Indicted Attorney General Releases More Scandalous Emails

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane continued last week to release sexually explicit and otherwise crude emails from state employees as she battles to retain her job following her indictment last August on charges of leaking documents and obstruction of justice.

Meanwhile, Kane denied in testimony Nov. 5 in the state capital of Harrisburg that state prosecutors or a judge improperly leaked grand jury testimony leading to the conviction of former Penn State football coach and charity foundation leader Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted in 2012 of sexually assaulting 10 boys over a 15-year period in a case brought before Kane’s election in 2012.

Kane, the first female and first Democrat to hold the top law enforcer’s post in Pennsylvania’s history, seeks to show that her indictment was reprisal for her probes embarrassing high-level officials on courts and both political parties in a variety of ways.

Kane, shown in a file photo from a recent press conference, refuses to resign despite the indictment, being stripped of her law license by the State Supreme Court, and many demands for her resignation by prominent officials, including from Gov. Tom Wolf, a fellow Democrat.

“I will not allow them to discredit me or our office,” Kane wrote in one email to colleagues disclosed in the investigation. “This is war.”

Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen is among Kane’s defenders.

His September column PA Supremes suspend anti-pedophile crusading Attorney General’s law license reported parallels between cover-ups of the Sandusky pedophile crimes at Penn State and those involving the “Franklin Scandal” ring based in Nebraska that trafficked teens from the Boys Town orphanage to powerful and wealthy perverts in Omaha, Los Angeles and Washington, DC.

That tale is recounted also, among other places, in a 2009 book authored by Nick Bryant, The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal and also in a similar grim tale of law enforcement run amok, Confessions of a DC Madam, published earlier this year. It was co-authored by Bryant and convicted male madam Henry Vinson, who says he provided male escorts to elites in the nation’s capital and resisted requests for underage prostitute before suffering harsh retribution from law enforcers who kept customer names secret.

More than two decades ago, federal and authorities ruled that initial investigators were wrong to believe a pedophilia scandal had occurred based in Nebraska implicating prominent suspects there and in Washington, DC, among other places. Authorities imprisoned teenagers for long terms on perjury charges in grossly irregular proceedings, much to the alarm of the leader of a legislative committee investigating the scandal, Loren Schmitt, and sentenced several adults to terms on embezzlement or minor sex charges. The state’s major newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, headlined the exoneration

More generally, the spectacle of Pennsylvania’s top law enforcer unilaterally releasing salacious emails while battling other top officials raises troubling questions as-yet unanswerable.