Kane Trial Day 3: Back stabbing, broken trust, and a clown newspaper company

Adrian King says his old friend Kathleen Kane is trying to frame him

by Bill Keisling

 

Wednesday, August 10 — To hear former First Deputy Attorney General Adrian King tell it, his boss, Attorney General Kathleen Kane, one day simply and without explanation asked him to deliver a plain manila envelope to a political operative in Philadelphia.

King later found the envelope in his office as he was on his way out of town.

King says that when he returned that night to his Philadelphia home he called the political operative, Josh Morrow. King says he made arrangements for Morrow to pick up the envelope. He says he placed the envelope between his front door and the screen door for Morrow to pick up the next day.

King did not have time to deliver the envelope to Morrow himself, as he was to fly to the West Coast in the morning on a business trip, he says.

That’s all Adrian King says he knows about the envelope, he testified in the third day of Kathleen Kane’s criminal trial.

The envelope, prosecutors allege, contained secret grand jury material.

Morrow, in turn, would deliver the envelope to Philadelphia Daily News reporter Chris Brennan.

Brennan would soon write a reckless and lousy newspaper story, quoting verbatim from the secret grand jury material.

There would quickly be an investigation into the grand jury leak, and Kane would be arrested and put on trial.

And there sat Adrian King on the witness stand, an old boyfriend of Kane’s from law school days in the early 1990s.

On the stand, King tried to explain the collapse of his friendship with Kathleen Kane.

He would say that now Kane and Josh Morrow are trying to frame him with the crime of participating in the leak.

“It became clear the attorney general and Mr. Morrow were trying to frame me,” he told Kane’s lawyer, and the jury.

But King says he only carried the envelope, and had no way of knowing what it contained.

King’s testimony ended a long and eventful day at Kane’s trial.

The trial revolves around the star-crossed manila envelope, and how it ended up in the careless and carefree hands of Daily News reporter Brennan.

But if AG Kane and Morrow are trying to frame Adrian King, as he says on the witness stand, someone should tell Kane and Morrow.

At trial on Tuesday a county detective revealed that political operative Morrow had an immunity deal to testify against Kathleen Kane.

Also yesterday, in his opening statement to the jury, Kane’s lawyer said, “Josh Morrow took an oath and lied again and again.”

And as for King, “it will be easily demonstrated that King lied,” Kane’s lawyer told the jurors.

So all three old friends are turning on each other.

It’s what’s called a tragedy: everyone turns against each other, lives are ruined, and no one remains standing.

Whether Kane’s lawyers can trip up Adrian King and show him to be, as they say, a liar, and a participant in the leak, remains to be seen, as the cross-examination of King will resume Thursday, August 11.

But King’s actions, and what he did or did not do, remain at the center of the trial and the controversy; the extent of King’s involvement will surely take days to explore.

The path of the envelope containing the grand jury material, and whether or not it was willfully and unlawfully leaked, and who was involved, is what this trial now boils down to.

 

Meanwhile, four other witnesses testified on this, the third day of trial: Kane’s former First Deputy AG Bruce Beemer; former Deputy AG William Davis; and two agents in the office, Mike Miletto and David Peifer.

The two agents and Davis described how they helped develop the grand jury material that would be leaked.

The leaked material contained information from a dropped case from the 2000s. Deputy AG Davis and Agent Miletto were investigating the head of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP, the late Jerry Mondesire.

Kane’s nemesis, Frank Fina, never prosecuted the case. AG Kane wanted to know why Fina dropped the case, and whether it could be reopened. She asked Peifer, the special agent in charge, to gather information on the dropped case.

But the head of the criminal division, former first Deputy AG Bruce Beamer, met with the two agents and told them that the case against Mondesire was too old to prosecute, and must be dropped.

That, the agents thought, was the end of it.

But not long afterwards they learned the Daily News had printed the Mondesire case files, quoting from them at length, and verbatim.

But the agents said they had no idea of how the material was leaked to the newspaper. Peifer said he feared the leak would be attributed to him.

The agents told the jury they were surprised and concerned when they read the June 6, 2014 Daily News article, and saw the case files quoted line for line.

Former First Deputy AG Bruce Beemer testified that he too was concerned and chagrined to read verbatim excerpts from the material in the Daily News not long after he had reviewed it.

Beamer says he told Kane they had a problem with a leak of obvious grand jury material, and asked to start an investigation.

Kane, Beamer says, told him not to bother.

“She said don’t worry about it, we have more important things to do,” Beemer told the jurors.

Beamer says his concern only grew when the courts appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the leak.

He testified that Kane soon thereafter asked him to prepare a legal brief to file with the state Supreme Court, or the grand jury judge, challenging the legality of the appointment of the special prosecutor.

Beemer said he refused to pursue a court ruling, telling Kane such a filing would be meritless.

But under cross-examination from Kane’s attorneys, Beamer allowed that nothing in Kane’s request for a court filing obstructed the investigation, or was in any way illegal. AG Kane had only asked him to make a court filing, which after all is perfectly legal. She asked nothing more, he said.

The big surprise in Beemer’s testimony came under cross-examination.

Kane has been charged with lying to the grand jury when she said she had not signed a secrecy oath to protect grand jury information from years’ past.

When it turned out that she had signed such an oath, Kane explained she had merely forgotten that she had signed it, that it was an “honest mistake.”

Under cross-examination, Kane’s lawyer asked Beemer whether he too had signed a secrecy oath.

“I have no recollection of signing oaths for grand juries 1 through 32,” Beemer testified.

With that, to everyone’s surprise, including Beemer’s, the lawyer produced a copy of a secrecy oath, signed by Bruce Beemer.

“It appears to be my signature,” Beemer choked.

An honest mistake? Kane’s lawyer asked.

With that, it appears, the jurors may likely acquit Kane of this charge. People do make honest mistakes, and forget things, as Beemer himself demonstrated.

Beemer appeared stunned. During a break in testimony he stood in a back hallway near the courtroom, looking at a wall, appearing introspective and forlorn.

Bruce Beemer somehow comes across as a sympathetic figure in all this. It appears he was haplessly trying to understand what was going on.

Beemer seems to understand now that this is a tragedy, and he’s caught up in it, despite his best efforts and intentions.

What’s unfolding in Courtroom A is a tragedy all the way around.

 

Mixed in with the tragedy, this trial also looks more and more like a clown show.

The clowns are the reporters and editors who work for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. The reporters for those newspapers turn out to be ignoring basic decency and all journalistic ethics. They would print anything they can get their hands on, verbatim, not caring how sensitive the material might be, or the senseless wreckage it might cause, or bothering to cover their tracks, or the tracks of their sources, who now face jail.

The amazing thing is how these careless newspaper reporters would end up having the staff of the state attorney general’s office jumping through hoops for them, leading to this criminal trial.