KEISLING: The Gang That Refuses to Shoot Straight

Pennsylvania court officials and the Philadelphia newspapers blame AG Kathleen Kane for their own incompetence and rush to judgment

The job of criminal investigations belongs to an attorney general, not the courts or a newspaper company. Now we see why.

by Bill Keisling

This weekend Pennsylvanians again were reminded why they cannot trust their own state courts, or, for that matter, those dying state newspapers embedded with our errant court officials, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, both owned by the Philadelphia Media Network.

As most readers know, throughout the year-and-a-half-long coordinated attack against Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane, the Pennsylvania court system and the Philadelphia newspaper company have been joined at the hip.

They’ve blatantly shared leaks and cooperated to do whatever they can to quickly drive Kane from office, without much in the way of open hearings or due process.

Hardly a week passes without the strange spectacle of the Inquirer or its sister newspaper, the Daily News, snidely leaking some insider, confidential court information designed, they hope, to damage Kane, and send her to jail.

All this would be bad enough, and would perhaps even be laughable, were it not for the dangerous and rank hypocrisy of the Philadelphia newspapers and their sources in the courts trying to throw Kane behind bars and deny her liberty for the same thing they themselves love to do: leak and traffic in court documents for a news story.

An unusual amount of animus, poor judgment and haste on the part of the courts and the Philadelphia newspapers have been hallmarks of their odd proceedings against Kathleen Kane.

All this sloppy double-dealing finally caught up with the courts and the Philadelphia newspapers this week.

Last Thursday, October 8, the Daily News ran a story saying someone had given them a supposedly heretofore-unknown batch of racy or demeaning emails sent or received by Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Michael Eakin.

In the same article, Daily News reporter William Bender oddly complains that this newest batch of leaked emails was different from the batch of emails previously leaked to the Daily News — last year.

This time last year, as many know, now-retired state Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald Castille strong-armed AG Kane into allowing both a “special counsel” appointed by the court and the court’s Judicial Conduct Board access to the emails in the attorney general’s office.

Chief Justice Castille, it’s worth noting, demanded court access to the emails at the same time he was also threatening Kane with criminal prosecution by another of Castille’s own-approved special prosecutors.

At the time, most seasoned observers questioned why the judicial branch would be interfering, impeding or obstructing criminal or other investigations conducted by the executive branch of government.

Even so, those hot-potato emails questionably and hurriedly demanded by Castille were turned over to the chief justice’s own “special counsel,” a former judge and state lawyer, Robert Byer, who supposedly was hired by the high court to thoroughly investigate.

(Let’s forget for a moment that a 1993 state constitutional amendment, establishing the Judicial Conduct Board, supposedly prohibited the court from conducting investigations of itself.)

But “Special Counsel” Byer just as quickly and apparently wrongly cleared Justice Eakin of any wrongdoing in the porno email scandal. Byer apparently never even bothered to interview Eakin or any of the other justices, as would any competent criminal investigator. Byer instead, in his report, simply makes note of “my review of the email messages.”

And just as quickly, last year, someone leaked at least some of that first batch of emails to the Daily News, which naturally at the time ran a sloppy, half-baked news article about them.

From this we learn, if nothing else, what first-year journalism students are taught: it doesn’t pay to write about incomplete leaks provided by self-serving sources because, when you do so, you’re not getting the whole story.

So now both the courts, and the Philadelphia newspapers, have egg all over their faces for their shoddy work and rush to judgment in 2014.

So what do they do?

They naturally blame AG Kane for their own incompetence, inside dealing, and rush to judgment.

On Friday, the state’s tainted Judicial Conduct Board issued a press release that was both highly unusual and strange, insinuating that AG Kane had somehow or for some reason last year withheld porno emails from them.

