Kane, who has denied wrongdoing and refused to resign, is charged with perjury, obstruction and other counts.
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Henry began opening arguments with words she attributed to Kane herself: “Revenge is best served cold”.
Ms. Kane left a trail of her lies and crimes, Ms. Henry said, including text messages that will be presented at trial.
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.
One month later, Henry said Kane came across information showing Fina had failed to prosecute the former Philadelphia NAACP president J. Whyatt Mondesire and instructed her second in command, Adrian King to deliver a memo and a transcript of testimony to political operative Josh Morrow. In May, Morrow delivered the documents in an envelope to reporter Chris Brennan (then with the Philadelphia Daily News), who published a story about it on June 6, 2014. Rather than address her critics at a news conference, Henry said, Kane deployed “cloak and dagger” techniques. “In an envelope, the secret documents”.
But defense lawyer Gerald Shargel promised a bruising cross examination of Mr. Morrow and other former top aides to Ms. Kane.
As Steele questioned Bradbury, the secrecy oaths with Kane’s signature were displayed to the jury on a giant projection screen by Jonathan Perrone, computer operations supervisor in the district attorney’s office. “It just doesn’t make sense she would risk her reputation and career”. He claimed the two hardly knew each other and had met once or twice before. “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.
Kane has hired a small army of private attorneys to represent her. She insists she never broke the law.
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.
A pool of more than 100 potential jurors was asked, as a group, if they are lawyers, if they know the prosecutors or defense attorneys, and if they know Kane.
She also is charged with perjury for making false statements in a grand jury hearing about her knowledge of the grand jury records, her involvement in their release and her knowledge of the resulting newspaper article. Beemer advised the men that the statute of limitations on that case had passed and there was no way to pursue it further.
The list of witnesses and trial topics read to the jury pool includes a Supreme Court justice who stepped down over the pornographic email scandal; the NAACP official at the center of the long-dormant probe leaked to the press; and the special prosecutor whose investigation of the leak led to Kane.
“My reaction was, ‘Who’s giving out police interviews or reports out of our office?'” he said.
“I will not allow them to discredit me or our office”, Kane wrote to a media strategist that day, according to emails shown in court Tuesday.
Beemer’s testimony is expected to continue tomorrow when the trial resumes at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown. The judge in the case told jurors Kathleen Kane’s perjury trial should last about a week.
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This story was updated at 5:30 p.m.
