When Gawker published a selection of emails from Sarah Palin's hacked Yahoo! account, we got tons of psychotic (and anti-Semitic!) hate mail full of "Don't drop the soap in prison" jokes; Bill O'Reilly said we should go to jail forever; and cesspool blogger Michelle Malkin called Gawker "a cesspool blog." But now the real villain in all this being asked to answer for her villainy. An Alaskan activist—a Republican activist—is taking Sarah Palin to court to find out why she was using personal email accounts to conduct government business in the first place.

In a lawsuit filed in Alaska Superior Court, a Republican activist seeks to force Gov. Sarah Palin to produce copies of official correspondence she sent and received on private e-mail accounts. Andrée McLeod filed the suit Wednesday and publicized it in a news release today. "Rather than using her state e-mail account, throughout her two-year tenure as Governor of Alaska, defendant Sarah Palin, as a matter of routine, has used, and, on information and belief, continues to use, (at least) two private e-mail accounts... to conduct official business of the State of Alaska," the suit alleges. The suit is the latest front in a battle McLeod is waging over Palin's e-mail. In June, she filed an open-records request and received four boxes of redacted e-mails. But more than 1,100 others were withheld, an action Palin justified by claiming executive privilege. McLeod appealed that claim last month before going to court last week. McLeod has questioned whether Palin was using private e-mail accounts to conduct state business in a manner that would skirt open-records laws. In one notable e-mail, a Palin aide apologized for discussing state business on a public account. "Whoops!" Palin aide Frank Bailey wrote, after addressing an e-mail to the governor's official state address. "Frank, this is not the Governor's personal account," a secretary reminded him.

[Washington Post]