“Any investigation conducted by any agency necessarily relies on the full disclosure by those persons or entities with pertinent information,” read the release, written Conduct Board Chief Counsel Robert Graci. “The Board believed that it had been provided with all such information when it concluded its prior investigation. However, recent revelations, including news accounts of emails sent to or from Justice Eakin’s personal email account, demonstrate that the Board was not provided with all of the information on the Attorney General’s servers relating to that account.” (Emphasis mine.)

(That press release was given the equally pompous and suggestive subject line, “Investigation Regarding Certain Emails Received from Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane.“)

So here we have the Conduct Board, from which someone is obviously leaking to the Philadelphia papers, complaining they don’t like what they’re reading in, well, the Philadelphia papers.

Au contraire, Kane’s spokesperson, Chuck Ardo, felt compelled to tell reporters over the weekend. Kane granted the court and its jesters full access to the emails last year, and had turned over the pertinent Eakin emails then, Ardo says.

Perhaps the problem, politely put, Ardo suggests, rests with the Conduct Board, its staff, or other “technical issues.”

In other words, the court and its Conduct Board are incompetent, and shouldn’t be trusted to conduct a criminal investigation.

But that of course didn’t quell the controversy with Kane’s nit-witted and bullying antagonists, since she is as yet still alive, walking around freely, and in office.

So this Monday, October 12, the state Supreme Court itself threw more self-serving hypocrisy on to the fire by issuing a press release stating, “Members of the Supreme Court are disturbed by the content of the emails, as reported by the media.”

Let’s also forget for a minute why the court continues to allow leaks to “the media.”

The court’s news release attempts to shed light on last year’s two separate, previous investigations conducted by the court’s own special counsel, and the state Judicial Conduct Board, which it controls.

“Upon the Court’s request that its Special Counsel be given access to all emails in the OAG’s (Office of Attorney General) possession involving any Justice of the Supreme Court, the OAG permitted Counsel to review a collection of emails sent or received between January 1, 2008, and December 31, 2012. This review remained under the OAG’s control; no copies of any emails were provided. The process culminated in a report by Special Counsel dated December 19, 2014, in which he found no violations of the Code of Judicial Conduct or other improprieties by Justice Eakin.”

The court’s news release continues, “The report also is apparently consistent with an independent review conducted by the Judicial Conduct Board, which used its subpoena power to access emails within the OAG’s control.”

To state the obvious, it’s interesting to note that the Supreme Court, the Conduct Board (and the Daily News) don’t blame Justice Eakin for not being forthcoming with, and turning over, or even mentioning, his own emails.

Instead of rightly blaming its own Justice Eakin, the court predictably blames Kane.

It now seems painfully obvious that both the courts and the Philadelphia newspapers fully wanted and expected to cover-up and leak all this material last year, but now are surprised and embarrassed to have done such an incomplete and sloppy job of it.

To draw attention away their own incompetence, the Daily News’ Bender wrote, “It is unclear if Byer missed some emails sent or received by Eakin, didn’t consider them problematic or did not receive all of the Eakin emails to review.”

The Daily News then even quoted former Justice Castille, who apparently keeps an open line with the newspaper, as saying, “It’s totally bizarre. There are really strange things going on here.”

No kidding.

All this takes a lot of chutzpah, let alone duplicity and double-dealing.

If nothing else, we see what happens when a politicized court system and a moribund newspaper company team up to run a criminal investigation.

They morph into the Keystone Kops, with their own built-in echo chamber and squawk box, advertising their own incompetence.

A mess like this takes teamwork, and Team Daily News-Inquirer / State Courts don’t disappoint.

Hoisting themselves by their own petard

As many of us already know, shoddy, cheap-shot reporting at the Philadelphia newspapers and corruption in Pennsylvania courts have gone hand-in-hand for decades. So you may be asking yourself, what’s new?

But these guys this time truly have hoisted themselves by their own soiled petard, and now they’re working overtime to create such a messy stink that the national press is beginning to take notice. Go team!

So what are we to make of all this?

