Officials delay release of report on state’s porn email scandal

The release of an incendiary report on the exchange of pornography on state computers will be delayed while officials make sure no one is unfairly maligned in the document.

The last-minute freeze came after Douglas Gansler, the special prosecutor in the Porngate scandal, provoked an uproar of dread and embarrassment in the state attorney general’s office this week.

He did so by revealing he had prepared a report that publicly named “several hundred” employees in that agency and elsewhere as having used state computers to email pornography or other offensive material.

The agreement between the attorney general’s office and the union for its narcotics agents was reached after lawyers for the Fraternal Order of Police went to Commonwealth Court on Friday in their lawsuit seeking to block

publication of the longawaited report.

As the deal was struck, acting Attorney General Bruce L. Castor Jr. sought again to calm his worried staff, saying in a statement Friday that he agreed that employees had not been treated fairly and that he would not release the report as drafted.

But Mr. Castor acknowledged he was in his last days in office. A former top state prosecutor, Bruce Beemer, is expected to win Senate approval next week to replace Mr. Castor — and dealing with the drawn-out porn scandal’s endgame is shaping up as Mr. Beemer’s first major headache.

In an interview Friday, Mr. Beemer declined to say much about the issue but promised that every staffer would have “a fair opportunity to look at what they are being accused of.”

In their request for a special injunction, the FOP lawyers said Mr. Gansler had put agents on notice that they could be named in the report without letting them know beforehand what emails were tied to them.

The request for an injunction said the release of the report would “irreparably injure personal reputations across the commonwealth.”

Former Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane, a Democrat, appointed Mr. Gansler nine months ago, before her Aug. 15 conviction on perjury charges and subsequent resignation. She hired Mr. Gansler to investigate the discovery of pornography on the computer servers in her office and issue a full report.

Ms. Kane discovered after her election in 2012 that for years, agency staff had used state computers to exchange emails with pornography and messages with misogynistic, racial and homophobic content.

Although she identified only a handful of those who exchanged pornography or otherwise offensive messages, the scandal that followed cost several high-profile officials their jobs, including two state Supreme Court justices and a member of former Gov. Tom Corbett’s Cabinet.

In an interview Friday, Mr. Gansler, a former Democratic attorney general of Maryland, defended his work, insisting that he and a team from his law firm had given those named a chance to make their cases.

The suit recounts two warning letters Mr. Gansler sent Wednesday to those named in the report, giving them until Monday to defend themselves. The letters reveal much about Mr. Gansler’s report and how his approach differed from that of Ms. Kane.

In decrying the emails, she made little distinction between those who sent offensive messages and those who received them. Mr. Gansler’s report identifies only those who sent or forwarded troubling emails.

According to the warning letters, Mr. Gansler has prepared a main report that names 38 people whom he terms “high-volume senders,” which he defined as those who sent 50 or more troubling emails between 2008 and 2015.

This main report would describe the offensive content in the messages and provide some breakdown of the government roles of those who received the messages.

Mr. Gansler also has prepared an an appendix that will name “several hundred government employees,” all of whom sent fewer than 50 emails, he said in another warning letter. The appendix will not provide a count of emails for each sender or describe any content.

Mr. Gansler alerted the 38 people named in the main report of precisely which emails had been deemed offensive. Those to be named in the appendix were not given this information.

He also revealed that his appendix would include this disclaimer: “Many senders sent only a handful, and in some cases, only one inappropriate email. We also acknowledge that reasonable people may differ about the degree of offensiveness of a particular document.”

The FOP lawyers said the word inappropriate could cover email ranging from the “slightly ribald” to pornographic. Yet, they said, “Gansler alone will act as the propriety police.”

They also criticized Ms. Kane, saying her appointment of Mr. Gansler “looks suspiciously like a continuation of her reign of terror against perceived enemies.”

Ms. Kane could not be reached for comment Friday.

Matthew Haverstick, a lawyer who represents an unnamed plaintiff in the case, said he was troubled that Mr. Gansler had lumped together all sorts of emails, pornographic and otherwise. “This report brands people with the scarlet letter ‘P,’” he said.

Mr. Gansler seemed to see the key issue before the Attorney General’s Office as whether the “low-volume” senders should be named in the appendix.

Asked whether those names should be struck, Mr. Gansler would say only that he was “sympathetic to the argument.”