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 Today, at 9 a.m. local time in Juneau, the state of Alaska is scheduled to release 24,199 pages of emails Sarah Palin sent and received during her half-term as governor of the Last Frontier. State workers will distribute six-box sets and hand trucks (which must be returned) to representatives of a dozen or so media outfits, including Mother Jones. Immediately, a mad dash will be on, with journalists reviewing (and scanning) these thousands of emails, searching for illuminating or entertaining information regarding the GOP’s number-one political celebrity, who remains a possible 2012 presidential contender. (Shortly after the release, Mother Jones, msnbc.com, and ProPublica will post online a searchable archive of the emails.) This saga began with a request I made almost three years ago. 
 
 When John McCain chose Palin as his sidekick, reporters rushed to dig up what they could about the little-known chief executive of the faraway state. As part of that frenzy, I came across a local story about a citizen activist in Alaska named Andrée McLeod, who had used the state’s open-records law to request emails sent to and from two of Palin’s top aides over a period of several months in 2008. McLeod suspected that the pair had engaged in prohibited political activity during official business hours. The governor’s office handed over four large boxes of emails, portions of which McLeod used as the basis for filing an ethics complaint. But more intriguing than the documents released was the material withheld: 1,100 emails the state deemed exempt from release because they were covered by the “executive” or “deliberative process” privileges that protected communications between Palin and her aides about policy matters. The subject lines of several of the withheld emails—which were catalogued in a list given to McLeod—suggested that they were not policy-related. Several referred to one of Palin’s political foes, others to a well-known Alaskan journalist. 
 
 Though it appeared that Palin’s administration might have abused the exemptions to hide politically inconvenient emails, I thought it was worthwhile to shoot for the moon. On September 8, 2008—ten days after McCain tapped Palin as his running mate—I filed a request with the state for “all emails sent and received by” Palin during her entire tenure as governor. 
 
 This was the first comprehensive request for the Palin emails received by the state. In subsequent days, other media outlets submitted more-limited requests. The Associated Press and NBC News requested copies of emails sent to and from Todd Palin. Msnbc.com asked for emails between Sarah Palin and certain state employees. CNN requested emails to and from the McCain presidential campaign. 
 
 Palin’s use of a private account was arguably improper and perhaps a violation of state guidelines. Why should news organizations and citizens have to pay extra because the governor had decided to engage in state business on a private email account? 
 
 I wasn’t sure whether the state could process my request before the November election, when Americans would have to render judgment on the McCain-Palin ticket. That would would entail collecting and reviewing a lot of information. But the state’s initial response, outlined in a September 22 letter, was almost encouraging. The state noted that it would take eight hours of computer staff time to gather the emails and perform “security operational management,” whatever that meant. For all this, Mother Jones would have to pay a fee of $2,249.46. But there would be an additional cost for copying. The normal duplication fee, the state said, was 10 cents a page. But for this request the state had opted to use an outside vendor that charged 29 cents a page. And there was no way to tell at the start how many pages would be produced; certainly there would be thousands. 
 
 Without knowing what the final fee would be, Mother Jones decided to proceed, and the state revised the initial fee covering the search to $590.96. That seemed a like bargain. I sent in a check. We were on our way. 
 
 But soon, a big problem materialized. News reports revealed that Palin had used a private Yahoo email account to conduct state business. (This account was soon hacked.) I asked Palin’s office whether it would be collecting emails related to state business sent to and from this account. Linda Perez, the administrative director of the Alaska governor’s office, replied, “We are unable to access records from the nonstate email accounts as we are not the account owner or customer of the providers.” 
 
 Regarding this Yahoo account, the state, Perez reported, could only gather emails that Palin had sent to or received from the official email accounts of other state employees, including her aides. But doing so would require searching the accounts of dozens of other state employees at a cost of $960.31 per account. Perez noted that searching through the email of all state employees would result in an exorbitant fee. But, she added, there were 68 employees within the executive offices of the governor. This meant a limited search would cost about $65,000. 
 
 I protested. Palin’s use of a private account was arguably improper and perhaps a violation of state guidelines. Why should news organizations and citizens have to pay extra because the governor had decided to engage in state business on a private account? I requested that the fees associated with searching these 68 accounts be waived. Days later, the news emerged that Palin had used a second private account to communicate with a small circle of staff members—further complicating the effort to gather her emails. 
 
