Photo caption: Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane leaves the courtroom for a short recess on the second day of her trial at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa., Tuesday, August 9, 2016.
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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.
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. Kane is charged with perjury, obstruction of justice, official oppression and false swearing.
But Kane’s lawyer, Gerald Shargel, said Kane barely knew Fina – saying he quit 10 minutes after she took office in 2013 -and that she did not knowingly leak any grand jury material.
“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.
Prosecutors say Kathleen Kane helped orchestrate that leak.
The defense added Kane did not lie to a grand jury but instead may have made “honest mistakes”, on the timeline of the events.
Prosecutors opened their case with testimony from Montgomery County Detective Paul Bradbury, who former District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman assigned to follow up on a special prosecutor’s grand jury probe of the leak.
Jurors were being questioned Monday for the expected one-week trial of outgoing Attorney General Kathleen Kane, whose four-year term has been rocked by petty feuds, political intrigue and a pornographic email scandal.
Upon hearing about the defunct NAACP investigation, Kane testified before the grand jury, she believed that case could have been successfully prosecuted and directed aides to release that information to the public. The defendant wanted to get revenge, and to get that revenge she leaked secret confidential information to a reporter.
The perjury trial of Pennsylvania’s attorney general is set to be a gossip-filled political affair with a list of potential witnesses and topics including judges, journalists and former top aides to the embattled Democrat. Bradbury from his 2015 investigation at Kane’s Harrisburg office. In fact, she “never had access to those documents”, Shargel said.
The first-term Democrat lost her law license after her arrest and decided not to run for re-election.
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.
The emails, which were released by Kane after much court wrangling, led Fina to quit his job with the Philadelphia District Attorney, and claimed the jobs of two state Supreme Court justices and several other state officials in what became known as “Porngate”. “As I reviewed article a little bit more, then I realized there’s a lot going on here and a lot of problems and one of them certainly, the grand jury”.
“I was shocked because I knew that information had to have come out of our office”, said Beemer.
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The day ended with Kane’s former 1st assistant Bruce Beemer on the stand. “I thought we had a problem”.
