KEISLING: PA AG Kathleen Kane: Gagged, bound, and tied to the sawmill

Kathleen Kane posed a tangible threat to the well-entrenched cadre of corrupted officials from both parties who’ve been running the state, and who all rely on a turned blind eye.

by Bill Keisling

Pennsylvania ranks as among the most corrupt states in the union, we’ve been told by academics.

But even those academic studies underplay the severity of the problem in Pennsylvania.

For example, a widely reported 2014 study by professors at the University of Indiana Bloomington and the University of Hong Kong ranked Pennsylvania the fifth most corrupt state in the U.S.

But the Indiana / Hong Kong study only tabulated successful federal prosecutions of state officials.

If corrupt officials are never investigated or prosecuted, or if they’re prosecuted in state courts, those statistics don’t show up in a tally of federal prosecutions. So we have strong reason to suspect that governmental corruption in Pennsylvania isn’t even fully represented in this national corruption ranking.

In Pennsylvania, we don’t just dabble with corruption. We’re pros at corruption.

The issue of the protection of corrupt officials and their well-entrenched network of enabling cronies now takes center stage in the case of Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane.

Previously an assistant district attorney in upstate Lackawanna County and a neophyte to state politics, Kane came from obscurity to win a landslide election in 2012 when she promised to examine the inexplicable delays (dating to the late 1990s) in the prosecution of the Jerry Sandusky / Second Mile / Penn State pedophile case.

The notoriously conducted Sandusky case itself came on the heels of the Luzerne County PA Kids for Cash scandal, in which over six thousand juveniles for most of a decade were sold down the river to a private detention facility that bribed state judges.

One of the owners of that private detention facility was the son of a state Supreme Court chief justice. No wonder then that the state Supreme Court waited almost two years to intervene in the staggering Luzerne County bribery scandal. That case, like the Sandusky case, has yet to be properly or thoroughly investigated.

It also speaks volumes that there’s been no legislative investigation of the mishandling either of these two notorious cases, which brought rape, injury or jail to thousands of children.

Disgusted with Republican Governor and former-Attorney General Tom Corbett, the electorate rebelled against even the insiders in the Democratic Party by selecting Kane in the primary and overwhelmingly electing her in the general election.

Kane was a loose canon, a spanner in the works, and that’s what the voters of Pennsylvania wanted.

Not having an experienced team of her own and the first Democrat to hold the office since it became elective, Kane naively held over appointments from the previous, Republican-controlled office, exchanging vulnerability for experience.

Right out of the gate, after her election and her appointment of an investigator to conduct an internal review into the Sandusky case, AG Kane was subjected to threats of political retaliation from prominent Republicans who formerly ran the attorney general’s office.

When AG Kane unearthed thousands of pornographic emails sent between Sandusky prosecutors, Supreme Court justices and others, it would seem her fate was sealed.

It certainly appears that, shortly after she came into office, a plan was hatched by the state’s top Republicans — both elected and court officials — to remove the sword of justice from the hand of the uncontrollable outsider, Kathleen Kane.

As Kane soon found out, ordinary Pennsylvanians can’t get speedy or impartial justice. Worse, that’s the way our state’s network of corrupt, self-satisfied officials like it.

Pennsylvania, during its steady decline, has been about keeping up the false appearances of integrity. And you can’t keep up those appearances if you’re under the threat of investigation, or prosecution, by an outsider attorney general.

It should come as no surprise that the official actions against AG Kane began with questions surrounding the non-prosecution of Philadelphia African American politicians. Those who are investigated for corruption in Pennsylvania, and those who are protected, are matters of great political importance here.

Kane fell into the trap by engaging with reporters from the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer, and by attempting, of all things, to apparently give them a news story.

Old-time hands in Pennsylvania politics could have warned Kane to beware of dealings with the Inquirer and Daily News. Compromised reporters from those distressed newspapers have long traded access and played footsie with corrupted state political insiders, and have for decades themselves played an indispensable role in the propagation and protection of outrageous corruption in Pennsylvania, while contributing to the coarsening of public life and discourse here.

