firm Faircount Media Group.

Nine days later, in his regular newspaper column, Fagan called Perry’s explanation “the mother of all Palinista deceptions.”

He added: “A commission headed by the governor’s best friend came up with the topics. I talked to the Florida publishing company and they said they worked directly with the governor’s office on the book and that the governor’s office approved every word.”

Palin was furious: “Where’s Faircounrs [sic] explanation via letter to the editor so we can shut up Fagan finally?”

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Palin emails let old media test new media methods

Posted 6/12/2011 8:08 PM ET

By Mike Baker, Associated Press

The analysis of Sarah Palin's emails over the past few days may end up teaching us more about the future of journalism than about the former Alaska governor's past.

Drawing on methods used by both Wikileaks and social networks, traditional news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post used the Palin email dump as an experiment in new media techniques. They sought collaboration from readers and posted massive volumes of documents online before reporters even had a chance to read most of the papers.

That sort of public coordination -- often called "crowdsourcing" -- has drawn increasing interest from many journalists. David Lauter, chief of Tribune Co.'s Washington bureau, said he and his colleagues have wondered whether it would be a more productive way of analyzing data.

"It's a concept that we'd been looking at," Lauter said. "This seemed like a great opportunity to test to see how it might work."

Tribune dispatched two journalists equipped with portable scanners to Juneau to pick up the thousands of Palin emails and begin digitizing them for online readers. Lauter said the first batch was posted on the Los Angeles Times website about 30 minutes after the documents were released Friday.

The New York Times, using a similar strategy, assigned a team to put all the documents online as soon as possible. It took 14 hours to post all of them.

Technologically, the project seemed to succeed. Several outlets organized the files chronologically and made the documents searchable. The Associated Press made electronic scans available to members around the country.

Neither the crowdsourcing nor the traditional analysis by reporters produced any bombshells, but enlisting the public did help engage readers. The New York Times received more than 2,000 emails, about half of which were substantive responses. Most of the annotations attached to Palin's emails came from readers, not reporters.

Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor at the paper, said the paper still considers crowdsourcing experimental, but the public responses were clearly useful.

"The readers are augmenting the work of our journalists, not taking their place," Roberts said in an email. "We're not doing anything that we wouldn't otherwise do. The readers are just an extra, and valuable, resource."

Steve Doig, a journalism professor at Arizona State University who specializes in computer-assisted reporting, said the crowdsourcing approach was clever -- and one he hopes to see more of in the future.

"You don't have to be a professional reporter to be able to recognize statements that might be newsworthy," Doig said. "So, having lots and lots of eyeballs looking through it -- whether it's professional reporter or just somebody who's looking for their own interest or amusement -- you can more quickly find something newsworthy."

With an increased focus to share documents online, media outlets have been seeking out new ways to compile and analyze information. A few months ago, the AP internally assessed thousands of emails sent to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and raised questions about his claim that most people who contacted him wanted to eliminate nearly all union rights for state workers.

In 2009, The New York Times publicly posted hundreds of pages from the calendar of Timothy Geithner -- now President Barack Obama's treasury secretary -- from his time at the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

Journalists and observers said the conditions were ripe for using crowdsourcing with the Palin emails because the documents were so voluminous. And they were released to many media outlets at the same time, meaning there was no reason to horde them in hopes of identifying an exclusive.

Reporters had been seeking the Palin emails for nearly three years -- ever since she was selected as John McCain's running mate in 2008. Alaska public records law requires agencies to respond within 10 working days, but it took the state far longer to compile, review and release Palin's correspondence.

Palin's use of private email addresses to conduct state business made the job more complicated and stirred interest in the messages.

As the release date grew closer, Palin continued to be the focus of speculation about a potential 2012 White House bid. And the number of news organizations seeking the emails also grew. That led to a scrum of reporters arriving Friday in Juneau to pick up boxes containing 24,000 documents and hurry them off to be digitized.

The documents offered a glimpse into Palin's methods as governor, showing her engaged in day-to-day duties, concerned about her image and protective of her family. It also captured the speed of her rise to the center of national politics.

Tim Crawford, treasurer of Palin's political action committee, encouraged everyone to read the emails and said they showed a governor hard at work. Meanwhile, other Palin supporters questioned whether the news media were unfairly targeting her in a massive rush to analyze the documents.

Stacy Drake, an editor and contributor at the pro-Palin website Conservatives4Palin, said the email databases were clearly a fishing expedition and could potentially be called a witch hunt. She thought it was ridiculous to post emails from every aspect of Palin's time in office, as opposed to investigating a specific issue or topic and posting documents related to that.

"You have to sit back and ask: 'Who else are they doing this with?'" Drake said. "I think if she were a Democrat, her treatment would be different."

Doig disagreed but said he'd like to see such scrutiny for all public candidates and hopes it becomes commonplace.

Mike Oreskes, AP's senior managing editor for U.S. news, noted AP filed more than 1,000 records requests in each of the past two years, including many related to other governors and the Obama administration. He said the news cooperative plans to continue pressing to obtain the records of other presidential contenders.

"Palin is one of many office holders whose public record and leadership the AP has sought to illuminate by obtaining emails, memos and other documents," Oreskes said.

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Mike Baker can be reached at twitter.com/MikeBakerAP