On the fourth day of Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane’s trial on perjury and conspiracy charges, her former consultant dropped a major bomb: He helped illegally leak grand jury information to a Daily News reporter because Kane told him to do it, he said.
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The documents at question include sensitive grand jury information surrounding a 2009 investigation led by Frank Fina, an enemy of Kane’s, Morrow said.
Here & Now’s Robin Young gets the latest from WHYY’s Katie Colaneri.
The documents that found their way into the Philadelphia Daily News detailed an investigation into an NAACP official who was never charged in the case. Morrow has been granted immunity for his cooperation with prosecutors. Working for Ms. Kane’s 2012 election campaign was the “one of the crowning achievements of my career”, Mr. Morrow said, so he had tried to protect her.
He changed his story slightly in subsequent testimony, saying she said it related to Mr. Fina and how he shut down the Mondesire investigation.
Joshua Morrow, Kane’s former political consultant, said he and Kane attempted to cover up the leak, the Morning Call reports. If charges are filed, judges can also permit grand jury materials to be used at trial.
As an investigation of the leak commenced, Morrow testified he and Kane met in August 2014 and “Kathleen and I came up with a story”, that they each would tell to a grand jury empaneled to investigate the leak, to communicate that Kane never saw the leaked documents.
Eventually, Morrow said, “The lie was starting to unravel” and he says he felt burdened by it.
Morrow said he became involved in the alleged tangle of lies to “protect” Kane.
Now, Beemer said he and Kane were going “back and forth” about whether the documents – a memo and a transcript of an interview – should even be considered secret grand jury material protected by law.
Long before the trial started there were rumblings coming out the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office concerning a hostile work environment. Kane, wearing a teal suit, sat with her hands calmly folded on her lap and showed no reaction to Morrow’s testimony.
Kane, 50, a first-term Democrat, faces charges of perjury, obstructing administration of law, abuse of office and false swearing in connection with allegations she orchestrated the illegal disclosure of confidential investigative information and secret grand jury information to the media and then engaged in acts created to hide and cover up her conduct.
But prosecutors also played in court Thursday a recorded phone call that he made to a friend the night before he was supposed to pick up the leaked documents from Mr. King’s home. But they have insisted that she did this out of a commitment to transparency, not as part of a vendetta against Mr. Fina.
But in the phone call taped by the FBI, Morrow described Kane as bent on getting out information harmful to Fina. Kane allegedly replied, “I won’t tell anyone”. “They wanted me down to see if I was wearing a recording device”.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane returns to the defense table and a former boyfriend-turned-top deputy to the witness stand when Kane’s perjury case resumes. But he said he now believes Kane is “trying to frame” him for the leak, and he barely hid his anger as her lawyers cross-examined him Wednesday.
Defense lawyers have implied Kane violated no law and committed no crime.
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The feud nonetheless sizzled, and she suspected him of planting a Philadelphia Inquirer article a year later that faulted her for not charging anyone in a statehouse bribery sting.
