State Attorney General Kathleen Kane’s criminal trial is underway in Montgomery County.
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Kane was the first woman and first Democrat to be elected attorney general in Pennsylvania. Dressed in a cream and black tweed suit, she occasionally leaned in to speak with her attorney, Gerald Shargel.
Kane then lied repeatedly before a grand jury investigating the leak, Henry said. Mr. King alone decided what to release, her attorneys have said.
Ms. Kane, 50, was charged a year ago after prosecutors said she had illegally leaked secret grand jury information to embarrass former state prosecutor Frank Fina – and later lied about it. Court adjourned shortly after Beemer was called to the witness stand. It remains unclear whether Kane will testify.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane congratulates Governor Tom Wolf following his inauguration ceremony at the State Capitol in Harrisburg, PA on January 20, 2015. “She broke the laws when her job was to uphold them”, Henry said, gesturing toward the attorney general.
The witness list was still unavailable, but key witnesses against Kane are expected to include her former first deputy, Adrian King, and supervisory agent David Peifer. After both prosecution and defense spent an hour, respectively, on opening statements, District Attorney Kevin Steele, showed the jury various original and redacted versions of disclosure statements, emails, memo’s and other documents regarding the grand jury leak on two large screens in the courtroom.
Kane’s law license was temporarily stripped stemming from her charges in September 2015; an appeal Kane filed in February for its reinstatement was denied. He became collateral damage when the story ran in 2014, they said. He died past year.
“Revenge is a dish best served cold”, prosecutor Michelle Henry said in her opening remarks in the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas in Norristown, a Philadelphia suburb.
It was in that context, and not because of alleged revenge, that the information about an investigation into the NAACP official came from her office, according to Shargel. “This is war.” Prosecutors say Kane collected documents from an unrelated case that Fina had taken to a grand jury – and also later dropped – and gave them to a trusted assistant, who allegedly had them delivered to a reporter at the Philadelphia Daily News. He accused Ms. Henry of whitewashing the aides’ own “perjury” when she told the jury the men may try to minimize their own roles in the conspiracy with Ms. Kane. He said she did not commit a crime, however, because it was an “honest mistake” as she simply did not remember doing so. As for her feud with Fina, “it makes absolutely no sense”, Shargel said. Mr. Morrow had already given the grand jury materials to the reporter, Ms. Henry said.
Kane said the oaths she recalled signing dealt with ongoing and new grand jury investigations, according to a transcript of her testimony before the grand jury.
That’s a double-edged sword for prosecutors.
“I will not allow them to discredit me or our office. I was never sworn into any grand jury”. He spoke about his reaction when he learned information from the Mondesire probe was made public in the Philadelphia Daily News.
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“I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it”, Beemer testified about seeing the article, adding it caused him to suspect a leak in the attorney general’s office.
