Pennsylvania
court unseals pornographic emails sent by officials
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[August 27, 2015]
By David DeKok
HARRISBURG, Pa. (Reuters) - Pennsylvania's
highest court on Wednesday unsealed a trove of pornographic emails
exchanged by state officials years ago that Attorney General Kathleen
Kane said her political enemies wanted to suppress and her foes said she
was using to intimidate them.
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The emails, consisting of crude jokes and graphics passed among
hundreds of people in state government, have formed a subplot in a
tangle of investigations stretching over years.
They were released by the state Supreme Court on Wednesday at the
request of a judge who had supervised a grand jury that brought
perjury charges against Kane. The supervisor, Judge William
Carpenter, argued that their release would not comprise the secrecy
of the proceedings of that grand jury.
The documents made public on Wednesday also revealed that a special
prosecutor investigating Kane in the perjury case had sought a
protective order against her a year ago. Thomas Carlucci claimed
Kane planned to use the emails to retaliate against witnesses who
testified against her to the grand jury.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2015/Aug/27/images/ads/current/cca_laptop-sda021709.png) Kane, a Democrat, has maintained that the perjury charges were
politically motivated and intended to keep her from releasing the
embarrassing emails. She had uncovered them as part of an unrelated
investigation into her Republican predecessor, Tom Corbett, and one
of his investigators, Frank Fina.
Fina, one of the state officials who had exchanged the emails, was
Corbett's chief investigator in the case against Jerry Sandusky, the
former Penn State football coach who was eventually jailed for child
sexual abuse.
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In the perjury case, Kane, 49, is accused of illegally leaking
embarrassing information about Fina to a newspaper in 2009 in yet
another separate investigation and then lying about it.
Many but not all of the people in state government who exchanged the
emails were named by Kane last year. Several former prosecutors in
Corbett’s office and Supreme Court Justice Seamus McCaffrey lost
their jobs as a result.
But the emails were never formally released until Wednesday, even
though Kane had made them available for viewing on an informal
basis.
(Writing by Frank McGurty; Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Frank
McGurty)
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