One begins to surmise that this will be a third-rate trial about a fourth-rate newspaper article
Judge Demchick-Alloy already ruled that Kane’s team can not make mention of the porno emails Kane dug up; now it appears the defense is barred from discussing Jerry Sandusky
Tuesday, August 9 — “‘Revenge! Revenge is best served cold!'” Assistant District Attorney Michelle Henry began her opening statement at the start of trial. “The defendant’s words. That’s what this case is about!”
Bruce Beemer at state senate hearing in 2015
She said Attorney General Kathleen was charged with upholding the law, but instead she violated the laws “for her own personal gain.”
“At the core this case is very simple. The defendant wanted to get revenge. To get that revenge she leaked confidential material to a reporter. Orchestrated it…. After that happened she covered it up with lies.”
“Laws that she should have held a high regard for, she broke.”
Henry said that in March 2014 the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a front-page article critical of Kane. The article was critical of Kane for not pursuing a case involving corrupt state legislators, she said.
“Bad press, negative press, ladies and gentlemen.”
Henry said that Kane believed former AG office prosecutor Frank Fina was behind the article, and that she “wanted to get revenge.”
So Kane broke the law by leaking confidential grand jury information to the Inquirer’s sister newspaper, the tabloid Daily News, for another article to “get revenge” on Fina. That article suggested Fina had not prosecuted a case against former Philadelphia NAACP leader Jerry Mondesire, who has since died.
Kane, Henry said, conspired to leak the grand jury material with her second in command, First Deputy Attorney General Adrian King, and a political campaign operative, Josh Morrow.
Then, after she was caught, Kane lied about it before another grand jury. Kane even lied about not taking an oath to protect the grand jury material she had leaked.
The material leaked by Kane badly hurt the reputation of the subject of the grand jury investigation, Mondesire, the prosecutor said.
AG Kane, Henry charged, orchestrated the leak that Mondesire had been criminally investigated by the grand jury.
Kane didn’t care whether Mondesire was hurt, Henry said. “He was just a casualty on her war of revenge. If Mondesire got hurt in the process, oh well.”
Henry told the jurors, “We know the why: for revenge. We know the how: through Morrow and King. We know about the cover-up, the lies, the lack of cooperation. Lies. Leaks. Lawlessness. Why? For revenge.
“That’s why she’s where she is today: a defendant.”
Not so, Kane’s attorney, Gerald Shargel, told the jury in his opening statement. None of it was true.
Shargel began by summarizing Kane’s life and career.
“She wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth. She worked hard,” Shargel said. She got out of Temple Law School and worked for twelve years as an assistant DA in Lackawanna County.
“She prosecuted hundreds of cases,” Shargel said. She was a tough adversary known for taking the most difficult cases.
“She wasn’t a career politician. She wasn’t a politician at all. But she saw that the system in Pennsylvania was broken.”
She ran for state attorney general and “promised that she’d investigate the Jerry Sandusky sexual assault case. She wanted to find out why that case had taken so long.”
The prosecutors objected.
With that, Judge Wendy Demchick-Alloy summoned the lawyers from the courtroom to her chambers for a lengthy discussion away from the jurors.
When the lawyers came back, Shargel was no longer talking about Jerry Sandusky and broken Pennsylvania government.
Judge Demchick-Alloy had already ruled that Kane’s team could not make mention of porno emails Kane had dug up; now it appeared the defense was barred from discussing Jerry Sandusky.
But once the jury heard it, as they say, they could not unhear it.
Shargel said that the commonwealth was trying to “invent a feud if you will between Kane and Frank Fina.”
But there was no feud, and Kane did not care a “whit” about Fina, he said.
Fina worked in Kane’s office for ten minutes after she was elected and sworn in, Shargel said. Then Fina, who headed the Sandusky prosecution for Kane’s predecessor, Tom Corbett, walked into her office and quit.
“They had one conversation that last ten minutes. On the way out,” Shargel said.
He said it was ridiculous and made no sense that Kane would have a vendetta against a man she had only spoken with for ten minutes.
Fina thereafter worked as an assistant DA in Philadelphia.
“Why would it be that the attorney general’s concern was over one assistant district attorney?” Shargel asked the jury. “Why would Kane give everything up for that?”
