Summary: Convicted Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane announced today that she will resign.
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On Monday, after 4 1/2 hours of deliberation, a jury of six men and six women found Ms. Kane guilty of two counts of perjury and seven misdemeanor counts of abusing the powers of her office.
Kane’s conviction and subsequent resignation represents a dramatic turn of fortune for the 50-year-old former county prosecutor who was the first woman and first Democrat elected as attorney general in Pennsylvania.
County Judge Wendy Demchick-Alloy ordered Kane to surrender her passport and threatened to jail her if she retaliated against the once-trusted aides who testified against her.
“The attorney general continues to believe the information that she authorized to be released was not covered by grand jury secrecy”, Chuck Ardo, a spokesman for Kane, said a year ago.
“It’s just a matter of how to really gauge your time, focus your interests and give direction to the staff all at the same time”, he said.
Kane’s criminal troubles began with a squabble over the handling of a pair of investigations by prosecutors in the attorney general’s office before she was elected in 2012. He resigned from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office in June, accusing Kane of using the pornographic emails as a weapon in her “personal and political vendetta” against him, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Kane’s criticism of the Sandusky case had triggered a bitter feud with the investigators who handled the case, and prosecutors say she suspected they had leaked the unflattering story to the Inquirer. “We have rules that we have to abide by and there are no exceptions to that”, prosecutor Kevin Steele said, adding that the prosecution team were vying for prison time for Kane.
The Montgomery County District Attorney said that in addition to illegally leaking the grand jury information, she lied about it under oath.
Kane’s term was initially supposed to end in January.
His replacement was Walter Cohen, a colleague at the attorney general’s office, who now is a partner with Obermayer, Rebmann, Maxwell and Hippel LLP in its Harrisburg office.
Elected on a pledge to take on the Capitol establishment, she promised a vigorous review of the handling of the child sex abuse case involving former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky under the previous attorney general, former Gov. Tom Corbett.
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The “Porngate” scandal resulted in the early retirements of former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justices Seamus McCaffery and Michael Eakin, as well as reprimands for dozens of state employees. However, the judge in her perjury trial did not allow the jury to hear about the email scandal.
