Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has joined critics of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the use of private email accounts to conduct public business. The rest of the United States should try not to be distracted by the gales of unseasonably warm laughter coming from Alaska today.
On March 5, Palin's Facebook page posted the following:
This Clinton email scandal can't be shrugged off. If this doesn't strike you as shady and corrupt, I don't know what will. Didn't anyone in the Obama administration notice that the Secretary of State for "the most transparent administration in history" was only using a private email account for all her government business? And her answer to all these questions is a tweet? Diplomacy (and cover ups) by Twitter continues.
More from Bristol on this scandal here:
http://www.patheos.com/…/why-that-hillary-clinton-personal…/
Under ordinary circumstances, that would just be political jockeying between people whose names are bandied about for high national office, but this is Sarah Palin. Ordinary can keep on walking. For a long time now, even before her fame began to wane, she has operated in a new space, somewhere between candidate and pundit, between private citizen and celebrity. Even as governor, she was an astute observer of that gray area, and is no stranger herself to the kind of shade she's throwing Clinton's way.
During her 2006 campaign for governor, Palin vowed to run an "open and transparent" administration. In 2008, after her election, a college student in Tennessee broke into Palin's personal Yahoo account. He posted some of what he found to Internet sharing sites, then, fast-forward, spent some time in jail. That batch of emails made it clear that Palin was conducting state business on non-state accounts under the impression that what was said there would be "confidential."
After three years of government delays, media outlets and private citizens eventually pried thousands of printed and heavily redacted pages of emails out of the state government.
Some of the same state officials targeted by the records requests became the ones to oversee the redaction and release of emails, and the debacle showed Alaska's open records law had more holes than a Bristol Bay setnet.
In an email leaked prior to the official release, Palin told her inner circle, including family members, advisers and her chief of staff on Feb. 2, 2007: "My NEW personal/private/confidential account will now be: gov.sarah@yahoo.com All other people will be emailing me through the state system at governor@gov.state.ak.us and that is NOT a confidential/private account so -- warning -- everyone and their mother will be able to read emails that arrive via that state address."
Her attorney, Thomas Van Flein, explained that message was intended to keep personal and public communications in their proper areas. But emails leaked then, and dozens of others released to media outlets later as part of a lengthy public records battle, clearly show Palin using personal email addresses to conduct state business. The Yahoo account existed well into autumn of 2008.
Palin's hypocrisy on this issue is so massive that it makes her moral outrage all the more plausible to some, especially her fans, but that's nothing new. Nor is her hypocrisy the real issue here. The issue is an increasing bent for secrecy in government.
Sean Cockerham reported in 2012 that a former state official claimed the same Parnell administration that slow-rolled the release of Palin emails was using text messages to forestall public records requests in what would eventually become the Alaska National Guard sexual assault scandal.
Whether at the hands of Parnell, Palin, or Clinton, the erosion of public oversight and accountability is a direct threat to representative democracy. What's in the emails is less important than the very fact of these extra accounts' creation. They exist in defiance of the spirit of open records laws and the public's right to know, and at potentially great risk to sensitive information that reasonably should be secret.
And our public officials evidently are getting better at circumvention. According to The Associated Press, Clinton was using a private server and a private email domain. That's much more sophisticated than Palin's operation, or the texts that the Parnell administration was said to have been using.
But the sophistication of this doesn't excuse any politician caught circumventing public records laws or endangering state or national security by communicating public business outside of an official email account.
This trend means that eventually, if they aren't already, government officials will use private email accounts to conduct every kind of state business except to make the blandest, most innocuous statements. The face of our government will become a public mask scrubbed of all import, unresponsive to any meaningful request for information in the public interest. It's pretty close to that already.
Our technology allows unprecedented connectivity, and it is advancing faster than ever. If public oversight doesn't catch up, it could get left behind for good. And then the public's right to know will be completely thwarted.
When that happens, we'll only have ourselves to blame. We must not allow public access to the inner workings of our government to become a partisan issue instead of the civic one it always will be no matter who's in charge.
Scott Woodham is an opinion pages editor at Alaska Dispatch News.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.