Kane Trial Day 4: Consultant says he conspired with AG Kane to leak grand jury material

Political consultant Josh Morrow says he and Attorney General Kathleen Kane cooked up a cover story designed to conceal their involvement in the leak and to make Kane’s former second-in-command, Adrian King, the fall guy

by Bill Keisling

Philadelphia-based political consultant Josh Morrow testified at trial Thursday that he and Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane conspired to leak a news story to the Philadelphia Daily News in 2014.

He and Kane then cooked up a cover story designed to conceal their involvement and to make Kane’s former second-in-command, Adrian King, the fall guy for the leak, Morrow told the jurors at Kane’s criminal trial.

If the jury can believe him, Morrow dealt a devastating blow against his former political client and friend, Kathleen Kane.

Whether he can believed or not, Morrow certainly delivered a shocking story.

 

Morrow testified that Kane “was unhinged” following the publication of an earlier news article critical of both of them published by the Philadelphia Inquirer in March 2014.

The Inquirer’s article was unfair, Morrow said.

Morrow said he and Kane believed former AG office top prosecutor Frank Fina had planted the news article to embarrass the two of them.

So they decided on revenge; they’d give Fina a dose of his own medicine.

“She was hell bent on getting back at Frank Fina,” Morrow testified.

Morrow explained that he’d worked on Kane’s 2012 political campaign for AG. Kane’s election “was one of the crowning achievements of my career,” he said.

Then, on April 22, 2016, AG Kane called Morrow, he testified. “She said she wanted me to do a favor, to give Adrian King a call.”

Morrow testified that Kane told him she had a transcript and other records from one of her agents that would embarrass Frank Fina.

Kane told Morrow that she wanted him to get the material to a newspaper, he told the jury.

Once the courts began an investigation into the leak a few months later in 2014, Morrow says, he and Kane conspired to tell investigators that Kane was not involved.

Their agreed-upon cover story was that all Kane “did was call me and said give Adrian a call. I called Adrian and he gave me a call…. That she never saw the documents and Adrian was the one who gave me the call.”

None of this, Morrow says, was true.

 

In his original grand jury testimony in late 2014, Morrow said, his cover story had been that, “I had a lengthy conversation with Adrian King and he walked me through the documents.”

But Morrow said he came to realize that his phone records would not collaborate this story, as there had been no phone calls of such length with King.

“The lies were starting to unravel,” Morrow testified.

Instead, there were plenty of records of phone calls and texts messages between Morrow and AG Kathleen Kane, prosecutors contended at trial Thursday.

Morrow’s court testimony was bolstered with page after page of text messages sent between Morrow and Kane, contemporaneous to the leak, and even an audio wiretap coincidentally recorded by the FBI.

 

Morrow said he made arrangements with Adrian King to pick up the grand jury material in a manila envelope that had been stuffed in King’s storm door, after he’d received telephone calls from both Kane and King.

Morrow told the jury he personally gave the envelope with the grand jury material to Philadelphia Daily News reporter Chris Brennan.

The material for the article had not come anonymously over the transom at the Daily News. He was Brennan’s source, Morrow said.

As it turns out, Brennan’s careless and amateurish handling of the news story ended up putting his sources in severe legal jeopardy, and threatened their jobs. One or more of Brennan’s sources could yet go to jail.

Chris Brennan “is a reporter I’ve known for a number of years I’m often a source for,” Morrow explained. Besides, he said, “It was sort of a Philadelphia-centric story so there wasn’t a whole lot of outlets” to take the story.

Before he gave the documents to Brennan, Morrow says, he used a black Sharpie to redact the name of every Office of Attorney General prosecutor mentioned — except for Frank Fina’s name, and that of Fina’s colleague, Marc Costanzo.

“I met (reporter Brennan) at his house in South Philly,” Morrow says. “I gave him the documents.”

“We talked about the documents,” Morrow says. “He said he was interested in writing a story. I told him I got them from the attorney general’s office. I didn’t tell him I got them from Kathleen.”

Reporter Brennan and Morrow in the coming weeks would talk over the phone about the developing news article, Morrow testified.

He told the jurors, “Every time I talked to Chris (Brennan) about the article I relayed it back to Kathleen.”

 

By chance, in an amazing stroke of bad luck, the same evening Kane called Morrow to ask him to leak the documents, FBI agents intercepted an eighteen-minute phone call between Morrow and a second political consultant whom the FBI was investigating.

Prosecutors played for the jury the garbled recording of the conversation between Morrow and his friend. The wiretap perhaps sheds light on the role played by former First Deputy Attorney General Adrian King in the leak.

In the recording, Morrow complains to his friend about both Kane and King. Morrow worries aloud that AG Kane “threw me under the bus.”

