Pa. AG confirms probe into office

Associated Press

NORRISTOWN, Pa.

Attorney General Kathleen Kane confirmed Monday that she was testifying before a grand jury investigating whether her office violated grand jury secrecy requirements and said she would tell the panel that information was shared but no law was broken.

Portraying herself as a victim, Kane suggested she was being targeted because of her effort to end abuses of the criminal-justice system, but did not specify by whom.

“If this can be done to me as attorney general ... I am sickened to think what can be done and may be done to regular, good people who don’t have the resources that I have to challenge it,” Kane, accompanied by two outside lawyers, said in a statement she read before entering her eastern regional office to testify.

In her statement, Kane recounted her office’s recent release of emails containing pornographic or explicit images, videos and jokes that had been discovered on state computers after being circulated by employees of the office in recent years. Some people involved in circulating the emails have resigned their government jobs.

She did not explain the link between the email case and the grand jury investigation.