Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane walks into the courtroom on the opening day of her trial at the Montgomery County Courthouse Monday, Aug. 8, 2016, in Norristown, Pa.
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The first-term Democrat insists she did nothing wrong.
To the contrary, Ms. Kane is the victim of a former first deputy and political consultant who lied repeatedly to hide their own roles in the leak, her defense argued before the jury in Montgomery County Common Pleas Court.
A jury of six men and six women has been seated to hear the perjury and obstruction trial of Pennsylvania’s attorney general.
Kane is charged with perjury, a felony, and misdemeanor counts of conspiracy, obstruction and false swearing.
She’s accused of leaking secret grand jury material to a newspaper to embarrass enemies and then lying about it under oath.
Henry said Kane, 50, the state’s first female and first Democrat to be elected attorney general, sought to embarrass prosecutor Frank Fina because she believed he was the source of a 2014 Philadelphia Inquirer story about Kane’s decision to drop a bribery prosecution of several black Democratic legislators.
“(Kane) took an oath of office to uphold and enforce the law”, Henry said in her opening remarks.
“Instead of upholding and enforcing our laws, she broke them”.
“The Attorney General of Pennsylvania, she wants to get something out, she has a press conference, right?”
Kane is accused of leaking confidential information from a 2009 grand jury to a writer from The Philadelphia Daily News in 2014.
“Lies, leaks and lawlessness made her what she is today, a criminal defendant”, Henry told the jury about Kane.
Shargel described his client as the daughter of hardworking parents who was “not born with a silver spoon in her mouth”.
NORRISTOWN Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane smiled briefly but declined comment as she left the Montgomery County Courthouse after selecting jurors that will decide her fate on alleged perjury charges. That amounted to a perjury trap, Shargel said.
But in a dramatic opening line, Henry began with the alleged motive: “Revenge”, she said.
Kane has maintained that information on the NAACP investigation did not violate the law because that grand jury had long shut down its investigation.
“It just does not make sense that she would risk her reputation and her career”, Shargel said.
Steele has been laying the foundation for his case against Kane, having county Detective Paul Bradbury read to the jury much of the evidence that he found in his investigation to bring charges against the state’s top prosecutor.
The man she blamed for that negative press is Frank Fina, a former state prosecutor who later joined the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office. He also recited the testimony Kane gave before the grand jury.
This investigation turned up the signed oath by Kane.
After reading the story, Beemer said he immediately knew that the information on which the reporter based the story came from the state Attorney General’s Office.
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“I will not let them discredit me or the office”, Kane wrote to a political partner in an email presented into evidence Tuesday.