“Kathleen called me today and she’s like, ‘Adrian has documents for you to leak out,'” Morrow says in the recording. “Why the fuck do I want to get in the middle of this?”

Adrian King, for his part, testified Wednesday that AG Kane and Morrow were both trying to “frame” him, and that he knew nothing of the contents of the manila envelope he acknowledges he brought to Philadelphia for Morrow.

But, in the recording, Morrow complains to his friend, “Adrian’s like well ‘I’ll leave these between my screen door and my front door and you can pick them up and, like, redact names,’ and I’m, like, oh God.”

“I don’t want to be the source for, like, junk that then comes back, you know, on my ass.”

 

The hoped-for news article turned out to be a disaster in just about every way, thanks to Brennan’s monumentally sloppy and careless newspaper work.

Reporter Brennan soon got back to Morrow with the news that “he’d reached out to Frank Fina for comment.” And that, “He (Fina) claimed the documents he had were grand jury material.”

An angered Fina wasted little time contacting grand jury judge William Carpenter. Fina and Carpenter got the ball rolling that led to this week’s criminal trial.

But, at the time, Morrow said he and Kane thought Fina’s response to the newspaper reporter was amusing.

Morrow texted Kane, “oh man frank’s response was priceless.”

But Kane and Morrow wouldn’t be laughing long.

The growing leak investigation would cause Morrow and Kane to concoct the cover story implicating Adrian King as the fall guy in the leak, Morrow testified.

In time the three of them — Kathleen Kane, Josh Morrow and Adrian King — would betray each other, Morrow says.

And the article they’d hoped would damage Fina turned out to be not very good, Morrow says.

“That article wasn’t what we had hoped,” Morrow told the jury. “It wasn’t that well written. Brennan didn’t do a good job.”

Morrow says he was “disappointed.”

But things would only get worse.

 

The grand jury leak investigatiors were on her trail, and Kane found she couldn’t stop them.

In the months that followed, Kane began to grow suspicious of Morrow, that perhaps he would betray her.

One day, in August 2014, he says, Attorney General Kane asked to meet him for lunch in Philadelphia.

AG Kane’s driver, Pat Reese, called Morrow and instructed him to meet Kane at noon at the corner of 16th and Locust in Philadelphia.

Reese and another member of Kane’s Office of Attorney General security detail pulled up in a vehicle and told Morrow to get in. They drove Morrow to a parking garage.

“They took my cell phone, my keys, and wallet and they ‘wanded’ me down to see if I was wearing a recording device,” Morrow says. “They had some sort of device and they were checking me” for a bug, he says.

Afterwards the two security men drove Morrow to the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, where AG Kane, he says, was waiting in the restaurant. Driver Reese, he says, sat aside at a table nearby.

“It was a little odd, yes. In the past we’d just meet for lunch,” Morrow says.

Kane, he says, “apologized to me for the security detail and she said it was a new security protocol.”

Kane told him there was a grand jury investigation.

Morrow said he told Kane he was worried that he’d be subpoenaed.

“I was very concerned because I didn’t want to be dragged before a grand jury,” he says.

Kane, he said, told him that he didn’t have to worry, as “they are after me.”

 

A few months later, in October 2014, Morrow says, Kane asked to meet him at a park in Dunmore, outside of Scranton.

Morrow told the jury that he drove up one morning from Philadelphia.

“I pulled into the park and nobody was there.”

But soon Kane’s driver Reese arrived, Morrow says. Reese took him to his house and again “wanded” him down to check for a listening device.

Then Reese drove him back to the park, where he met Kathleen Kane.

“She definitely was a lot more frantic than she was before,” Morrow recalled.

“I need help! I need help!” Morrow says Kane pleaded with him.

“Tell me what you want me to do,” Morrow says he asked her.

There was no specific answer from Kane, he says.

“Just that she needed people to help her.”

 

This Thursday, on the witness stand, Morrow said that he lied to protect Kathleen Kane before three grand juries, in 2014 and 2015.

He said he lied again in June 2015, even though he’d been granted immunity.

But Morrow now says he wants to “come clean” in 2016.

Morrow informed the jury that Montgomery County prosecutors had again granted him immunity only the day before, on Wednesday August 10, 2016.

But this time he’d be telling the truth, he said.

On cross-examination, Kane’s lawyers questioned why the jury should believe a man who’d lied so freely so many times before.

“I had an opportunity to come back here and tell the truth,” Morrow says.

As I listened to Morrow’s testimony I was reminded of the profound words of Richard Nixon as he was leaving the White House in disgrace.

Everyone involved in this sad story — Kane, disgraced Frank Fina, the reporters and editors at the Inquirer and the Daily News, and Montgomery county officials alike — would do well to consider Nixon’s words:

“Never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”