 Palin had in effect created a challenge for the state (especially its IT workers), and the state agreed to drop all search fees. Officials returned my check for $590.96, while noting that the request still would probably end up costing between $7,000 and $13,000 in copying fees. (Mother Jones, msnbc.com, and ProPublica agreed to cover these costs, share the documents, and jointly develop the online archive.) But now the major issue was time. Recovering the emails from Palin’s various official and nonofficial accounts and then reviewing those messages would take a while. “I can’t even begin to estimate,” Perez told me, with a sigh, in October 2008. 
 
 At this point, it was obvious there would be no Palin emails released before the election. Though the state could have gone ahead and collected and reviewed emails from her state account—which presumably would have taken less time—it insisted on making those official emails a part of the more comprehensive and time-consuming project. 
 
 The long wait began. As the governor’s office began processing the request, every few months it asked the state attorney general for an deadline extension. And the AG (always a Republican) said yes. 
 
 In December 2008, the state—which had lumped together most of the various media requests—told us that it had collected about 25,700 relevant messages. (It was compiling emails from the official accounts of 51 state employees, not 68.) But the state noted that it would take 33 days merely to print them out—and then the lawyers would have to start reviewing the documents to determine if any material should be withheld or redacted. The state declined to say how long the legal review would go on. At the end of January 2009, the senior assistant attorney general in charge of the review noted in a memo, “Unfortunately, we have made little progress.” He reported that his department had been unable to “batch-print the email records in the format provided” and that each email had to be opened individually and converted to a PDF file. 
 
 Throughout the months, the state reported various glitches. For instance, at one point its techies realized that the format for state employees’ email addresses had changed during the period in question from @[department].state.ak.us to @alaska.gov. Consequently, IT staffers had to collect data from twice as many accounts as initially anticipated. 
 
 The senior assistant attorney general in charge of the review noted in a memo, “Unfortunately, we have made little progress.” 
 
 In February 2009, acting attorney general Richard Svobodny declared that he had designated the ongoing email review “a very high priority” for the state’s Department of Law—as he granted another extension. The following June, he noted that the department had devoted “over 4,000 hours to providing legal review and advice on public records at a cost to the state of $450,000,” and he granted another extension. 
 
 When Palin resigned as governor in July 2009, the governor’s office asked the journalists seeking her emails if we were “still interested in the requested records.” Yes, we replied. Two weeks later, the state’s Department of Law wrote a memo reporting that it had a team of six attorneys and four paralegals and associate attorneys on the case. It claimed it had “continued to make significant progress.” Still, more extensions came and went. (In June 2010, the state did release to msnbc.com and NBC News nearly 3,000 pages of emails Todd Palin had exchanged with state officials. ) 
 
 This past December, the state reported that it had identified 26,553 pages of emails, and the lawyers had reviewed less than one-third of this trove. More time was needed. But Alaska attorney general David Sullivan demanded that the governor’s office submit a work plan that would state when the request would be finished, and a target date was set: May 31, 2011. 
 
 Now, another six months later, the governor’s office has missed that date, but by only 10 days. Not bad, considering. The final fee ended up being a reasonable $725.00 for copying. 
 
 But what’s coming? Or, more important, what’s not? The state has informed us that it is withholding 2,353 pages. And the released documents will contain redactions. There may be no way to tell if the suppressed material was excised legitimately. (The state, as I noted above, doesn’t have a sterling record on this front.) The lawyers who reviewed the emails and recommended deletions worked for Palin or her successor Gov. Sean Parnell, who served as Palin’s lieutenant governor. Citizens might be excused for wondering if politics (or Palin protection) was a concern among the redacters. The lawyers suggested material to block; the governor’s office rendered the final decision. 
 
 Also, because Palin used those personal email accounts for official communications, this collection will not be comprehensive. Emails that were sent to or from her personal email to people other than those 51 state employees—even if these communications involved state business—will not be part of this batch, nor will emails that Palin sent from her personal accounts to the personal accounts of aides and other state officials. By using personal accounts for official business, Palin has been able to evade, in part, the open records rules of her state. 
 
 Still, it is hard to envision a release of so many pages that won’t contain valuable nuggets for those who want to better understand Palin, who has been all over the news of late. For months, as other leading Republicans have been stating their intentions regarding the presidential race, Palin, who has declined to indicate whether she might enter the contest, seemed somewhat eclipsed within the political-media firmament. But she recently took steps to elevate her profile, including a stunt-like family bus tour of historic sites imbued with patriotic meaning. She quickly returned to the headlines, dominating the political news—even crowding out announced candidates. A Palin presidential reality show, at the moment, appears a greater possibility. And opposition researchers in the various GOP presidential campaigns are, no doubt, eager to peruse these records. 
 