Had Kane wanted revenge on Fina, she could have convened a grand jury against him, Shargel suggested. She wouldn’t have leaked a news story on him.
Shargel said that he was going to introduce evidence that Mondesire, the subject of the leaks, and now deceased, had previously been the subject of a “barrel” of negative news articles in Philadelphia “going back to 2010.”
As for the supposed conspiracy to leak the grand jury material with King and political consultant Morrow, Shargel said the two were lying.
“Josh morrow took an oath and lied again and again,” Shargel told the jury.
And, he said, “It will be easy to demonstrate that King lied…. He told lies about this.”
AG Kane, Shargel said, “didn’t leak grand jury material.”
She wanted the case investigated, not leaked.
TV trucks at courthouse
That, Shargel said, was Kane’s campaign platform: to “get stories out to the public.”
As for the charge that Kane lied to the grand jury, Shargel said, Kane “made a couple of honest mistakes before grand jury.” She mistakenly testified that she never signed a secrecy oath.
She signed the oath when she was busy, shortly after she was sworn in as AG, when family members and “dignitaries were coming to see her.”
It was an honest mistake, Shargel told the jury.
“But honest mistakes are not criminal,” Shargel said. “None of us goes through life without making honest mistakes.”
This case, Shargel concluded, “comes down to two main allegations: that she released grand jury information, and that she lied about it.”
The prosecution, he said, “has to prove it if they can beyond a reasonable doubt.”
With that, the first witness, Montgomery County Detective Paul Bradbury, was introduced.
Bradbury’s testimony was long and tedious. He explained how evidence against Kane was gathered.
The surprise testimony from Det. Bradbury was that Kane’s former political consultant, Josh Morrow, had received an immunity deal from the prosecutors, and as such could be expected to testify against her at trial.
The prosecutors had Det. Bradbury read aloud to the jury a long list of documents, including emails, grand jury transcripts, and even the entire dreary Daily News article at the center of the trial.
The overhead projector kept flashing the Daily News article featuring the photos of Kane and Fina.
Even the font used in the headline was discussed, ad nauseam.
It was a “U.S.-goes-to-war font,” the jury was told, designed to get “more coverage.”
One began to surmise that this will be a third-rate trial about a fourth-rate newspaper article. The article, like most of the tic-for-tat junk published these days by the Inquirer or Daily News, would otherwise be quickly forgettable.
But not at this unusual trial.
The overhead projector kept flashing the news articles, the headlines, and fathead photographs of Kane and Fina in the pages of the Daily News and Inquirer.
Something was just unseemly and wrong about it: using the courts to go over the layout of a newspaper page in a criminal trial.
Yes, it’s a shame that today’s public officials, and courts, are so hypnotized by front-page newspaper articles, and morning talk shows.
It’s a shame, but is it a crime?
Det. Bradbury repeatedly read from an email attributed to Kane: “I will not allow them to discredit me or this office. This is war.”
But under cross-examination by Kane’s lawyers, Det. Bradbury allowed that the phrase “I will not allow them to discredit me,” referred to a plural them, meaning the Inquirer, and not Frank Fina.
Det. Bradbury furthermore allowed under cross that the same June 6, 2014 issue of the Daily News that contained the article so supposedly hurtful to Mondesire contained a second, unrelated article about Mondesire and money missing from NAACP bank accounts.
And so it went with witness Det. Bradbury.
With that, Kane’s recent nemesis in the AG’s office, Bruce Beemer, took the stand.
Beemer recounted how he had met with two attorney general’s office agents to discuss the dropped case against Mondesire.
Beemer said he told them it was an old case, dating back to the mid-2000s, when one of the agents himself had been “ten years old.” As such, the statute of limitations had long since passed, and the case could not be prosecuted.
But one day not long thereafter, Beemer testified, he saw an article in the Daily News discussing the same case, obviously written from the same document he’d discussed recently with the two agents.
That’s when he knew there was a problem, Beemer said.
He knew the information must have been leaked from the AG’s office. At first, he said, he thought perhaps it had been leaked from someone in the AG’s Norristown office.
But was all this just inside baseball, undeserving of criminal prosecution?
Throughout the day I kept asking myself, What in God’s name is going on here?
Kathleen Kane only needs one juror to ask the same thing.
