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| Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane at her perjury trial |
Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane decided today not to testify or put on any defense witnesses at her perjury and obstruction trial, saying she didn’t think the government had proved its case against her.
Maryclaire Dale reports for the Associated Press:
Kane listened this week as two of her once-trusted advisers told the jury that she had invented a story for the grand jury and framed someone else for the leak. One of them said he conspired with her on the plan.
“Kathleen and I came up with a story that she was going to testify to and I was going to testify to,” political consultant Josh Morrow testified Thursday. “We had conspired to create this story that wasn’t true.”
The other, former chief deputy and her former law school boyfriend Adrian King, said he passed an envelope from her to a campaign consultant that eventually reached a newspaper. But King said that he didn’t know it contained secret criminal files and that Kane is trying to frame him.
Kane, once a rising star in the state’s Democratic Party, is set to leave office in January after a tumultuous first term that spawned her arrest, the loss of her law license and a statehouse impeachment effort. Kane, 50, has said she was being targeted for taking on an “old boys network” in state government.
Prosecutors say Kane leaked documents through aides in 2014 to get back at a former prosecutor in the office whom she loathed. The documents showed that the prosecutor, Frank Fina, had led a 2009 investigation into an NAACP official’s finances but then shelved the case. Kane thought Fina had made her look bad in a story about a statehouse sting of fellow Democrats that she had dropped.
“I think she was just hell-bent on getting back at Frank Fina,” Morrow said.
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