Prosecutor: Pennsylvania attorney general had sought revenge

MARYCLAIRE DALE

NORRISTOWN, Pa. — A desire for revenge drove 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.

Kane, 50, was once a rising star in the state’s Democratic party, using her then-husband’s trucking fortune to run for statewide office after stints as a Scranton prosecutor and stay-at-home mother. Her 2012 campaign criticized the pace of the office’s child sex abuse investigation of Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.

The chief deputy attorney general, Frank Fina, had led that investigation. When Kane took office, he moved on.

The feud nonetheless sizzled, and she suspected him of planting a

article a year later that faulted her for not charging anyone in a statehouse bribery sting.

“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. “This is war.”

Kane, out for revenge, gathered documents from a Fina-led grand jury case from 2009 that had likewise been dropped, prosecutors said. The case involved J. Whyatt “Jerry” Mondesire, an NAACP leader in Philadelphia. He became collateral damage when a story ran in 2014, they said.

“He was just a casualty in her war of revenge. She was after Frank Fina,” Assistant District Attorney Michelle Henry said in opening statements.

Kane had given the confidential documents to top assistant Adrian King, who passed them on to campaign consultant Josh Morrow, who passed them to the

she said. Rather than address her critics at a news conference, Henry said, Kane deployed “cloak and dagger” techniques.

Kane then lied repeatedly about the leak to a grand jury, Henry said.

“I don’t know what Adrian gave to Josh,” she told the grand jury, according to excerpts shown in court. “What I said to Adrian was, ‘People need to know about this.’ He agreed.”

But she said that she neither passed King any documents nor told him which ones to deliver.

Bruce Beemer, who headed the criminal section, testified that he was stunned when he saw the article because he knew the Mondesire leak must have come from their office. He returns to court today for more testimony.

The defense, in opening statements, told jurors that Kane wouldn’t have risked her career over a feud with Fina.

“(He) left 10 minutes after she arrived,” veteran New York trial lawyer Gerald Shargel told jurors in opening statements. “It just does not make sense that she would risk her reputation and her career (over him).”

But Fina, after going to work for Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams, fanned the flames when he revived the statehouse probe and secured several convictions. Kane had deemed the case flawed by sloppy detective work and a focus on black lawmakers from Philadelphia.

Kane is charged with perjury, a felony, and misdemeanor counts of conspiracy, obstruction and false swearing. She lost her law license over the charges and did not seek re-election this year. The trial is expected to last a week.