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By now it is hard to register surprise when detectives show up at the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office with a search warrant. There are, of course, the questions:
What did they forget to take the last time?
What Kathleen Kane confidante has cut a deal and told them what else to look for?
Will they carry out the portraits lining the walls for questioning? By now, it’s a good bet Kane is walking the hallways at midnight talking to them.
Thus goes Harrisburg’s Watergate Summer Reunion, replete with media frenzy, deficit of attributable sources, and a deeply flawed and tragic figure about to topple from the weight of her own hubris.
“It’s imminent,” one person close to the investigation told me. Risa Vetri Ferman is the Montgomery County district attorney tasked with deciding whether to bring charges of perjury and obstruction against the sitting attorney general.
Ferman was handed a devastating grand jury presentment that painted a tableau of an angry Kathleen Kane deciding to dispense revenge against enemies real or imagined. Kane is accused of arranging the leak of grand jury information about a decision to not lay charges against former Philadelphia NAACP leader J. Whyatt Mondesire – a leak intended to paint former deputy AG Frank Fina as a hypocrite.
Kane blamed Fina for a series of stories that detailed how Kane ditched an undercover investigation into legislative bribery. She said it was deeply flawed and impossible to prosecute. Fina’s new boss, Philadelphia DA Seth Williams, took the case on a dare and has snagged four current and former legislators, including a former member of the House Democratic leadership.
When the story broke in March of last year, Kane could have issued a brief statement to the effect that her own doubts about the sting probe outweighed her sense of outrage at what the case revealed. She could have said that reasonable people would disagree. For that matter, she could have said she blew it and should have done the case, or could have said nothing at all and let the episode pass as one of those unpleasant interludes in a life where public obligation and political need intersect.
Instead, she accused her predecessors of racism, blind ambition, and simply made things up – things that were disproven the moment they sprang from her lips. She fixed her sights on Fina, the designated hobgoblin in her world of political monster-hunting. She laid a midnight snare so elaborate, so intricate that it was inevitable she’d be hanging upside-down by her ankle come morning.
According to several sources with cause to know, Ferman was also recently provided information that spilled over from the FBI investigation into then-state Treasurer Rob McCord. According to these sources, a Kane ally was picked up on a wiretap with one of McCord’s people, talking about how they would take care of Fina and his allies.
There are two possibilities here. The first is that they were talking about the Mondesire leak. The second is that the ally was hinting at the forthcoming revelation of former AG staffers trading pornographic images and jokes on their office computers, a revelation that brought down several Corbett administration appointees and wrecked several careers, ultimately toppling a Supreme Court justice.
Either way, it’s simply more evidence that an obsession with revenge was blotting out common sense, if not common decency.
This self-destructive fixation on revenge against Fina reminded me of an old folk myth once told about wolf hunting in the Arctic. The story holds that natives would encase a knife in frozen fat, then prop the knife upright in a block of ice. The wolf would lick the fat off, repeatedly slashing its tongue, bleeding to death from its own hunger.
Nobody has ever produced evidence for this myth until now, doing so in metaphor, from the 16th floor of Strawberry Square. Kathleen Kane’s appetite for retribution has bled her dry. All that remains is to carry away the empty husk.