Investigation of Sarah Palin Email Hacker Focuses on David Kernell

Investigations into the hacking of Sarah Palin's private email account continues. (My initial post on this subject here). The FBI has focused its efforts on David Kernell, a student at the University of Tennessee. Search warrants have been granted and served on Kernell's apartment.

The interesting twist is that David Kernell is the son of Democratic Tennessee state representative Mike Kernell. The obvious question is whether the son acted on his own or if he was given direction by someone officially affiliated with Democratic party. The former makes it just an impulsive kid acting out in an irresponsible manner; the latter would have more serious political and legal implications.

The son certainly wasn't careful and the attitude displayed is disgraceful.

I read though the emails… ALL OF THEM… before I posted, and what I concluded was anticlimactic, there was nothing there, nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped, all I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor…. And pictures of her family

So he broke into her private (not official government) Yahoo! email account and was devastated to find only private information?

Some people have complained about the lack of national news coverage this story has received. While I agree to some extent, the FBI search is official enough that it is starting to appear on the AP wire. Will CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and the like actually cover the story? Doubtful but if it grows large enough they will have no choice. This is especially true if the father somehow is tied into his son's actions. At the moment though, dad seems to be worrying about number one--his son's problems are his own.

"I had nothing to do with it, I had no knowledge or anything," Mike Kernell told the AP. "I was not a party to anything of this nature at all," he said. "I wasn't in on this — and I wouldn't know how to do anything like that."

I like the "I wasn't in on this" part. Does that mean he knows his son is guilty and is distancing himself or was the "this" just in reference to the email hacking in general? Is his whole response a case of protesting too much? Time will tell...

Update: Credit where credit is due. CNN.com has picked up the AP story. It's a short article and doesn't have one-tenth the information available in local news stories, but a link to the article did appear (and at the time of writing, still appears) on the CNN front page.