Todd Palin: Shadow Governor?

Good question.

The answer may be here:

In the aftermath of the Walt Monegan firing, one question keeps surfacing over and over again; why does the governor’s husband, Todd Palin appear to hold so much power? After all, Nancy Murkowski or Susan Knowles were never accused of pressuring a commissioner or inappropriately sitting in on meetings that should have been private.

The stories started last year when Representative Ralph Samuels told me about going into a meeting, he thought would be private, with Governor Sarah Palin. Much to his surprise, Todd Palin was there and proceeded to sit through the entire meeting.

Other lawmakers have shared similar stories and were shocked at how inappropriate Todd’s presence was at meetings with the governor.
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The most alarming indication of Todd Palin’s reach into state government came just yesterday.

Last month, a group of Alaskans filed a freedom of information act for emails sent from the computers of both Frank Bailey and Ivey Frye. Along with several boxes of documents, they received a cover letter along with 78 pages detailing the emails that were not released due to “Deliberative Process and Executive Privilege”. (Privilege log attached) Page 1 of the list showed seven emails from both Governor Sarah Palin and Lt. Governor Sean Parnell within a three hour time frame on Feburary 1, 2008 that were described as “Email re Andrew Halcro”. The serious concern about these emails is that they were prohibited from being released to the public due to executive privilege, even though Todd Palin was copied on these same emails. Todd Palin is not a member of the executive branch, nor is he even a government employee. Todd Palin is a member of the general public. So why in the world is Todd Palin getting copied on emails that his wife’s administration is classifying as confidential?

Furthermore there is something incredibly suspicious about these emails. The first email was sent on Feburary 1 at 7:41am from Lt. Governor Sean Parnell to Governor Sarah Palin. Obviously something was burning Parnell to make him fire off an email to the governor so early in the morning about Andrew Halcro. This in turn set off a flurry of email activity that spanned the next three hours and encompassed five different people including Todd Palin.

Judging from the blogs I posted on January 31, the night before, this very well could be about the 2004 TransCanada proposal that Parnell help negotiate when he was an attorney in the oil & gas division that has been kept sealed ever since. TransCanada has insisted to this day that it remain confidential.

These emails should be released to the public…after all Todd Palin has no standing to claim executive privilege. By including him in the email loop, the Palin administration has arguably breached any claim of executive privilege.

What do you bet that they find an activist judge to uphold the claim of Executive Privilege?