Gov. Corbett’s inactions in the Sandusky case demand full investigation
It didn’t take long for a jury in Bellefonte, PA, to conclude that former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky for more than a decade misused his positions of trust at the university and the Second Mile Charity to seduce and rape vulnerable boys.
Left unanswered and unexplored by the same jury in Bellefonte were equally troubling issues involving the state’s highest offices.
“Why was the criminal investigation of Sandusky delayed for nearly three years while then-Attorney General Tom Corbett ran for governor?” is the obvious question on so many minds.
Many are quick to point out that Corbett received hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions from associates of Sandusky’s Second Mile Charity, and Penn State.
After Corbett was sworn in as governor in 2011, when he was now a member of the Penn State Board of Trustees, Corbett continued to turn a blind eye to the Sandusky scandal. Incredibly, Gov. Corbett even gave Second Mile a $3 million state grant
So who was enabling whom at the governor’s and the state AG’s offices, and why?
There can be no doubt that the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office has become a political steppingstone to the Pennsylvania governor’s office.
But that’s only part of the larger problem.
Since it became an independent elective office in 1980, the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General has been controlled by ambitious politicians belonging to one political party: the Republican Party.
Each Republican attorney general for the last 30 years has blatantly misused the broad powers of the AG’s office to politically and legally protect himself and his party’s elite.
Pennsylvania Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer, on the morning of his infamously public suicide, complained that Gov. Dick Thornburgh way back in 1984 was “desperate” to see Republican AG LeRoy Zimmerman reelected to prevent a Democrat from investigating Thornburgh and other Republicans.
“They were afraid … (Democrat) Allen Ertel as Attorney General would conduct an investigation of the Thornburgh Administration’s sweetheart, no-bid legal contracts,” Dwyer wrote in his suicide note.
This is the deeper problem in Pennsylvania.
The blatant political misuse of the state AG’s office has become so ingrained that this type of misbehavior has become standard operating procedure.
This has led to shameful child endangerment in the Sandusky case, and in the governor’s office.
Consider this: Any number of investigations of prominent Republicans now are stalled in the Republican-controlled AG’s office, as was the Sandusky case.
These “cases going nowhere” include moribund investigations of the Hershey Trust, run by Corbett’s long-time Republican friends, including former AG Zimmerman and Gov. Tom Ridge.
Corbett’s handpicked successor for the Republican AG nomination, Cumberland County DA David Freed, happens to be the son-in-law of Mr. Zimmerman.
It is hardly likely that Corbett, Zimmerman, and a host of other Republic officials will be investigated for any of these misdeeds if their man Freed is elected state attorney general.
Corbett and the others essentially will be given a free pass for these and future misconducts.
If truth and justice are to emerge, and if this misbehavior is to stop, Pennsylvanians should realize the importance this November of electing a Democrat to the office of state attorney general.
Democratic AG nominee Kathleen Kane should pledge to undertake a complete accounting of the actions and inactions of the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General in the Sandusky case, and all other cases with a troubling political taint.
This should not just be a criminal investigation. If elected, Kane should undertake nothing less than a full internal performance audit of the AG’s office and its staff.
Kane should also pledge to make a full report to the public
The Pennsylvania public, meanwhile, should begin to reexamine the bad idea of politically electing the state attorney general.
Our laws, and the safety of our citizens, ultimately should not be held hostage to the political whims and ambitions of party politicians, as was evident in the Sandusky case.
We should not have to wonder if our governor’s office has been gained by ignoring the rape of children.
