Castor, a former Montgomery County commissioner and district attorney, will serve as acting attorney general until a new Attorney General is elected in November and sworn in January or a replacement is appointed by Gov. Tom Wolf and approved by the state Senate.
Advertisement
On Tuesday, Wolf called Kane’s situation “unfortunate”.
There is little support among Castor’s fellow Republicans for the 54-year-old Lower Salford lawyer to hold the top post any longer than necessary, according to sources.
However long he remains state attorney general, though, Castor would not have a role in the Cosby case, which is being handled by county prosecutors.
Even a former Kane supporter, Northumberland County Democratic Chairman Rodger Babnew, said last week’s four-day trial surfaced disappointing details about Kane’s conduct. She already has lost her law license over the charges.
Kane, through her lawyer, also surrendered her passport at the county Clerk of Courts Office on Tuesday.
Bruce Beemer now serves as Pennsylvania’s Inspector General, and prior to that he served as first deputy in the Office of the Attorney General of Pennsylvania where he oversaw the day to day operations of the Criminal, Civil, and Public Protection Divisions, as well as being responsible for the management of nearly 800 employees.
“Lastly, I would like to send a message to the hardworking men and women who are employed in the Office of Attorney General, who have had to deal with this nightmare – help is on the way, keep the faith”.
The driving force in Kane’s case are the perjury counts, which have a standard guideline range of probation to nine months in prison for each count, D’Andrea said.
If she is sentenced to jail, it is highly unlikely she will be allowed to remain free until her appeals are resolved, the attorneys said. Before dismissing Kane, the judge expressed her displeasure with Kane, while referring to trial testimony, bellowing that Kane left no one “minding the store” when Kane took a trip to Haiti in April 2014 with several other staffers. Kane’s lawyers also complained that the judge had not allowed them to argue in court that the investigation had been propelled by former state prosecutors anxious that Kane would reveal their raunchy, pornographic interoffice emails she had discovered on the office’s services.
The same prosecutors involved in the Philadelphia investigations oversaw the Sandusky case.
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. “If the saga of the past two years has taught us anything, it’s the need to elect an Attorney General who will make serving their constituents their top priority”.
However, senators were preparing to act regardless, under an obscure procedure known as direct address, in which a state official can be removed from office.
Beemer’s nomination needs to be confirmed by a two-thirds vote of the state Senate.
Kane was convicted of leaking secret criminal files and then lying about it.
Advertisement
In an August 10, 2015, statement, Kane said that the criminal charges launched against her were part of ongoing political retribution for requesting that the emails be released to the public, a request that was blocked by Judge William Carpenter in what she called “a tortured interpretation of our state grand jury secrecy law”.
