Kane consultant: ‘We had conspired to create this story that wasn’t true’
The Philadelphia Inquirer
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — A political consultant to Kathleen G. Kane testified Thursday that the Pennsylvania attorney general was deeply involved in orchestrating an illegal grand jury leak and that the two of them plotted a cover-up, conspiring to pin the crime on an estranged former top aide.
“We had conspired to create this story that wasn’t true,” Joshua Morrow said Thursday as he took the witness stand at Ms. Kane’s perjury trial in Norristown. “Kathleen and I came up with a story that she was going to testify to and I was going to testify to.”
He said they hatched the scheme in August 2014 at the Hyatt at the Bellevue in Center City. Before the meeting, he said, two members of Kane’s security detail picked him up at a nearby street corner and drove him to a parking garage, where they took his cellphone, wallet, and keys, and searched him with a security wand “to see if I was wearing a recording device.”
Her security detail performed that same drill at two other meetings he had with Ms. Kane, including one in which she met him, “frantic,” in a park near her home outside Scranton, he told jurors.
In the meeting at the Bellevue, Mr. Morrow said, Ms. Kane stunned him by saying a grand jury was investigating an illegal leak of secret documents from the Attorney General’s Office — documents that he had passed on to a reporter at Ms. Kane’s request after receiving them from Adrian King, then her top deputy.
Mr. Morrow said he and Ms. Kane agreed to blame the leak on Mr. King, who had left her staff and had a strained relationship with her. Mr. Morrow pledged to lie that she never saw the leaked documents.
Mr. Morrow, 43, who was granted immunity in exchange for his cooperation, admitted his story had changed over time.
“To protect Kathleen,” he said, he stuck with his initial story, lying in three grand jury appearances and modifying his accounts until he decided to tell the full truth days before trial.
In a rigorous cross-examination, Seth Farber, one of Ms. Kane’s lawyers, repeatedly suggested that Mr. Morrow had no credibility left.
“Would it be fair to say, Mr. Morrow, that no matter what you say, no matter how much you change your testimony, you don’t get charged with a crime?” Mr. Farber asked. “Correct,” Mr. Morrow replied. While Mr. Morrow said he finally decided to tell the truth because he wanted to do the right thing, he acknowledged that his motivation was spurred when detectives confronted him with