Kathleen Kane knew she released secret grand jury information to the press and she lied about it, Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele argued Tuesday at Kane’s trial.
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“Where’s my article?” Ms. Henry said Ms. Kane wrote to her political consultant Josh Morrow in 2014, before a newspaper article was published using the information Ms. Kane is accused of leaking to the Philadelphia Daily News.
Excerpts of Kane’s grand jury testimony are being aired as her trial begins Tuesday in suburban Philadelphia.
Kane is charged with perjury, a felony, for allegedly lying to the grand jury, and eight misdemeanor counts that include obstruction, official oppression, conspiracy and false swearing. An ethics board accused Kane of “egregious conduct” amid criminal charges she leaked grand jury material to a newspaper to embarrass enemies and then lied about it under oath.
“Revenge is best served cold, those were her [Kane’s] words”, Special First Assistant District Attorney Michelle Henry told jurors at the start of her opening statement. Prosecutors also say she lied about whether she signed an oaths to keep grand jury records secret when she took office.
Kane, 50, has said she won’t give up fighting what she calls the “old-boys network” in state government, but she did not seek re-election this year, and her term expires in January. “She knew it was wrong but she wanted revenge and covered it up with lies”. “I’m sure this isn’t the end of the game”, Kane said after prosecutors added more charges to the case.
Angered by a newspaper article critical of her decision to drop a corruption case, Kane chose to make her foe, former state prosecutor Frank Fina, look bad by leaking information about another case he had not pursued.
NORRISTOWN, Pa. (AP) A blind desire for revenge led Pennsylvania’s attorney general to leak secret criminal files to the press to embarrass a rival and then lie about it to a grand jury, prosecutors said as Kathleen Kane’s perjury and obstruction trial opened Tuesday.
“She wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth”.
After working in the Lackawanna County District Attorney’s Office and then stepping down to raise her two sons, Kane, who had never run for public office, set her sights on the state Attorney General’s Office, according to Shargel, after determining that “the criminal justice system was broken”.
Running on a campaign platform of reform and transparency, Kane won the post in a landslide election in 2012, said Shargel.
Shargel told jurors that Fina left for a job in Philadelphia, and that Kane had no motivation to pursue a course of action that would have risked her career.
He says he immediately recognized the information as coming for the AG’s office, and, in his opinion, it was protected by grand jury secrecy laws. “She worked hard to achieve her success”, Shargel said. Bradbury from his 2015 investigation at Kane’s Harrisburg office. Rather than respond to criticism at a news conference, Henry said, “it’s cloak and dagger”.
That leak of secret grand jury materials pertains to a 2009 investigation Fina headed into former NAACP president J. Whyatt Mondesire, who is now deceased and was never charged.
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Kane visibly bristled at the defense table when Beemer referred to her as “the defendant”. “This case is very simple”. At one point Kane is quoted in the transcript as saying, “I didn’t consider it a leak, a leak is something you do secretly, something you don’t want other to know”. “I thought we had a problem”. It remains unclear whether Kane will testify.
