More than 24,000 pages of e-mails relating to Sarah Palin's term as governor are scheduled to be released Friday by the state of Alaska to CNN and other news organizations.The release follows Freedom of Information Act requests filed by CNN and five other news agencies that date to 2008, shortly after Palin was tapped to be Sen. John McCain's running mate.
Among the material that will be made public are Palin's e-mails dealing with state business -- using both her official account as well as private accounts, according to Linda Perez, the administrative director for current Gov. Sean Parnell.
A search was done "in an effort to capture everything in the state e-mail system" that would comply with the request, Perez said.
Then lawyers within the state Department of Law recommended what should be released and what should be withheld under state requirements, and the final decision was made by the governor's office, Perez said.
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Members of the media, including CNN, were informed last week in an e-mail from the governor's office that the release was imminent. The e-mail said some of the documents will be redacted and others will be withheld due to several legal privileges that are permissible under the state's disclosure law, including attorney-client and some executive deliberations.
Perez said 2,275 pages are not being released.
The documents being released cover requests from December 2006 through September 2008, when she was named the Republican vice presidential candidate.
E-mails for the remaining 10 months of her tenure, before her resignation, are not yet being released.
A number of reporters and producers, including those representing CNN, are expected to be on hand for the release of six boxes full of pages. The e-mails will be reviewed by CNN, with some posted online at CNN.com.
As early as last week, Palin said she was not worried about what was in the e-mails.
"I think every rock in the Palin household that could ever be kicked over and uncovered anything, it's already been kicked over," Palin told Fox News Sunday.
Palin told Fox News Sunday that "those e-mails obviously weren't meant for public consumption," saying she was sure the material would be taken out of context.
"They'll never truly know what, the context of each one of those e-mails was, or each one of the issues were that I was working on that day, or in what time period," she said.
The Alaska Dispatch political columnist, Amanda Coyne, says all the attention is "for what I'm betting won't be much."
"There will be tidbits, but nothing that a few local reporters and bloggers couldn't cover quite nicely," Coyne wrote in a recent column.
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