Pa.’s attorney general charged in grand-jury leak

Associated Press

NORRISTOWN, Pa.

Pennsylvania’s attorney general was charged Thursday with leaking secret grand-jury information to strike back at her critics, then lying about it under oath, in a case that could spell the downfall of the state’s highest-ranking female politician.

Kathleen Kane leaked the material to a political operative to pass it on to the media “in hopes of embarrassing and harming former state prosecutors she believed, without evidence, made her look bad,” Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman said.

Kane, the first woman elected attorney general in Pennsylvania, was charged with perjury, obstruction, conspiracy and other offenses. The 49-year-old Democrat is expected to surrender within days.

“No one is above the law, not even the chief law-enforcement officer of the state of Pennsylvania,” Ferman said. She called it “a sad day for the citizens of Pennsylvania and a sad day for all of us in law enforcement.”

Kane has portrayed herself as a victim of payback for taking on a corrupt, old-boy law-enforcement network and exposing state employees for exchanging pornographic emails. She vowed to stay in office and fight the charges.

“A resignation would be an admission of guilt,” she said, “and I’m not guilty.”

The charges represent a new low in Kane’s tumultuous three years in office, a period that has seen an exodus of top aides, fumbled corruption cases and feuds with former prosecutors who served under her Republican predecessors.

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf called on the former rising star to resign, echoing newspaper editorial pages across the state in recent months.

Kane had come under fire from some former prosecutors for declining to pursue charges against several lawmakers accused of taking illegal gifts.

The charges against her allege she struck back by leaking information to the Philadelphia Daily News last year that made it look as if prosecutors botched a 2009 probe into whether a Philadelphia NAACP official misused state job-training grants. The official never was charged.

The NAACP probe was headed by Frank Fina, who was a top prosecutor before Kane got elected. In court papers, Kane was accused of spilling the information to get even with Fina.

“I will not allow them to discredit me,” she wrote in a 2014 email to her media strategist. “This is war.”