AG’s gubernatorial run raises issues

August 15, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

HARRISBURG

If Tom Corbett holds onto his lead in the polls and gets elected Pennsylvania’s next governor in November, he will get the power to fill thousands of jobs.

One of them is the position Corbett currently holds, attorney general.

That scenario raises the prospect of his nominee having to go door-to-door in the Senate to seek support from a legislative chamber that for several years has been a target of Corbett’s wide-ranging public corruption investigation.

The nominee would need votes from 34 of 50 senators to serve as a full-fledged attorney general, and it’s no secret that many lawmakers are critical of how that investigation has been conducted.

Those critics might think twice about broaching the subject with the hand-picked successor of a new governor with whom they will have to work for the following four to eight years.

“Are they going to say, ‘Yeah, they want my vote, drop the investigation’? Boom, you’ve got a subpoena to the grand jury to explain that remark,” said Ernest D. Preate Jr., who was attorney general until he resigned in June 1995 as part of a deal in which he pleaded guilty to a federal mail-fraud charge.

“The reality is there’s going to be so much intense scrutiny from the media and legislative groups and political parties that Corbett’s going to have to appoint someone with stature,” he added.

The nominee could always respond with a prosecutor’s standard “That’s under investigation” form of “No comment.”