The FBI searched the residence of the son of a Democratic state lawmaker in Tennessee over the weekend looking for evidence linking the young man to the hacking of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail account, two law enforcement officials told The Associated Press on Monday.
David Kernell, 20, has not returned repeated phone calls or e-mails from the AP since last week. His lawyer said Monday the family is going through a difficult period.
“The Kernell family wants to do the right thing, and they want what is best for their son,” said attorney Wade V. Davies of Knoxville. “We are confident that the truth will emerge as we go through the process. David is a decent and intelligent young man, and I look forward to assisting him during this difficult period.”
Kernell is the son of state Rep. Mike Kernell, a Memphis Democrat and chairman of Tennessee’s House Government Operations Committee. The father declined last week to discuss the possibility his son might be involved in the case.
“I had nothing to do with it, I had no knowledge or anything,” Mike Kernell told the AP last week.
“I was not a party to anything of this nature at all,” he added. “I wasn’t in on this — and I wouldn’t know how to do anything like that.”
No one answered the door at Mike Kernell’s home in Memphis on Monday, and he did not return repeated phone calls Monday from the AP.
The apartment the FBI searched is in a complex about five blocks from the University of Tennessee campus in a neighborhood popular with students. No one around the complex Monday knew David Kernell or saw the FBI agents over the weekend.
A hacker last week broke into one of the Yahoo Inc. e-mail accounts that Palin uses, revealing as evidence a few inconsequential personal messages she has received since John McCain selected her as his running mate. The McCain campaign confirmed the break-in and called it a “shocking invasion of the governor’s privacy and a violation of law.”
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/AheadoftheCurve/wireStory?id=5856956
Can you imagine the liberal meltdown if the kid of a Republican Congressman had pulled the same crap?
Kernell did this purely for political reasons. He was salivating for some kind of juicy scandal in Sarah Palin’s innocuous emails. What an ass.