Anchorage activist Andrée McLeod has filed an ethics complaint with the state Attorney General's office, this time against former Palin aide Frank Bailey, who is reportedly writing a book about her time as governor.
The complaint is based on an item in Sunday's Alaska Ear column:
“Bailey hasn’t been giving interviews, but earwigs say he and two co-writers are about 70 percent done with a manuscript based heavily on thousands of e-emails sent and received by people in the gov’s office during that period.”
The essence of McLeod's complaint is that it's unethical for Bailey to use government e-mails for personal gain if the e-mails haven't been made public. McLeod, along with the Associated Press, Mother Jones and MSNBC, asked for a variety of Palin administration e-mails in 2008 and have yet to see the release of many of them.
Department of Law spokesman Bill McAllister said …there's "no way of knowing what e-mails are being referenced."
From Andree:
EXACTLY MY POINT. When you go around and run business through back-channels with the use of private email accounts…there’s no way of knowing what emails Bailey used to cash in on …
which is illegal if those same emails haven’t been made public… or he hasn’t gotten authorization to use them if they were acquired because of his position working for Palin…
or if they remain confidential to members of the public because of executive privilege, deliberative process or client/attorney privilege.
Thanks for the supportive comment Sherry!
Posted by: Syrin From Wasilla | 09/09/2010 at 08:42 AM
And round and round we go. Andree McLeod must have incredible fortitude to keep bringing these complaints. As Molly Ivins would say, good on ya, Andree!
Posted by: SJohnson | 09/09/2010 at 08:27 PM