the kicker

Good MoJo

Kudos to Mother Jones for some great muckraking when it comes to Palin’s foreign policy experience as Alaska governor. Not only do the governor’s calendars—562 pages of schedules that MoJo obtained under Alaska’s Open Records Act—show that Palin conducted no official meetings with Russian officials, but Palin also “had few meetings at all with any […]

October 10, 2008

Kudos to Mother Jones for some great muckraking when it comes to Palin’s foreign policy experience as Alaska governor. Not only do the governor’s calendars—562 pages of schedules that MoJo obtained under Alaska’s Open Records Act—show that Palin conducted no official meetings with Russian officials, but Palin also “had few meetings at all with any foreign representatives and rarely dealt with any topic related to foreign policy.”

The schedules include about 20 meetings, events, or phone calls in which Palin interacted with foreign officials. And in many instances, these interactions were cursory or ceremonial and did not involve policy details. According to the schedules released, Palin spent roughly 12 hours over the course of 19 months on these meetings. (This doesn’t count what happened during a four-day trip she took to Kuwait to visit members of the Alaska National Guard. The schedules for those days do not detail whom she met.) The calendars show no meetings between her and a trade delegation from any nation.

Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.