HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane's slide from political stardom to possible criminal defendant appears traceable to one place.
The mirror.
Had Kane, days after a newspaper published a story critical of her, not authorized the release of an agency memo critical of her accusers, it's unlikely she would have become the apparent target of a grand jury leak probe.
A Montgomery County judge appointed a special prosecutor for the probe in May, and Kane appeared before the grand jury in November on whether any leak was an act of revenge on her part. In December, the grand jury recommended that Kane be charged with perjury and three other criminal offenses, a decision likely on hold until March.
Until then, a cloud hangs over Kane's future as the first Democrat elected to the state's top prosecutorial job.
"That leak of the memo is the catalyst for a lot of this," said Muhlenberg College political science professor and pollster Chris Borick. "If you look at the timeline, if you look at all the ins and outs and the complex nature of this, that particular moment is very crucial in the unraveling of everything."
Court records, made public last week by the state Supreme Court, list Kane as the only agency official facing possible criminal charges. But most of the records remain sealed, so it is unknown whether the grand jury has recommended charges against anyone else.
Kane's defense lawyer, Lanny Davis, said she is a victim of selective enforcement.
"This entire process seems more today than ever before a railroad train with biased misuse of the grand jury system," Davis said in a statement Thursday.
The state's grand jury law says all evidence and testimony are secret, with very few exceptions. A witness may divulge what he says after being cleared, or a judge can approve a prosecutor's request to make material public. But grand jury leaks of secrets to the media are not uncommon. Sometimes judges launch probes to determine who leaked information; sometimes they do not.
In this case, Montgomery County Judge William Carpenter did, and the court records made public so far point to Kane, Pennsylvania's top elected law enforcement official. Carpenter supervises the grand jury process in southeastern Pennsylvania.
"Of interest, both the OAG [office of attorney general] and Attorney General Kane have effectively admitted the disclosure of OAG materials came from within the OAG and perhaps from the attorney general herself," Thomas Carluccio, the special prosecutor, wrote in a court document.
Kane was elected in November 2012. Her campaign pledge to investigate how her predecessors conducted the Jerry Sandusky child-molestation case resonated with voters, who questioned why it took 33 months to arrest the retired Penn State assistant football coach.
But Kane's pledge rankled law enforcement and some criminal defense lawyers as a distasteful stunt that politicized child-abuse victims while Sandusky was sentenced to up to 60 years in prison.
One of the loudest critics of Kane's campaign pledge was Frank Fina, who served as co-counsel in the Sandusky trial and ran the attorney general's public corruption unit under her predecessor, Republican Tom Corbett.
In her first year in office, Kane received high praise among Democrats for a series of decisions, including shooting down Gov. Corbett's contract to privatize the state Lottery system. But the public also was looking for her promised Sandusky review.
In February 2014, Kane announced that the review was taking longer than expected because her office had to reconstruct thousands of deleted agency emails. Some of them, Kane disclosed later, contained sexually explicit images and videos received or sent by eight former agency staffers who had ties to Corbett or who had been critical of her.
On March 16, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a story detailing how Kane, on taking office, had dropped a dormant sting investigation involving lawmakers' allegedly accepting cash in exchange for political favors. The sting in part was led by Fina, who now works for the Philadelphia district attorney's office.
In the Inquirer article and subsequent interviews with other media, Kane claimed she dropped the sting case because it was poorly run and tainted by race. She claimed Fina, who is white, and another agent, who is black, had targeted black lawmakers because of their race.
Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams and other district attorneys blasted Kane for offering no proof of racial bias. Williams later filed criminal charges against a city traffic court judge and two lawmakers, and their charges have been sent to courts for trial.
Days after the Inquirer published its sting story critical of Kane, staff in the attorney general's office was looking into another old case of Fina's. It dealt with a 2009 grand jury investigation into government contracts involving J. Whyatt Mondesire, a political activist and a one-time NAACP chapter president.
On March 21, five days after the Inquirer article was published, special agent Michael Miletto gave one of Kane's supervisors a taped interview about his involvement in that investigation, court records show.
A transcript of Miletto's interview, as well as a 2009 memo written by then-Deputy Attorney General William Davis Jr., then were given to a Philadelphia Daily News reporter.
Judge Carpenter got wind of the Daily News' reporting.
In a May 29 letter to then-state Supreme Court Chief Justice Ron Castille, Carpenter told Castille that two individuals privately testified before him that "secret grand jury information from a prior grand jury was released by someone in the attorney general's office."
Carpenter's letter, part of the now-public court records, did not name the people who testified before him. Nor did Carpenter clearly identify which grand jury he meant. But one of the men who went to Carpenter is believed to have been Fina, who was mentioned in the ensuing Daily News article.
On June 6, the Daily News published its Mondesire story.
The article cited the 2009 William Davis memo to Fina that says investigators "uncovered what appeared to be questionable spending" of state money by Mondesire. The article also referenced Miletto's March 21 interview transcript in which he said Fina had him taken off the case. In the article, Fina declined to comment, citing the grand jury secrecy law.
In an Aug. 31 story, the Inquirer revealed the grand jury involving Kane.
On Oct. 17, Carluccio filed an affidavit seeking Kane's testimony about two leaked "confidential records." The affidavit, made public last week, listed them as a William Davis memo and as Miletto's interview transcript.
Kane testified Nov. 17 in Montgomery County. Before entering the grand jury room, she told reporters she knew about the leak of Miletto's interview transcript, but not the alleged leak of the 2009 memo.
On Dec. 19, the grand jury recommended charges against Kane. But a document spelling out why remains sealed, so it's unclear why. Whether to charge Kane is in the hands of Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman, who has not signaled her intentions. The Supreme Court last week ordered Ferman to hold off until it decides whether Carpenter's appointment of a special prosecutor was legal.
Kane lawyer Lanny Davis has told reporters she "authorized" a deputy to release the Miletto transcript interview to the Daily News, and that she knew nothing about the 2009 William Davis memo.
Lanny Davis said Kane's decision to release the Miletto transcript interview was not illegal but also not wise, adding that Kane regrets any negative publicity the release might have caused Mondesire, who was never charged.
Kane's decision to release the Miletto document was about "transparency," Davis said. He would not say whether Kane released it to inform the public about the Mondesire probe, or to cast doubt on other prosecutors' actions.
The contents of the 2009 William Davis memo did not apply to Kane because it was written before she was elected and therefore was not bound by secrecy provisions in the grand jury act, Lanny Davis said in a statement Thursday.
Davis' interpretation of the laws has drawn derision in Pennsylvania legal circles.
While Davis claims Kane is not bound by secrecy provisions for grand jury cases done before she took office, Kane did follow the secrecy provisions when it came to her review of the Sandusky 2008-12 investigation and prosecution — which occurred before she took office in 2013.
In February 2013, Kane announced she could not release her Sandusky review until a judge approved its contents.