An Alaska Superior Court judge on Friday ordered the administration of Gov. Sarah Palin to preserve emails she sent from her private Yahoo! email account dating back to December 2006.

The ruling was issued in response to a lawsuit filed against Palin by former state employee turned government watchdog Andree McLeod, who has been trying to gain access to thousands of pages of Palin’s government emails through an open records act request.

In June, Palin’s office turned over to McLeod four boxes of heavily redacted emails. The Palin administration has cited executive privilege in its refusal to voluntarily turn over more than 1,000 emails to McLeod.

“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,” McLeod’s lawsuit claims. 

Anchorage Superior Judge Craig Stowers ordered Alaska Attorney General Talis Colberg to immediately contact Yahoo! And begin the process of preserving emails dating back to 2006 and retrieve emails that may have been destroyed after Palin’s account was deactivated following the hack.

“Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and the office of the governor of Alaska … are ordered to preserve all e-mails (including attachments thereto) sent between December 4, 2006, and the resolution of this litigation,” Stowers order says.

Like some senior officials in the Bush administration, Palin has allegedly used a private email account to conduct official government business. Palin used gov.sarah@yahoo.com and gov.palin@yahoo.com to conduct some state business.

A congressional report concluded last year that more than 80 Bush administration officials used private e-mail accounts to conduct official business, in violation of the Presidential Records Act.

Former White House political adviser Karl Rove used an email account maintained by the Republican National Committee to conduct 95 percent of White House business, according to congressional investigators in what appeared to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act.  

Federal lawmakers claimed Rove used the RNC account as a way to circumvent the archival process. Lawmakers have spent more than a year trying to gain access to Rove’s RNC emails as well as the emails of other White House officials who conducted White House business via an RNC account. Many of those records have since been destroyed, the RNC said.

Last month, someone hacked into Palin’s Yahoo! Email account and posted screen shots on the Internet of some of Palin’s personal correspondence with state officials.

McLeod, who fell out of favor with Palin, said the governor’s use of a non-secure email account to conduct government business was negligent at best.  

“We shouldn’t be in a position where public records have been lost because the governor didn’t do what every other state employee knows to do, which is to use an official, secure state e-mail account to conduct state business,” McLeod said Friday after the court hearing.

McLeod filed her lawsuit on Oct. 1, the same day the Washington Post published a report that said Palin was using yet another private email address to “communicate with a small circle of staff members outside the state government’s secure official e-mail system.”

Recently, Palin’s office said it would cost $88,000 to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act request filed recently by the state’s Public Safety Employees Association, the union that represents the governor former brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, an Alaska state trooper, who was involved in a bitter divorce and child custody suit with Palin’s sister.

The union alleges Palin’s office illegally accessed the trooper’s personnel and workers compensation file and disseminated confidential information to a top Alaska state trooper official in an attempt to get Wooten fired. A report on the matter is scheduled to be released today.

In August, the union filed an ethics complaint against Palin alleging unauthorized access to Wooten’s personnel files.

John Cyr, the director of the PSEA, also filed a FOIA request for emails after an audio recording surfaced in July that showed Palin’s director of state boards and commissions, Frank Bailey, telephoned police Lt. Rodney Dial last February to inquire about union issues involving state troopers and outlined disparaging details about Wooten’s finances and personal behavior that appear to have come from his personnel file.

Bailey said he had gotten the information from Todd Palin, the governor’s husband.

But Cyr said he believes more than 1,000 e-mails were exchanged between Bailey, and Sarah and Todd Palin, and other officials from Palin’s administration that, if released, would show that Palin and her aides kept tabs on Wooten and perhaps discussed information about the trooper that could only have been obtained by illegally accessing the trooper’s confidential files.

Cyr said he filed a FOIA request on behalf of the union to obtain the e-mails, but the governor’s office said in a written response it would cost the union $88,000 for the documents because it would require the state to spend $1,000 to search 90 separate email accounts. 

“That seems a little steep,” Cyr said. “And suspicious.”