By Kevin Zwick
Staff Reporter
Capitolwire
HARRISBURG (Oct. 1) – Montgomery County prosecutors filed an additional perjury charge against Attorney General Kathleen Kane, adding to the list of charges faced by the state’s top law enforcement official.
The new perjury charge, filed Tuesday, stems from a search warrant detectives executed on Kane’s downtown Harrisburg office Sept. 17, where they seized a “secrecy oath” which Kane signed swearing her secrecy to all statewide investigating grand juries going back decades, “proving she lied in sworn testimony,” prosecutors said.
Kane and her lawyers have repeatedly claimed she never swore an oath of secrecy on prior grand juries.
Her initial charges, including perjury, obstruction and official oppression, stem from her allegedly orchestrating a leak of confidential material regarding former Philadelphia NAACP leader J. Whyatt Mondesire, who was never charged, to the Philadelphia Daily News in an attempt to embarrass her political foe, Frank Fina. He’s the former OAG prosecutor who led the Mondesire investigation.
“I was not sworn into the Grand Jury from 2009, as I could not have been since I was home with my kids at the time,” Kane testified to a grand jury last fall.
But county detectives say the secrecy oath, which Kane signed Jan. 17, 2013, means she took an oath of secrecy on the decades-old Statewide Investigating Grand Jury Number One up through Thirty-Two. The oath compelled Kane to maintain the secrecy of all matters before the Mondesire grand jury, which was Grand Jury Number Twenty-Nine.
Kane’s lawyer, Gerald Shargel, couldn’t be reached for comment.
Related charges also were filed Tuesday, according to a press release from Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman. However those charges weren’t explained in the release and have not yet appeared on the court docket.
An arraignment on the new charges is scheduled for this afternoon in front of Magistrate Cathleen Rebar in Montgomery County.
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