Sarah Palin: Hillary Should Have Followed My Example on Emails

Sarah Palin says Hillary Clinton should have followed the former vice presidential candidate's example in releasing her emails publicly the way Palin did when she came under fire as Alaska's governor, The Washington Post reported.

Noting the irony, it appears Clinton was tracking with Palin who kept a state email account and then also created a Yahoo personal account, warning friends to use the latter, lest their correspondence became public record, the Post wrote.

"My NEW personal/private/confidential account will now be: gov.sarah@yahoo.com All other people will be emailing me through the state system at governor@gov.state.ak.us and that is NOT a confidential/private account so — warning — everyone and their mother will be able to read emails that arrive via that state address,” Palin wrote while governor.

Regardless, such flouting of transparency in government earned the ire of at least one opinions editor at the Alaska Dispatch News, Scott Woodham, who slammed the "hypocrisy" of Palin, noting that "the erosion of public oversight and accountability is a direct threat to representative democracy," the Post said. It added that Palin, unlike Clinton, did not use one private account exclusively while in office.

Palin, in an editorial posted on the Fox News website Monday, said she had faced tough scrutiny over her emails, which were released in 2011. She thinks Clinton should, too.

"As Secretary of State under Obama, Hillary Clinton used private email accounts on a privately maintained server 100 percent of the time for 100 percent government business," Palin noted. "That's unethical, no doubt illegal, and flies in the face of all claims of transparency. Hillary Clinton and her staff weren't trying to be in compliance with the law; they were skirting it altogether. "

Palin joked about her own email scandal, writing: "The release of my emails was a great boon for Alaska's tourism industry because dozens of national reporters descended on Alaska to pour through tens of thousands of pages of my emails looking for some smoking gun. They even crowd-sourced the work out to the general public to help them look for dirt! They were sorely disappointed."

Clinton, on Tuesday, defended the use of private emails as a matter of convenience but agreed it might have been better if she had separated her work and personal correspondence, USA Today reported.

"Looking back it would have been better to use separate phones and two separate e-mail accounts," Clinton said, addressing the scandal publicly for the first time. "I thought one (mobile) device would be simpler. Obviously, it hasn't worked out that way."

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