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Nearly three months ago, I offered these thoughts on why Kathleen Kane has become a public danger:

“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.”

The attorney general of Pennsylvania is a position of singular power and fearful responsibility. An attorney general has the power to destroy a life and no violation of human morality is greater than the destruction of an innocent one.

During the course of the Kane scandal there were well-sourced reports that people were being followed: judges, reporters, former prosecutors and witnesses. Tuesday, in open court, William Carpenter, the judge who presided over the grand jury that investigated Kane for leaks and later accused her of perjury, stated in open court that he and his wife had been placed under surveillance.

Carpenter did not accuse any specific person or agency. That he made this revelation during a hearing for Patrick Reese, a Kane confidante and co-defendant, speaks volumes by saying nothing.

At the same time, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a Kane consultant, Ken Smukler, had been shopping emails from 2013 between former state grand jury judge Barry Feudale and Inquirer reporters Angela Couloumbis and Craig McCoy.

The emails purportedly show reporters wooing a potential source for information about why Kane had done her damnedest to have Feudale removed from overseeing a statewide grand jury based in Harrisburg. Such canoodling is pretty standard stuff in the business of reporting the news. That Couloumbis and McCoy wanted Feudale to provide information is no surprise. That’s what they’re paid to do.

Feudale had been forced off the grand jury by Kane, who filed sealed motions accusing him of everything from nasty remarks about her predecessor to knife play in the lobby. It was a classic bureaucratic hit and worthy of public display.

I do not know what Feudale might have said to these reporters and, frankly, am inclined to think an honest judge who had been mugged in a dark alley might want his assailant to be known.

Political consultant Smukler is in a curious spot. He is the kind of guy on whom reporters often rely even as their prey turn to him for rescue. This means that sometimes he is on the side of the angels, and at other sharpening pitchforks for the devil.

When I called him last week, he raised a poignant question: “What if you obtained something illegally as a source and then I asked you your source, would you tell me?”

No, I told him, I would not. He quickly added that he “did not obtain any information from the attorney general’s office that I shared with anybody.”

What nobody has been able to make clear is how anybody was able to obtain these emails. Feudale insists he sent them on his computer at home from his private account. How they could have ended up on the AG’s servers is either a cyber world glitch of astonishing proportions or the dodgy outcome of some seedy behavior by someone in power.

With every inconvenient development, Kane has overseen the release of embarrassing emails retrieved from her office servers. Like transcribed small talk, artless humor and locker room bonhomie, they show men and women at their least guarded.

People act behind a keyboard much the way they behave behind a steering wheel: well-mannered vicars and ladies suddenly become hyper-selfish goofs. Kane has thousands of these moments, with the names of prosecutors, judges, private lawyers and elected officials at the ready when the time comes to show the true cost of crossing the most dangerous official in the commonwealth.

My own surmise is that the emails, once released – and you damned well know they will be – will touch off a cascade of recrimination, accusation and a general mushroom cloud of damaged careers, ruined lives and humiliations. That is the zero sum game to which Kane has taken us. She knows she’s finished but is hoping the general public will pronounce a plague upon all houses and bring everybody down at once.

Part of this is a result of the odd minuet we dance here in Media Land. The bias is less liberal-versus-conservative than it is probity-versus-sensation. There is no more sense philosophizing about whether this is good or bad than trying to decide what to do about the weather.

At this point, though, we must weigh the totality of Kathleen Kane. To say she is evil is to attribute moral dimensions to a wounded dog. It will bite friend and enemy alike. Nothing wants to die alone.

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Dennis Roddy

Contributing Columnist

Dennis Roddy served as a special assistant to Gov. Tom Corbett and is a writer and consultant living in Pittsburgh.