Kane defends record in statement about grand jury report

HARRISBURG - Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane has maintained her innocence in light of

published reports that a Montgomery County grand jury elected to charge Kane with leaking secret information to newspapers in an attempt to embarrass political rivals.

"I did nothing illegal. Period," Kane said in a statement released Friday. "Any fair and impartial review of the facts would conclude that. This seems to me to be another political attack on my attempt to clean up Harrisburg and its political culture."

No official documents have been made public by the grand jury investigating whether or not Kane broke secrecy laws, but unnamed sources told The Philadelphia Inquirer that criminal charges have been recommended. It falls to Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman to decide if the case is strong enough to warrant prosecution.

The probe was ordered by Montgomery County Judge William Carpenter, who appointed a special prosecutor to investigate how the details of a grand jury investigation into J. Whyatt Mondeshire, former president of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP, reached the Philadelphia Daily News. Kane had been accused of leaking the information in a bid to humiliate one of her most vocal critics, Frank Fina, who worked as a prosecutor for then-Attorney General Tom Corbett.

During her 2012 run for the AG office, Kane promised to look into the investigation of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who was convicted of sexually abusing underage boys and sentenced to 30 to 60 years in federal prison. Kane pledged to determine why the Attorney General's Office took so long to develop a case against Sandusky, a task headed by Fina.

Last year, the existence of several sexually explicit emails traded among former employees of the AGO under Corbett's tenure were publicly released and resulted in the resignations of several high-profile public officials, including former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Seamus McCaffery. The grand jury investigation was ordered by Carpenter and approved by retired Supreme Court Chiefe Justice Ronald Castille by the leak of information regarding the grand jury presentation against Mondeshire, conducted in 2009 by Fina.

No charges were filed against Mondeshire, and the details of the investigation were intended to remain secret. The suspected goal of the leak was to paint Fina as an incompetent prosecutor, in retaliation of Fina's criticisms of Kane's decision to drop a sting operation against Philadelphia lawmakers.