Some things have become abundantly clear: the courts can’t run the state attorney general’s office. And the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer can’t run a trustworthy, independent newspaper, let alone write a straight, trustworthy news story, or spin a straight line, without being spoon-fed by political hacks.

To paraphrase columnist Jimmy Breslin, they are The Gang That Refuses to Shoot Straight.

Neither the courts nor the Philly papers should be running this investigation, or an honest hot dog and pretzel stand, for that matter. That’s just too much responsibility for these chaps. The pretzel stand, I mean.

Despite all the chestnut-flavored smoke, other things have become abundantly clear.

The job of running a criminal investigation belongs to the state attorney general, who unfortunately, in the case of AG Kane, has been unfairly trashed by both the high court and the Philadelphia newspapers for their own self-serving motives of politics, protection and profit.

A failure to think

The idiot wind blowing from the institutionalized lips of both the Pennsylvania high court and the Philadelphia newspapers deserves something that neither of those two dim-witted and unchallenged organizations are apparently much capable of: a little honest thought.

Because what we have here, at bottom, is a failure to think.

Like most of the coverage of the Daily News and its sister paper, the Inquirer, last week’s plaintive news article doesn’t hold up when you look at it closely, or think about it much at all.

Aside from the obvious observation that Justice Eakin should be held to account for Justice Eakin’s emails, and not Kane, there’s plenty more here that doesn’t make sense.

The Daily News was writing about some of Eakin’s emails last year. Where did the News get those emails? Just as obviously, someone leaked a new batch to the Daily News last week. Who could it have been? Kathleen Kane certainly didn’t give it to them.

(Remember, the Daily News is already working with the courts to throw Kane in jail for giving them documents for a news story, so having been burned once as a source she’s probably not leaking to them now.)

Eakin probably didn’t leak his emails to the schmucks at the Daily News. Few of the others in the porno email chain would want to pass them out.

So the Daily News in all probability got these latest emails from — pinch yourself — the Conduct Board.

Considering all the other leaks we’ve seen, it’s obvious that the Conduct Board and the Philadelphia papers are working together.

So, odds are, all these emails were leaked to the Philadelphia papers by the court or the Conduct Board. Who else has them?

Ask yourself this: why was the Supreme Court in such a red-hot hurry to hire “Special Counsel” Byer before all the information was in? And why were the Philadelphia papers so quick to write their articles, when they didn’t have all the information?

It’s called in the trade (both legal and journalistic), “conducting a poor investigation,” and “going off half-cocked.”

They both now look very unprofessional, to say the least.

So what does a bully do? They try to further embarrass Kane to cover their own incompetence.

After they’ve already brought criminal charges against Kane, suspended her law license without due process, and leaked these developments every step of the way, they naturally want to further blame Kane for this.

The Inquirer and Daily News also for months have been leaking information that could only come from the court or its Disciplinary Office, like news of Kane’s pending disbarment last month.

Kane’s lawyers take it further, and rightly point out that her license suspension and all these leaks are designed to poison and prejudge her before a jury can even be selected, let alone impartially hear the case.

So these are the same sort of bullies who blame victims for falling after they knock them down in a cattle car on the way to an extermination camp.

All this and more is why, as I wrote last week, the public requires an independent criminal investigation of all this, this time conducted by the U.S. Justice Department.

In the past week other journalists have begun echoing me when I wrote that this long-running porno email saga demonstrates that state judges and prosecutors are too cozy.

But that’s only part of the story.

An equally big part of the problem here is that the courts and the Philadelphia newspapers are too close.

All this shows that the public needs an independent investigation by an attorney general’s office that isn’t going to be leaking to ethically challenged reporters working for the Inquirer and the Daily News.

Only then can these bully boys and girls in our state courts, and the declining Philadelphia newspapers, get back to doing what they do best: endangering children, fixing cases, denying that systemic corruption exists in Pennsylvania, leaking and writing snide news stories about drunken township supervisors, and pulling the wings off flies.