From the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Full criminal complaint here.
Kathleen Kane and I have the tenuous connection that we are both 1993 graduates of Temple Law School. Back then, she was Kathleen Granahan, and I vaguely remember her. As a follower of Pennsylvania politics, I of course have been following the stellar rise and equally abrupt decline of General Kane’s career. Several months ago, I concluded that she was through. Now, it looks like she is really through. Governor Wolf recommends she resign. She will have no political support with the Democrats in the state (I am a district leader in Lancaster County, so I know), and would be primaried away in any event in early 2016.
My take on all this Kane scandal is that Temple University strikes again. And this one’s a whopper, coming on top of Bill Cosby.
Kathleen Kane studied law at Temple in its politically correct heyday. The school was not about building ethics as much as pushing philosophies like “deconstruction”, winning arguments by saying, “it’s all relative!!!”, organizing pushy little factions and playing tough politics against other, disenfranchised students. I have already written in the past about the religious chauvinism of Robert Reinstein, the then dean, who had his own agendas, and the cronies and friends he had the school hire and put in the administration, including the wife of a Penn law professor Reinstein was an associate of. The school was hyper-political, and Reinstein ran it at a time when the bull market in stocks, and in lawyering, meant that a steady of stream of fundraising would allow any “values relativism” lapses to go unquestioned.
This is where Kathleen Kane learned to a be a lawyer. To me, it’s really critical for the Pennsylvania public to understand this, because taxpayer money made Kathleen Kane the unethical lawyer that she is well before taxpayer money was taken home as an AG salary.
When you read that 42 page statement attached to the indictment, what you see is a person who politicized the office of AG from the get go, and began bullying subordinates, and pointing fingers at critics and “enemies” almost from the start. Very little interest in being the chief prosecutor for the state, unless the cases were the kind of headline-grabbing ones that advanced a political agenda.
When it came to leaking the grand jury information and then lying about, this is Temple 1993 again. Rules mattered less in the school than who was who and what end was being sought. Who let that environment exist there? Robert Reinstein.
Funny that no news organization in the Banana Republic bothers to ask: what makes Kathleen Kane tick? That’s Pennsylvania. New Jersey has the New York media market, whose workers are more than glad to go poking around in New Jersey politics when New York is having a slow news day. Pennsylvania gets scandals that put other states’ corruption to shame. And vivid ones. Not just Penn State and Sandusky. 
In 1987, it had a state treasurer shoot himself in the head on filmed television. In the 1950s, the Ed Sullivan Show had a segment about how Pennsylvania’s mental health system were essentially medieval dungeons where the state disappeared people (whether they belonged there or not), and then disenfranchised them if they got out. The then-Governor had to call a special session of the Legislature to fix the embarrassment.
Seventy-four percent of the people who live in Pennsylvania were born in Pennsylvania. Therefore, these types of scandals simply are taken as business-as-usual, when in fact, they make outsiders cringe as to what is going to happen next, what tightly wound wackjob is going to get elected to whatever high or low office. And since even positions like county coroner are elected in Pennsylvania, everything is incentivized to become political.
This is the trap Kathleen Kane now finds herself in. She clearly broke the law, and her defense is what? That she didn’t do it? No. That resigning would be an admission of guilt. She’s politicizing a fairly well-pled indictment. Thank Temple Law School. Time for a new AG.
Hoofin 