Just a reminder that for somebody who claims she has nothing to hide, Sarah Palin has worked VERY hard to hide virtually everything!

From Mother Jones:

A group of journalists, including myself, have been trying for two years to win access, under Alaska's open records law, to emails Palin sent and received during her partial stint as governor of Alaska. But the state has postponed releasing the emails, with the office in charge of the request repeatedly asking for and receiving extensions from a series of state attorneys general (including Palin appointees). But the delays could be coming to a halt, with the current AG demanding a "work plan" for turning over the Palin emails.

Nine days after Republican Sen. John McCain in 2008 tapped Palin to be his vice presidential running-mate, I sent Palin's office a request for all emails written by her, received by her, or cc'ed to her during her tenure as governor. In subsequent weeks other news organizations, including the Associated Press and MSNBC.com, the state Democratic Party, and individuals (such as Alaskan citizen watchdog Andree McLeod) filed similar requests.

The request for Palin's emails was not a simple one for her office to handle. Months earlier, the Alaska governor's office had used (or abused) exemptions in the law (covering materials related to the "deliberative processs") to hold back from public release 1,100 emails to and from state officials, including Palin. And, it turned out, Palin had used private email accounts for state business. That meant it would be tough for state record-keepers to locate all her emails, for the state didn't have direct access to these accounts. The governor's office said it would have to search through 68 official state email accounts used by Palin's aides to collect emails to and from Palin's unofficial email addresses—at a search cost of $960.31 for each account. (Some of the emails from her private accounts became public in 2008, after a hacker gained access.)

Now, it's more than two years later. Last June, the state did release to MSNBC.com and NBC News nearly 3,000 pages of emails Todd Palin had exchanged with state officials. (The documents showed how deeply involved the "First Dude" was in official affairs.) But Sarah Palin's emails remained behind a bureaucratic firewall.

Can you believe that? Even though she is no longer in office, the people that Palin left behind are still providing cover for her, and keeping her secrets locked away from public scrutiny. And don't forget that Palin opened those Yahoo e-mail accounts specifically so that what she e-mailed back and forth would NOT be subject to an official records request.  However since she conducted state business on them that put them into play, which Palin was to ignorant to anticipate.

That certainly does not sound like a person who is ready to stand up to the kind of scrutiny that she will receive as a candidate for the GOP nomination does it?

And don't believe for a minute that the legal wrangling by the State of Alaska on Palin's behalf is even remotely close to being over yet.

When the other reporters and I first filed our requests for Palin's emails, we wondered if we would have any records before Election Day in 2008. It quickly became apparent that the state would not release any of this material before Americans would render judgment on the McCain-Palin ticket. Now the question is, will the long run of extensions push the release of her gubernatorial emails into the 2012 presidential season, when she might be a candidate? It's possible this request could go unfinished until after the next election. But even if the state does turn over her emails in the next year or so, there will probably be significant material redacted. That could prompt legal challenges that extend this process up to Election Day 2012—or, perhaps conveniently for Palin, beyond that.

So essentially a request for e-mails by a sitting Governor, who is no longer even in office, may take over FOUR YEARS to process!  I have never heard of anything like that happening up here before.

Which leads me to believe that whatever is in those e-mails, must be devastating to Sarah Palin and her plans for the future.