Activist files ethics complaint over Palin e-mails

The complaint by Andree McLeod is based on a newspaper gossip item and focuses on former aide Frank Bailey, who's working on a Palin manuscript.

Palin was known to use private e-mail accounts to communicate with certain staffers while in office, and the complaint seeks to determine whether unreleased or even confidential e-mails from that period are being used for personal gain.

"Where's the attorney general on this?" McLeod said. "Where's the administration on this?"

Department of Law spokesman Bill McAllister said ethics complaints are supposed to be confidential; McLeod made hers public. He also said there's "no way of knowing what e-mails are being referenced."

Bailey, in an e-mail, acknowledged working on a manuscript but said there's no book right now. He said he has not sought literary representation or signed any deals.

He did not answer whether he had administration e-mails in his possession but expressed confidence that "our efforts and procedures" have been lawful.

"The manuscript will present a fair representation of the dramatic times -- both good and bad -- of my years working inside the Sarah Palin campaign and administration," he wrote. "Because of the massive amount of misinformation being broadcast from all sides, our primary concern is to be as accurate as possible."

Last year, a California publicist and two co-authors terminated a book deal with Bailey on a book titled "Renegade: Sarah Palin's Hatchet Man."

Bailey got caught up in an investigation of Palin's firing of her police commissioner over allegations the commissioner wouldn't fire a trooper who divorced Palin's sister. Bailey was heard in a recorded phone call telling a state police official that Palin and her husband didn't understand why the trooper still had a job.

Bailey left state government after Palin's abrupt resignation last summer.