Predictably, perhaps, a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News burned Kane as a source, and quickly served her up not only to her political enemies, the same Sandusky prosecutors caught in the porno email scandal, but also to a grand jury. So much for protecting sources at a newspaper.

What followed was a political charade, the sort of thing that substitutes for justice in Pennsylvania.

AG Kane, subjected to a secretive star-chamber court process, and gagged from speaking by a partisan grand jury judge, was indicted like the proverbial “ham sandwich” by a Republican county prosecutor. It should go without saying that there is no opportunity for the accused to be represented by counsel, or to defend herself before a grand jury.

The injustice wouldn’t stop there. With every subsequent step, Kane’s political enemies would err on the side of injustice and impropriety.

Kane was soon summarily stripped of her law license by a Republican-dominated Supreme Court, without a hearing and before any conviction at jury trial.

The state Supreme Court, we should point out, was also endangered by an uncontrollable Kathleen Kane.

Not only were at least two of the court’s justices involved in trading pornography; also, we’re told, one justice attempted to blackmail another to buy silence. Two of the justices would be suspended for their immoral actions, and last November three Republican nominees would be resoundingly defeated for election to the high court.

By suspending Kane’s law license, the shamed court nonetheless took the reins of Office of Attorney General from the hands an elected Democratic reformer and placed them back in the hands of Republican acolytes.

Holdover employees from the last Republican-controlled AG’s office quickly took control of the Office of Attorney General, pushing an elected AG Kane out of the way, preventing her not only from further investigating corruption in Pennsylvania, but also preventing her from defending herself, and her office.

Kane, it must be said, posed a tangible threat to the well-entrenched cadre of corrupted officials who’ve been running the state from both parties, who all rely on a turned blind eye.

Republicans may have led the putsch, but Democrats either sat by silently or, in the puzzling case of neophyte Gov. Tom Wolf, became the first stone throwers suggesting she step down.

One overarching principle held sway above all else in the ongoing plan to undermine, silence, and dispose of Kathleen Kane: While remaining in office, she must never be able to defend herself in public, either through trial by jury, or by formal charges of impeachment brought by the state House with a public trial in the Senate, as demanded by the Pennsylvania constitution.

Instead, Kane’s enemies seized upon an end-around. Republicans in the Senate threatened Kane with a long-forgotten clause placed in the state constitution in 1874 as part of a neo-Darwinist effort to force demented or infirm low-level officials from office. This constitutional provision dates from the era that laid the groundwork for eugenic sterilization and, ultimately, in Germany, Nazism.

Thus the clause the Senate now plans to wield against Kathleen Kane was forgotten for more than a century, for obvious reasons. It certainly was never meant to replace the public impeachment process demanded by the constitution for an elected official like the attorney general.

Today, AG Kathleen Kane finds herself unable to use the resources of her office to defend herself against the Senate’s unconstitutional removal effort.  (Governor Wolf and others who should know better are ignoring the long-term significance for subsequent office holders by allowing such a precedent to be set.)

The attorney general of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has been reduced to one of those helpless damsels in a matinee thriller, bound and gagged, and tied to a sawmill.

Just last week, word came that Kane’s choice of a special prosecutor to investigate the broadening porno email scandal was, a month after his appointment, still being sandbagged by the old-guard holdovers who now run the attorney general’s office, and who refuse to sign his contract.

Here’s the ultimate irony that brings us full circle: the old guard in the AG’s office, widely criticized for obstructing the investigation of Jerry Sandusky, a charge they vehemently deny, is now just as obviously dragging their feet and obstructing the investigation of the porno email scandal that sprang from the stalled Sandusky case.

The sword of justice may have been removed from the hands of Kathleen Kane.

But don’t think that’s the worst of it, or the end of it.

In the face of wholesale, systemic corruption, the sword of justice has also been removed from the hands of the people of Pennsylvania.