PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER OP-ED:
By Peter F. Vaira
…Prosecutors and former prosecutors I have spoken with are offended by the scandal. The full details have been kept secret for too long. The delay in exposing the limits of this scandal appears to many as another instance of lawyers protecting lawyers. This is a quagmire that former Attorney General Kathleen Kane inherited when she took office, and it should have been exposed in its entirety on her watch.
There is solid evidence that, for several years, prosecutors in the Attorney General’s Office were sending ex parte communications to judges they appear before or were likely to appear before. This is not a group of guys having beers, deciding who would like to see email photos of women in various sexual acts, or would like to see emails containing ethnic or racial jokes. This lasted too long, and appears to have been a concentrated effort to compromise the courts. This is misconduct of the highest order.
Based on the length of time and the number of contacts, some prosecutors, me included, regard this behavior as criminal. That the individual judges who received the emails took no action is not a defense; it is credible evidence that the prosecutors’ efforts were successful. The information that has been released so far indicates that there is too close a relationship among many prosecutors, judges, and grand jury judges. Aside from the off-color emails, what other ex parte communications regularly took place? … (more)
NEWSLANC: So who was the “criminal”, Kane or those who frivolously accused her of criminal behavior? She never would have been tempted to perjure herself had she not been charged for what amounted to a “political gotcha”. To bad that former U. S. Attorney Vaira had not editorialized about the unfairness of the charges at the outset.