 So perhaps the Palin emails are arriving at an appropriate time. The request I placed during the last presidential campaign might end up affecting the current one. ||||| FRIDAY: More than 24,000 pages will be available in Juneau. 
 
 JUNEAU -- The state of Alaska will release thousands of Sarah Palin's emails from her first two years as governor today, a disclosure that has taken on national prominence as she flirts with a run for the presidency. 
 
 The emails were first requested during the 2008 White House race by citizens and news organizations as they vetted a vice presidential nominee whose political experience included less than one term as governor of Alaska and a term as mayor of the small town of Wasilla. The nearly three-year delay has been attributed largely to the sheer volume of the release and the flood of requests. 
 
 The state is releasing the more than 24,000 pages of emails in paper form only and asking news organizations to pick up several boxes' worth of documents in Alaska's capital city, accessible by only air or water. Reporters from several news organizations have already begun arriving in Juneau and are making various plans to disseminate the emails to the public. 
 
 Palin told Fox News Sunday that "every rock" that could have been kicked over to uncover things in her family has been. But she also said "a lot of those emails obviously weren't meant for public consumption" and that she expected people might seek to take some of the messages "out of context." 
 
 But there may not be any surprises to Palin in the emails. 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, the administrative director for Gov. Sean Parnell, who has been coordinating the release. 
 
 The voluminous nature of the release, the isolation of Juneau and the limited bandwidth in the city of 30,000 people have forced media outlets to come up with creative ways to transmit the information. The Washington Post is looking for "100 organized and diligent readers" to work with reporters to "analyze, contextualize, and research the emails." The New York Times is employing a similar system. 
 
 Msnbc.com, Mother Jones, ProPublica and are working with Crivella West Inc. to create a searchable database of the emails. (The Anchorage Daily News is partnering with ABC News to scan the paper documents and make them available to readers online.) The Associated Press also plans to scan the paper copies to make searchable files available to its members and clients. 
 
 The state said it was not practical to provide electronic versions of the emails. 
 
 It's not clear yet whether the 24,199 pages being released will contain any major revelations, but they will provide a fresh look at the inner-workings of her office from the time she took office in December 2006 to her ascension to vice presidential nominee in September 2008. Requests have been made for emails from her final 10 months in office. The state hasn't begun the process of reviewing those yet. Palin resigned partway through her term, in July 2009. 
 
 Prior records requests have shed light on the Palin administration's efforts to advance a natural gas pipeline project and the role played by Palin's husband in state business. 
 
 The email release adds another dimension to the vetting of Palin that began in 2008 and comes as she has become a prominent national political figure, attracting large crowds during a recent bus tour across the Northeast. Palin's attorney referred questions about the emails to the treasurer of her political action committee, who did not immediately respond Thursday. 
 
 The emails were sent and received by Palin's personal and state email accounts, and the ones being released were deemed to be related to state business. 
 
 She and top aides were known to communicate using private email accounts. Perez said Palin gave the state a CD with emails from her Yahoo account, and other employees were asked to review their private accounts for emails related to state business and to send those to their state accounts. 
 
 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. 
 
 Some emails may have been previously reviewed in other, earlier public records requests, such as in the Troopergate investigation, in which Palin was accused of putting pressure on public safety officials to fire her brother-in-law, an Alaska State Trooper who was going through a bitter divorce from Palin's sister. 
 
 Clive Thomas, a longtime Palin observer who's writing a book on Alaska politics, said he's not sure what the emails will contain -- or whether their contents will affect people's perceptions of Palin. 
 
 "I guess most people, I think, who don't like Sarah Palin are hoping there's something in there that will deliver the final sort of blow to her (politically)," he said. As for Palin's supporters, he said he doesn't think their opinion of her will be changed regardless of what comes out.
– Today’s the big day: The 24,199-page, 275-pound trove of emails from the first two years of Sarah Palin’s stint as governor of Alaska is almost here. The state will release them at 9am local time (1pm ET), reports Mother Jones, which requested the emails back in 2008. Reporters began arriving in Juneau, which is only accessible by air or water, yesterday, the Anchorage Daily News reports. They will pick up six boxes’ worth of documents and a hand truck (which they have to bring back), and immediately start a mad scramble to report on what they find. Click to see how you can help the Washington Post do just that.