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Dazzling in martyr’s white, Kathleen Kane took the stage midweek to offer up the kind of defense Joan of Arc might have launched after dropping acid.
She insisted that the criminal case against her was concocted by a gallery of angry men to prevent her from releasing pornographic emails they sent during work hours at the attorney general’s office.
It demands mystical powers to complete this connection. The timeline is reversed.
Kane is accused of disclosing grand jury material in a leak orchestrated in April 2014 and then lying under oath about her role. The goal was to retaliate against former deputy prosecutor Frank Fina, whom Kane erroneously blamed for a March story revealing that she’d spiked a bribery sting case against Philadelphia lawmakers.
Porngate, as she coins it, emerged months later – well after an agitated Fina called the leak of grand jury material to the attention of the supervising grand jury judge.
So in Kane’s narrative, events in the future influenced the past. There is talk of impeaching her. I say we nominate her for the Nobel in physics. She has cracked the space-time continuum.
I have been on hand now for two great meltdowns of American politics. In 1992, Ross Perot visited Pittsburgh for a rally at which he accused Republican operatives of plotting to disrupt his daughter’s wedding. An astonished audience could only wonder at the spectacle.
Like Kane, he entertained no questions afterward.
Now comes Kane, with an assertion that her legal problems are the result of men determined to hide their pornography habits. This would intrigue me except for the fact that she has already had the press over to Strawberry Square to view the pornography in question.
So what does Kane wish to disclose? She speaks of racist and religiously intolerant materials along with porn. In sum, she is describing a frat house in a bid to acquit herself of perjury.
To do this, she called out grand jury Judge William Carpenter and issued a plea for him to release her from an order she says enjoins her from naming all the players in the porn scandal. By this, she means Fina, who was on a chain of occasional emails that featured inspirational messages, porny jokes, patriotic jingoes and the usual jackass humor for which my gender has distinguished itself since the day Og the caveman drew an outsize phallus on his cave wall.
She called on her sons to remember the lesson from the movie “Boondog Millionaire.” There is no such movie, but in Kane’s world material existence is a minor detail. She once claimed to have a sworn affidavit from an agent in the abandoned sting case saying he was told to target only black lawmakers. This turned out, in fact, to be a memo from a third party, authored four days after she made her claim.
Since she first launched a defense of her activities, people have watched and waited for the moment Kane would present a cogent argument that allowed us to venture a second thought.
Where she could have merely shrugged about the abandoned sting case and said she thought it bad policy for the government to create crimes in order to prosecute them, she instead insisted it was racist. As it turns out, a black district attorney took up the work of a black undercover agent and proved that the focus – if there was one – was based on geography, not demography.
Faced with a special prosecutor’s findings that there were no political shenanigans behind the Sandusky investigation, she invented new victims that turned out to be impromptu fictions.
Criticized for humiliating a select handful of former Corbett staffers in the porn email episode, she publicly hinted that some of the images were child porn. Her staff had to walk that one back in a hurry.
At virtually every turn Kane has done a hippopotamus stomp across the truth, always at the expense of her own stature and that of her office. This character flaw matters because the attorney general is not like most other elected offices.
The governor cannot wiretap your phone. A state senator cannot subpoena your bank records. A state treasurer cannot hail you before a grand jury and ask about your personal life. These are powers invested in one state office alone – that of the attorney general.
If ever there were a place where facts matter and painful truth must be the standard, it is the office Kathleen Kane now holds and has sullied with her antics. Such conduct might or might not be criminal, but it is certainly egregious and we cannot afford it any longer.